Our colleagues Stéphane Baize and Oona Scotti from the French IRSN finished a report on the 2014 Napa Earthquake: Post-seismic survey report, with special focus on surface faulting. On 24 August 2014, an earthquake of magnitude Mw6 occurred on the West Napa Fault in shallow depth. The quake caused significant damage, an interesting pattern of surface ruptures, and the immediate attention of hundreds of geologists. The primary and secondary effects were mapped only hours after the event, which turned out to be extremely important – a large amount of afterslip was recorded in the following days. The earthquake was not only recorded by a huge seismometer network, but the ground motion was also captured by GPS sensors and InSAR images. The new IRSN report is especially concerned with the surface faulting hazard, since this agency is responsible for the safety of nuclear installations in France.  more

From 20-22 June, 2016, the IASPEI – Regional Assembly of the Latin-American and Caribbean Seismological Commission – LACSC will  be held in San Jose, Costa Rica. There will be some very interesting sessions on active tectonics, paleoseismology, seismic hazard, and intraplate faults: more

Plenty of paleoseismology papers have been published in late 2015 and early 2016 already! Especially those on the Gorkha earthquake made it to the news (Science and NatureGeoscience), but there is much more to discover. Check them out and – as always – tell us what we’ve missed. more

Dear friends and colleagues,

The 7th International Workshop on Paleoseismology, Active Tectonics, and Archaeoseismology (PATA Days) will be held in the USA from 30 May – 03 June, 2016. The workshop is sponsored by the INQUA-TERPRO Commission and mainly organized by James McCalpin. The workshop includes several excursions and we welcome presentations on a broad list of topics related to seismic hazards and active tectonics: more

A few weeks ago, Nadine Reitman (USGS) published an interesting paper about the use of Photogrammetry for Paleoseismic Trenching in BSSA. In this guest blog she shares her key findings and explains how to minimise errors without spending too much time measuring control points. Thanks Nadine!

Structure-from-motion (SfM) is now routinely used to construct orthophotos and high-resolution, 3D topographic models of geologic field sites. Here, we turn SfM on its side and use it to construct photomosaics and 3D models of paleoseismic trench exposures. Our results include a workflow for the semi-automated creation of seamless, high resolution photomosaics designed for rapid implementation in a field setting and a new error analysis of SfM models. more

Just a friendly reminder that the deadline for abstract submission for the EGU general assembly 2016 in Vienna is tomorrow, January 13th at 13:00 CET/12:00 GMT. If you are still looking for a session to submit your abstract to, please have a look at our session about Active Faults and the Earthquake Cycle (TS4.2/NH4.16/SM3.8)

By the way, the Vienna Basin is the perfect place to discuss active faults, as you see on our newest gravel pit outcrop. If you interested in having a closer look at this fault during the EGU – let me know…

Hopefully see you soon in Vienna,

Esther, Kris, Matthieu, Angela

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This is this year’s last issue of my paper round-up, and it includes some pretty interesting stuff. Our Greek colleagues published a report on the liquefaction caused by the 2014 Lefkada earthquakes, just in time with the recent earthquake that hit more or less the same area again (Papathanassiou et al., and see earlier posts here). Long et al. published a paper on iceberg-induced tsunamis, found in the sedimentary record – that’s a great story, isn’t it? Jacobson’s PhD on the Lake Heron Fault (NZ) is an interesting read, and Iván Sunyol’s paper on paleoseismological trenches in Mexico is especially interesting for those who attended the 2012 Morelia meeting. Zhou et al. come up with a great dataset of Pléiades imagery from the El Mayor-Cucapah Quake, Calais et al. have a close look on the northeastern Caribbean, and finally, Kufner et al.’s paper is about the collision between India and Asia deep below the Pamir and Hindu Kush.

Enjoy reading and Merry Christmas!

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The EGU General Assembly 2016 will be held in Vienna from 17-22 April, and the abstract deadline on 13 January 2016 is coming closer and closer. So if you haven’t already submitted your paper, keep this deadline in mind! Here are some warmly recommended sessions related to paleoseismology:

1) NH5.7/GM12.6/SSP3.20 Geological records of extreme wave events (co-organized). Conveners: Ed Garrett, Jessica Pilarczyk, Max Engel, Dominik Brill, Simon Matthias May

Even though I haven’t posted on this blog for years (sorry, Christoph…), I greatly appreciate the opportunity to advertise our session gathering all types of geological investigations, including both field studies and modelling approaches, which foster our understanding on tsunamis and high-magnitude storm surges. We welcome contributions on (i) sedimentary and geomorphological evidence of high-energy wave events from low and high energy environments, from low and high latitude regions and from coastal and offshore areas, (ii) novel dating approaches, (iii) numerical and experimental modelling studies of high-energy coastal sediment transport, and (iv) probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment based on geological data. more

I am running this blog for more than five years now and it is time to acknowledge the other geo-blogs out there that have inspired me. In order to stay updated I follow the Geobulletin, which monitors the geoblogosphere activity. There are numerous amazing blogs out there that are either fun to read or interesting or both, but here I will focus on the ones dealing with earthquakes/tectonics/geomorphology/tsunamis. Here is my personal, subjective, but honest, list of earthquake blogs that I like and read: more

Marta Ferrater from the Universitat de Barcelona did a lot of research on the Alhama de Murcia Fault. Her most recent paper deals with how good we can measure lateral offsets along faults which move only very slowly. This is probably of great interest for many people working on slow faults, so I am glad that she agreed to write the following guest post: more