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

Great news from Italy – A new version of the Database of Individual Seismogenic Sources (DISS) is now online! A huge amount of work went into this latest release which has several important updates and a fantastic new amount of data. Our colleague Umberto Fracassi sent me the following description of the new features:

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News on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, Mars, North Anatolia, the Half Dome, “killer quakes” and more. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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Isn’t it too hot to be inside and reading? For the night here are some short news on the top 100 paper of all time, the Landers earthquake and Landsat data. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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In case you need a good read for your summer holidays, here are the latest papers on paleoseismology and related fields. Today including a IAEA TecDoc about paleoseismology, an early paper on the Gorkha quake, coral paleoseismology, some tectonic geomorphology in Spain, clastic dykes, and tectonic uplift of an island in Chile. Enjoy!

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The INQUA 2015 congress in Nagoya will not only be the place to catch up with latest science news, but also to elect new commissions and project leaders and to plan and co-ordinate the ongoing activities for the inter-congress period. Therefore, think about joining the relevant business meeting! INQUA is organized in several commissions, of which TERPRO (Terrestrial Processes) is the one which covers paleoseismology, active tectonics and tectonic geomorphology. The IFG Palacte (Int’l Focus Group Paleosesimology/active tectonics) is a sub-organization of TERPRO itself. The TERPRO Business Meeting will be held on the evening (19:00-20:30) of Tue, 28 July in room 431, and will focus on the new Commission structure and programs for the intercongress period 2015 – 2019. more

New reports (on why geology matters), papers (on Nepal and Chile), a video (on Martian debris flows), some tweets and even more. Today is Friday and here are your links!

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The Megablock Complex: An example from the East African Rift

Recognizing and interpreting seismite horizons (soft-sediment deformation generated by earthquakes) preserved in the sedimentary record is an underappreciated approach for paleoseismic analysis. The addition of sedimentological studies to a toolkit that includes other well-established methods, such as instrumental seismic monitoring and fault trenching, can provide a less expensive and more practical option for earthquake hazard prediction and preparation in certain areas. For example, this may be a good option in less developed regions and in areas where fault trenching may not be possible. Moreover, there is a lot that we can learn rheologically from the study of seismites that could be invaluable for modeling the behavior of the surface/near-surface during seismic activity. Similarly, investigating Quaternary strata in areas that may be prone to seismicity, which may or may not have a recorded history of major earthquakes, can illuminate important information about earthquake recurrence patterns and intervals, in much the same way as fault trenching. more

Some weeks ago we advertised the NSF-sponsored workshop on Future Directions in Tectonics. Yesterday, Kevin Mahan announced that the workshop will be postponed. Read the message he circulated: more