Last October I was given the chance to attend the “iRALL school on field data collection, monitoring, and modeling of large landslides” in Chengdu, China. During the school, we spent one week in the epicentral area of the Ms=8.0 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, where I was able to take some interesting pictures of earthquake damage and coseismic landslides. Then other things happened, like the earthquakes in Italy and New Zealand, with exciting sights from the field shared here, and I never ended up sharing my Wenchuan pics, which I want to do now. more

Our colleague Petra Jamšek Rupnik from the Geological Survey of Slovenia sent us this interesting meeting announcement. The conference will focus on geological hazards, including active tectonics in Croatia and adjacent areas. Plus, there will be an interesting field trip to Croatia and Slovenia:

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Our colleague Åke Fagereng from Cardiff University will edit a textbook on problems in structural geology and tectonics together with Soumyajit Mukherjee and Andrea Billi. The editors invite contributions from the tectonics community. Perhaps you have a nice active tectonics exercise to share? Here is the announcement: more

Our colleague Lucilla Benedetti (CEREGE, France) distributed the following call for papers on the recent earthquake series in Central Italy:

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite contributions to a special volume entitled « The 2016 Central Italy Seismic Sequence: Insights, implications and lessons learned » that will be published in Tectonics AGU journal (details here).

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It is time for the monthly list of papers that could be interesting for the earthquake geology community. Lots of new papers this time, and too many different topics to list them in detail. Enjoy reading! more

It’s a book!

Sometimes, things need time to evolve. And when they finally arrive, all laborious work and cumulated frustration is almost immediately forgotten in a flash of joy, a little bit of pride, and a lot of relief. What sounds pretty pathetic here is a summary of the process that lead to the recent Geological Society of London Special Publication 432: Seismicity, Fault Rupture and Earthquake Hazards in Slowly Deforming Regions. While we will mostly advertise the volume, which should be of broad interest to the Paleoseismicity community (so please buy it, like it, share it!), we would also like to share some thoughts about why four years passed between submission of the volume proposal at the end of 2012 to seeing the book finally in the shelf at the beginning of 2017. more

Now that the new dates for the 8th PATA Days 2017 in New Zealand are fixed, it is time to bring to your attention an exceptional paper that was already published in 2016. I planned to write a review long time ago, but I just managed to do so now. The paper by Quigley et al. is not only likely to become your favourite read during the long flight to New Zealand, but it will also serve as an extremely valuable contribution to the study of earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) in general. The authors report on, and summarise, the effects that the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence had on the environment. The paper is special in many ways: more

In microtidal seas such as the Mediterranean (tidal range ≈0.4 m sea-level indicators are commonly used to infer coseismic history. A list containing these indicators is long, including wave-cut platforms, marine terraces, displaced beach rock, biological agents, sedimentological and stratigraphical indicators, and archaeological indicators. Obviously, the trustworthiness varies a lot from one to another. For deriving late Holocene coastal tectonic activity, one of the most commonly used sea-level marker activity are tidal notches. These form distinct morphological and ecological erosional features developed within the tidal range [Pirazzoli, 1986; Antonioli et al., 2015]. more

The “Great 1117 Veronese Earthquake” was one of the strongest events that hit Northern Italy in historical times. Many aspects of this earthquake are still debated, but archaeological sources, historical archives, and geological records can help to better understand what had happened near Verona 900 years ago. On 20 January, 2017, a conference on the 1117 Veronese Earthquake took place in Venice, bringing together archaeologists, historians and earth scientists. The presentations were given in Italian, but Paolo Forlin from the Armedea project provides an English summary of the meeting. Read his highly interesting article here. more

The FAULT2SHA Working Group has been formally approved by the European Seismological Commission, at the 35th General Assembly in Sept 2016. The WG core supporters are pleased to announce a new initiative, open to all researchers interested in contributing to discussions on topics that could improve the assessment of seismic hazard. more