A special session on the Amatrice Earthquake of 24 August in Italy was held at the Congress of the Geological Society of Italy (Naples, 7 September, 2016). A video of the entire session is now available online. Although the talks are in Italian, it is easy to understand and the slides tell the story.

See the full video here: more

Today’s paper round-up has lots of tsunami papers, including one on the use of DNA to decipher paleo-tsunami deposits. Also, we have some papers about Italy, even from the area of the 24 August Amatrice earthquake. Enjoy reading and please don’t hesitate to tell me which papers I’ve missed.

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There will be a Special Session on the Amatrice Earthquake of 24 August at the Congresso Società Geologica Italiana, 7 September, 2016, in Napoli. See http://www.sginapoli2016.it/home/ for the congress details.

Session programme:

Il terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016 7 settembre 2016, ore 20.00, Aula tbd

Chairmen: Carlo Doglioni, Alessandro Maria Michetti

• 20.00 – INGV Amatrice working group : La sequenza sismica di Amatrice 2016
• 20.10 – Bonano M., Castaldo R., Casu F., De Luca C., De Novellis V., Lanari R., Manunta M., Manzo M., Pepe A., Pepe S., Tizzani P., Zinno I. : Deformazione superficiale associata al terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016: primi risultati da interferometria radar dallo spazio
• 20.20 – Lavecchia G., Brozzetti F., Boncio P., de Nardis, Cirillo, Ferrarini: controllo strutturale sulla sequenza sismica di Accumoli 2016 – analisi preliminare
• 20.30 – Blumetti A.M., Bonadeo L., Brunamonte F., Comerci V., Cowie P., Di Manna P., Ferrario M.F., Faure Walker J., Frigerio C., Fumanti F., Gregory L., Guerrieri L., Iezzi F., Livio F., McCaffrey K., Michetti A.M., Mildon Z., Phillips R., Piccardi L., Pompili R., Rhodes E., Roberts G., Vittori E., Walters R.J., Wedmore L., Wilkinson M. : Rotture al suolo ed effetti ambientali associati al terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016: risultati preliminari e work in progress.
• 20.40 – Galli P. et al. : Distribuzione dell’intensità macrosismica e implicazioni sismotettoniche del terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016:
• 20.50 – Amanti M. : Eventi franosi nell’area epicentrale del terremoto di Amatrice.

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…
Enjoy!  more

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