The Chilik-Chon Kemin Fault Zone is a major left-lateral strike-slip fault zone in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, just a few tens of kilometres east of Almaty and north of Lake Issyk Kul. It has seen one of the largest continental earthquakes ever recorded in 1889, with an estimated magnitude of ~M8.3. In July and August I had the chance to visit this fault zone for two weeks together with Angela Landgraf from Potsdam and Aidyn Mukambaev from the National Data Centre, thanks to a travel grant from COMET (thanks so much, COMET!) and with support from the EwF Project. We wanted to find out more details about the tectonic geomorphology of this fault zone and we wanted to study the slip rate and earthquake recurrence intervals. So we took our drone, shovels and picks and set off for a field trip into the mountainous wilderness. Since I will leave for another field trip to Kazakhstan (Dzhungarian Fault) tomorrow, I will leave you with some impressions from our field work and provide more information once the paper is published…
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It’s a busy summer for me with lots of field work going on, but there’s still time to read the latest papers on paleoseismology and earthquake geology. Here’s my latest paper round-up. No tsunami papers this time, I am sorry. Enjoy reading and as always, please don’t hesitate to tell me which papers I have missed.

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Dear Colleagues,

We would like to bring your attention to a workshop we are organizing on the topic of Fault Displacement Hazard Analysis (FDHA). The Workshop will be held December 8-9th at the U.S. Geological Survey Campus in Menlo Park, CA, and is timed to be the Thursday and Friday before the 2016 AGU Fall meeting so that international participants can plan to attend both the Workshop and AGU the following week.

Workshop themes will include: more

Ruptured pebbles are frequently found near and along active faults. At RWTH Aachen University Christopher Weismüller has just finished his MSc thesis on ruptured pebbles in southern Spain. There, the NE-SW trending Carboneras Fault System meets the N-S trending Palomares Fault and ends. more

Our colleague Małgorzata Pisarska-Jamroży from Poznan, Poland, has two PhD positions to fill at her department. The two scholarship offers address researchers interested in her project “Recognition of traces left by earthquakes in Pleistocene sediments affected by glacio-isostatic rebound in the Baltic Sea Basin“. Closing date is 23 August 2016, 16:00. Here are the details: more

My dear colleagues Neta Wechsler, Stefano Pucci, and Oxana Lunina took some amazing photos during the PATA Days in Crestone, Colorado. Even better, they allowed me to distribute the links to their collections:

• Neta’s photos: access album
• Stefano’s photos: access album
• Oxana’s photos: access album

Do you also have some photos that you’d like to share? Please feel free to link to your album in the comments section or drop me a mail.

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The following open position might be of interest to the paleoseismology community:

“We are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Assistant for a 12 month fixed term appointment working on the exciting new UNAM-CONACYT-funded project on “Spatial and Temporal Variations of Upper Plate Deformation across the Guerrero portion of the Mexican Subduction Zone” at the Institute of Geography and the Environmental Geophysics University Laboratory (LUGA), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Campus Mexico City. The candidate will pursue fundamental and applied research into the assessment of both temporal and spatial vertical crustal deformation associated with both slow (interseismic) and rapid (coseismic) crustal deformation across the inner forearc region of the central Mexican subduction zone on the Guerrero sector, where the Cocos plate underthrusts the North American plate. The candidate will be responsible for the development and execution of laboratory and field research, conduct studies to develop a model of long-term deformation, writing reports and papers. more

The geometry, length, and displacement of fault ruptures that breach the surface provide critical information on the behavior of faults during seismic events (coseismic deformation), and on their long-term behavior. The study of coseismic fault ruptures has concentrated almost exclusively along continental faults, while submarine studies have been scarce, and only a few provided quantitative constraints in parameters such as fault displacement (e.g., Tohoku Earthquake). In addition to represent more than two thirds of the Earth’s seismicity, submarine faults can also be associated with tsunamis, potentially increasing the seismic hazard that these structures pose.

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Today’s paper round-up is rather short. Maybe this is due to the start of the field work season and many editors being involved in field research, maybe it’s just holiday season. Maybe I’ve missed some papers because I have been in the field, too. However, there are some very interesting studies, especially concerning tsunamis. Enjoy reading and please tell me what I’ve missed in the comments.

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An interesting opportunity for a postdoc position is currently open at Potsdam University, Germany. If you have a clever research idea, the university will basically support you and help establishing a research group via applying for more advanced funding schemes. So it’s a bit of an unusual advert, but certainly a nice one. Here’s the advert (ruthlessly copied from Potsdam University): more