The way we measure earthquakes, thousands of scientists writing one paper, and more. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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Is it just me or is the frequency of papers being published increasing…? Anyway, here’s the literature update with studies on paleoseismology and active tectonics. Today we have: Faulting in the Canyonlands, seismites from the Jurassic, a fake earthquake in Cologne, dynamic triggering, news from the San Jacinto Fault, ground motion variation between repeating earthquakes, metrics to evaluate seismic hazard maps, submarine tectonic geomorphology, the 1897 Great Assam Earthquake, and a collection of papers on geophysical imaging and interpretation of outcrops. Enjoy!

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The 19th INQUA Congress in Nagoya has now finished. It was a great gathering of scientists working in Quaternary. Overall 1800 researchers from 69 countries participated. Early Career Scientists (ECR) had a very strong presence (many thanks to INQUA for promoting ECRs). The venue offered enough time for discussions and was supported by several pre- mid and post congress fieldtrips. Two days were fully covered by active tectonics and paleoseismology studies and another one by tsunami related studies.

Our active tectonics and paleoseismology colleagues Frank Audemard and Alessandro Michetti have been re-elected as Vice-President of INQUA and President of the TERPRO Commission (Terrestrial Processes, Deposits, and History) respectively. Many thanks to Koji Okumura for the fantastic organization of the meeting and his successful work within INQUA as the former Vice-President. The next Congress has now been scheduled for Dublin (Ireland) in 2019, so be prepared.

In the meantime we will have the opportunity to meet in future meetings and workshops of our Focus Group on Active Tectonics and Paleoseismology.

The year is 2015. The world of paleoseismology is occupied by scientists traveling to Nagoya. Well, not entirely… One small number of unflinching scientists stay at their desks and hold out against the invaders. Today is Friday, and here are your links!

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Just as a reminder for all interested in visiting Vienna in September 21–24, 2015 and participate on the international workshop “Advances in Active Tectonics and Speleotectonics”:

The final deadline for registration and abstract submission is approaching tomorrow (July, 31st, 2015).

There will be great field trips to active faults in the Vienna Basin (currently excavated) and to Austrian caves showing ongoing deformation. For more details, dates and contacts please visit the website http://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/AATS_Workshop_2015

Looking forward to seeing you in Vienna!

Sincerely,

Esther Hintersberger, Kurt Decker, Lukas Plan, Ivo Baron, Ivanka Mitrovic

In 2013, a M_W7.7 earthquake struck Balochistan, caused a huge surface offset and triggered a small tsunami in the Arabian Sea. Immediately, the apparently strange fault behaviour caused the attention of scientists world wide and a number of papers were published. The discussion is highly interesting and still ongoing. This an interesting case for paleoseismologists, too, not only because of the cascading earthquake effects, but also because of the surface rupture distribution, from which we might learn some important lessons for our future work. Now my colleague Yu Zhou and his colleagues from Oxford University published a new paper on this event, arguing that it might be not as unusual as it seems. Their research is based on the analysis of Pleiades stereo satellite imagery, which has proven to be a very useful data source already. Yu send me a nice summary of his recent research: more

The 2015 GSA Annual Meeting will be held in early November in Baltimore and since the deadline is approaching (11 August) it is time to check paleoseismology sessions. One of the many interesting sessions will be chaired by our colleagues Mark Quigley and Tim Stahl: “T186 – Estimating the Timing and Characteristics of Continental Earthquakes from Geologic Data”. Tim told me that there will be “some great invited speakers lined up speaking on paleoliquefaction, lake varve deposits and San Andreas fault paleoseismology“. more

Lots of paleoseismology and tsunami studies are currently being published… Here’s my update on the latest papers, including: Surface ruptures, seismic swarms, tsunamites, Asian tectonics, slip rates and archaeoseismology. Plus: A very interesting study on the 1911 Chon-Kemin M8.0 earthquake in the Kazakhstan/Kyrgyzstan border region, the source process reconstruced from analogue seismograms. Thanks to Ramon Arrowsmith for pointing me to this one. Enjoy!

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Pluto and Charon, Globalising Geoscience, the Anthropocene issue, the World Stress Map calling for updates – and much more. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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A few weeks ago I spent ten days of field work in the Suusamyr Valley in Kyrgyzstan. In the framework of the EwF Project and COMET a team from Oxford (Eleanor Ainscoe, Austin Elliott, Richard Walker) and Kyrgyzstan (Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov, Azat Moldobaev) re-visited the epicentral area of the 1992 M_S7.3 Suusamyr earthquake. This thrust earthquake is quite special for it produced intense and widespread secondary earthquake environmental effects (landslides, rockfalls, secondary ruptures, mud eruptions, etc.), but remarkably short primary surface ruptures only. Actually, surface ruptures of several metres height were found near the Suusamyr river, but limited to few hundreds of metres in length. Some 25 km to the west, another set of surface ruptures appeared, which were only about 1 m in height and less than 3 km long. Here are some impressions from our field work. more