Richard Styron has published several interesting tools for fault/stress analysis and other geoscience problems, see his website here: http://rocksandwater.net/. The latest Python tool he is sharing with us is for calculating fault slip rates from offset topography data – great stuff for paleoseismologists! He announced this a few days ago and allowed me to spread the news. Check it out and let him know what you think!

Hi all,

Last year I built a tool to calculate fault slip rates from offset marker data (age and offset distance of features cut by faults).  Although I will be publishing a paper using it eventually, I’d like to spread the word about it now and just get it out to the community.  The Slip Rate Calculator can be found here:  https://github.com/cossatot/slip_rate_calculator, with more documentation.

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From 4-10 September, 2016, the 35th General Assembly of the European Seismological Commission (ESC) will be held in Trieste, Italy. Deadline for abstract submission is 30 April, early bird registration ends 31 May. The meeting covers a whole range of interesting topics, such as Earthquakes in regions of slow lithospheric deformation, active faulting and geodynamic data, secondary earthquake effects, regional studies and many more. Two sessions are probably especially interesting for the paleoseismology community:

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It’s only one month since my last paper update and yet I have nineteen interesting new studies for you. Today’s round-up includes tsunamis, tectonic geomorphology, environmental earthquake effects and soft sediment deformation, new techniques/technology, and some classic paleoseismology. Enjoy! more

[Update 15 February 2017: Since Sascha is an author here now, the post was attributed to him.]
Greece is one of the main targets of RWTH Aachen’s Neotectonics & Geohazards group. They worked on paleo-tsunamis, active faults on the Peloponnese, in Attica, and on Crete, and on the application of terrestrial LiDAR and shallow geophysics for active tectonics research. In their latest paper, Sascha Schneiderwind et al. developed a methodology to aid paleoseismic trenching studies. They use t-LiDAR and georadar to better and more objectively characterise lithological units. His paper includes nice examples from Crete and from the famous Kaparelli Fault. Here is his guest blog: more

Tsunamis are a very real threat in the Indian Ocean. Most people will immediately think of the 2004 tsunami and the Sumatra subduction zone, but the Arabian Sea has seen strong tsunamis in the past, too. In 1945, a major earthquake at the Makran Subduction Zone caused a large tsunami (Hoffmann et al., 2013a). In 2013, the on-shore Balochistan earthquake caused a submarine slide which in turn triggered a tsunami that reached the coast of Oman (Heidarzadeh & Satake, 2014; Hoffmann et al., 2014a). There is also evidence for paleotsunamis along Oman’s coast (Hoffmann et al., 2013b; Hoffmann et al., 2014b). Now a team of scientists from RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and GUtech (Muscat, Oman) have published a tsunami inundation scenario for Muscat (Schneider et al., 2016). This is lead author Bastian Schneider’s guest blog on this research: more

The 4th International Colloquium on Historical Earthquakes and Macroseismology will be held from 2-3 May, 2016, in Vienna, Austria. Attendance is free of charge and registration is possible until 31 March. The meeting is organised by Christa Hammerl and Wolfgang Lenhardt and will be hosted at the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik. The exciting program is available now for download: 2nd circular (PDF, 500 kb).

Our colleague Guillaume St-Onge sent us the following interesting job offer:

PhD project on natural hazards and paleomagnetism at the Institut des Sciences de la Mer de Rimouski (ISMER) in close collaboration with the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP)

Download the flyer here: download PDF more

I am quite happy that our new paper has finally been published in GJI. We worked on a fault between Aachen and Cologne in Germany and found that there has been a surface rupturing earthquake less than 9000 years ago, and possibly not much older than 2500 years BP. The area is of interest also because in 1755/56 a series of damaging earthquakes hit Düren and its surroundings – these are the strongest historical events in Germany that we know of. The quakes were felt as far away as Berlin, Strasbourg, and London, yet there were no primary ruptures. “Our” quake must have been much stronger… more

Great news reached us from Spain! Our colleague Julián Garcia Mayordomo spread the news that an updated version of the Quaternary Active Faults Database of Iberia (QAFI) is now available online. QAFI has a GoogleMaps-based interface with clickable features providing loads of content on fault geometry, fault mechanism, slip-rate, historical and pre-historical seismicity, geomorphology, compilers, further references and much more. Truly a wonderful tool, congratulations!

QAFI is hosted by IGME and can be found here: http://info.igme.es/qafi/ more

Here’s the February edition of my paper recommendations. This time we have:

• Paleoseismology in Germany and Nepal (the latter with a focus on charcoal dating techniques),
• Tsunamis in Greece, Portugal, Israel and Alaska,
• Turbidites in Portugal,
• New insights into the geodynamics of Mozambique,
• Fault rheology in Iran,
• Rupture jumps on strike‐slip faults, and
• A MATLAB tool for seismic hazard calculations.

Enjoy!

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