Do you know your birthquake? And what do you think about animal behaviour before earthquakes? Did you hear about the NPG initative on an outsourced, but accelerated review process? Today is Good Friday, and here are your links!

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Good news for the late birds – the abstracts deadline for the Colloquium on “Historical Earthquakes of the Rhine Graben and Interplate – Intraplate Continental Deformation: From archives to comparative seismotectonics” has been postponed to 3 April.

The meeting will be held from 11-13 May 2015 in Strasbourg (Inst. de Physique du Globe). The second circular is out with more details on the programme, download the PDF here.

Pieces of history, mapping faults, and maps – today is Friday and here are your links!

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From 16-18 July, 2015, an interesting workshop will be held at ETH Zurich (Switzerland): Submarine Paleoseismology – Using giant piston coring within IODP to fill the gap in long-term records of great earthquakes.

Michael Strasser, one of the main organizer, names the aims of the workshop: “The main topic of the workshop is to discuss and define a strategy how and where we could best make use of giant piston coring efforts within the Integrated Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) to make some major advancements in submarine paleoseismology to constrain earthquake recurrence beyond historical times.” more

What’s new in paleoseismology and active tectonics research? Here’s my latest digest of some recently published  papers. As always, please feel free to point out ones that I’ve missed. more

Last Friday the RAS held a discussion meeting on Tectonics from Above: Recent Advances in the Use of High-resolution Topography and Imagery in London. Almost the entire Cambridge Tectonics Group went there and I absolutely enjoyed the meeting and the discussion with friends and colleagues mainly from the UK and from France. The speakers reported on open-source software for producing high-res DEMs, advances in aerial and satellite imagery, new techniques in remote sensing, and latest developments in fault/offset mapping. The meeting was supported by NERC, COMET+ and LICS. more

The Big One covered the news this week – didn’t you notice? We’re back with news and links on the long-term erthquake forecast for California, the reawakened Oklahoma faults, the UN Disaster Risk Reduction conference, an image tournament, and more. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Makran Earthquake and Tsunami. On 27 November, 1945, an earthquake of magnitude Mw8.1 occurred at the Makran Subduction Zone offshore Pakistan. A large tsunami was triggered that reached the coasts of Pakistan, Iran, India, and Oman. The quake and the waves left approx. 4,000 people dead. A new book collects interviews with survivors. The book has been published by the UNESCO through its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and is available for free download here. more

Karachi is the most populated city in Pakistan with around 24,000,000 inhabitants – just as many as Australia. Since many years a nuclear power plant (NPP) is located just a few miles outside the city at the shore. Ongoing work on new reactors with Chinese help has recently sparked outrage and media coverage. Concerns are that any accidents at the NPP might have dramatic consequences and threaten millions of people. I searched the recent scientific literature on seismic and tsunami hazard for Karachi…

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A lot of great papers were published this week, so prepare for some reading this weekend. The South Napa Earthquake, drilling the Alpine Fault, earthquake supercycles and a landslide handbook. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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