Dear friends and colleagues,

We are very sorry to announce that the 8th PATA Days in New Zealand can not take place in April 2017. The meeting has to be postponed to November 2017. The Kaikoura Earthquake has not only shaken up the entire country, but also disrupted the organisation of the PATA Days. All NZ earthquake geologists are currently in the field and they will have to deal with the EQ aftermath for the next couple of months. It is just technically impossible to organise the meeting in April under these circumstances. It’s also going to be really hard to get the NZ sponsorship that we counted on, as funds from places like the Earthquake Commission will be diverted to the Kaikoura EQ response & follow up research.

Of course, the field trip plans will also have to change completely. In November 2017 we will be able to see some of the most stunning effects of the Kaikoura Earthquake. In April, many roads will still be shut and many landowners will still be recovering and may not be amenable to curious scientists. By November next year, if we can incorporate some community outreach, then it will be much more appropriate to bring a field trip through the impacted area – pending open roads.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause and we hope for your understanding. Currently the NZ organising team is working hard to fix new dates and locations. The official PATA website will be updated as soon as they’re back in office for a couple of hours.

On behalf of the organisers,

Christoph & the EGSHaz team

Annals of Geophysics has just published a special issue on the devastating Amatrice Earthquake series in Central Italy: Vol 59, Fast Track 5 (2016): The Amatrice seismic sequence: preliminary data and results.

The special issue, edited by Marco Anzidei and Silvia Pondrelli, contains lots of field reports, first assessments, and plenty of primary data. Plus, it’s all OPEN ACCESS! more

The M7.8 Kaikoura Earthquake in New Zealand produced one of the most complex ruptures ever observed, involving many different faults. Earthquake environmental effects include up to 10 m offset at the Kekerengu Fault, secondary ruptures, a tsunami, coseismic uplift, landslides and rockfalls, liquefaction, and maybe even earthquake lights. Lots of blogs and websites provide coverage on this earthquake, e.g. Geonet, the Landslide Blog, and The Trembling Earth. Our colleagues from the Research Group on Earthquake Geology in Greece worked on the landslides that happened during the earthquake. George Papathanassiou sent me the link to their Preliminary Map of Co-Seismic Landslides for the M 7.8 Kaikoura, New Zealand Earthquake. more

While the attention is still on the seismic sequence in Italy, a number of new papers have been published on paleoseismology, tsunamis, and active tectonics. Enjoy reading!

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Our friend and colleague Alessandro Michetti pointed me to this impressive video. It shows the surface ruptures of the 30 October earthquake from a helicopter: more

Our colleague Paolo Galli is in the epicentral area of the M6.6 Italy earthquake and he sent us some amazing images. I’ll just reproduce them here without further comment, they speak for themselves. Captions by Paolo. Thanks a lot Paolo, and stay safe! more

On 26 October two shallow normal faulting earthquakes occurred in Central Italy, very close to the epicentre of the Amatrice Earthquake from earlier this year. The first quake reached a magnitude of M5.5 and was followed by a M6.1 just two hours later. The events caused serious damage (see here for a video and some images), but luckily only one person died as most people had left their houses after the first moderate shock. This could have turned out much worse. Apparently the quakes at least partly filled the gap between the 1997 Colfiorito events and the 2016 Amatrice Earthquake. more

The first joint assembly of the Tectonic Studies Group (TSG), Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group (VMSG), and British Geophysical Association (BGA) will be held at the University of Liverpool from 4-6 January, 2017. Among the many interesting sessions the following one will be of special interest for … well … us:
S.12 – Earthquakes, palaeoseismology, and rates of fault slip: from milliseconds to millions of years. The session is chaired by Laura Gregory, Ed Garett, and Luke Wedmore, deadline for abstracts is 5 November. more

The Latin American Association of Tectonics has recently been founded in order “…to help the exchange of ideas and facilitate collaborations of tectonic studies in South America. The Latin American Association of Tectonics consists of researchers from universities and institutes interested in South America tectonic studies, and regarding Andean or pre-Andean tectonics.” See their website here. They organise the 1st South American Tectonic Symposium to take place from 16-20 November, 2016, in Santiago (Chile). The event will be held at the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Mathematics, University of Chile in Santiago, Chile. more

A lot of new papers have been published on paleoseismology, earthquake geology, active tectonics and tsunamis last month. We have research on slowly deforming regions, on the active tectonics of Mexico, New Zealand, Armenia, and Iran, new data from the Kumamoto earthquake, plus some marine/coastal paleoseismology and tsunami studies. Enjoy reading!

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