Our colleague Franck Audemard spread the news that a special issue of the Journal of South American Earth Sciences (SAMES) will be published on “Regional moment tensors and stress field in South and Central America”. Given the success of the RMTS (Regional Moment-Tensor Solution) session in the IASPEI Regional Assembly in Bogotá, last July, a special issue is now planned on all aspects of moment-tensors and stress field. more

The Deform2015 school on Active Deformation, Faults and Earthquakes from Measurements to Models will be held in Southern France from 7-13 February, 2015.
Over the past years, considerable advances have been made in observing crustal deformation at scales of seconds to thousands of years.
However, a unified view of the earthquake cycle is still missing. The thematic school aims at bringing together students and scientists
working on different aspects of active faulting and earthquake processes. This school will provide a state-of-the-art view of the technics used to study active deformation as well as a perspective on the current models integrating the growing corpus of available data.

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Several new papers deal with paleoseismology and active tectonics studies. Wiatr et al. used terrestrial LiDAR to analyse limestone bedrock scarps, Hornblow et al. investigated the Darfield earthquake source in NZ. Sarikaya et al. present new data on offset alluvial fans in Central Turkey; Xu et al. present geological data on two historical seismic events in Tibet. Tectonic morphology is used by Barcelona et al. in NW Argentina. Mathew et al. use remote sensing data to analyze coseismic deformation in China. Ed Garrett and colleagues present data on 1000 years of megathrust quakes in Chile, and Bemis et al. have an interesting article on UAVs and paleoseismology. more

Our colleague Tim Dawson from the California Geological Survey (CGS) pointed me to this website, where reports and data on the Napa Earthquake of 24 August, 2014, are collected. There is a new document available for download, the EERI report at the top of the page, which adds some previously unpublished information, especially on the observed afterslip. Tim writes that “afterslip along the central 6-7 km of the rupture is about 35 cm (whereas it was initially only about 20 cm the day of the earthquake).” The afterslip seems to be still ongoing and is monitored with InSAR. more

The 6th INQUA workshop on Active Tectonics, Paleoseismology and Archaeoseismology will be held from 19-24 April, 2015, in Pescina, Fucino Basin, Italy.

We will remember the centenary of the 1915 M7 Fucino earthquake, that was one of the largest and most devastating earthquakes ever occurred in Central Italy.

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Springer has recently published the book Dynamic Tectonics and Karst in the series Cave and Karst Systems of the World, edited by our colleagues S. Shanov and K. Kostov. The book focusses on the influence of tectonic processes on the formation of karst and karst caves and one chapter is devoted to karst cave paleoseismology. The authors present studies from the Balkans, Cuba, and France.  more

Second meeting on Active Faults and Paleoseismology in two weeks, so I am on the road again. Today, the 2nd Iberfault meeting in Lorca/Murcia/Spain starts focussing on A multidisciplinary approach to the study of active faults, earthquakes and seismic risk. After the very successful first meeting in Sigüenza/Guadalajara/Spain in 2010 after four years now the city of Lorca is the host. The reason is simple: a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck the area, leaving the region with the relative high number of 9 casualties, 100 Mio. € damage and a series of scientific papers that e.g. this earthquake was anthropogenically induced by water expulsion (it was discussed here a couple of months ago by Christoph). more

“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” 

I was thinking of this quote whilst listening to Mustapha Meghraoui’s talk during this week’s ISEMG conference in Mugla (Turkey). Mustapha was reviewing the seismic hazard potential of the northern stretch of the Dead Sea Rift, and he ended by identifying two prominent areas where there was a substantial long-term (1000 yr) slip deficit that strongly suggested heightened future earthquake potential. The quote above has nothing to do with earthquakes. Neither is it by Mustapha. Instead, it relates to global warming and was from the climate modeller and policy advocate Stephen Schneider. Nevertheless, it struck me that what Schneider was wrestling with a decade or so ago with climate change has parallels to what some earthquake geologists are wrestling with now: what do we do when we believe that the science demands action? more

In this week the 8th International Symposium on Eastern Mediterranean Geology started in Mugla/Turkey, our colleague Ersen Aksoy is one of the major organizers together with his colleagues and teams from the Mulga University, many sessions with interesting talks are scheduled, the programme lists many interesting talks on paleoseismology of the Aegean area and Turkey, and the Levant area. Yesterday, the meeting strated with keynotes from Celal Sengör (on the eastern Mediterranean tectonic framework and deformation history) and Iain Stewart (on: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Communicating Geology to Society). Then the individual scientific sessions started with presentations on….

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The 2011 Christchurch earthquake series had severe consequences and surprised scientists for many reasons. Ground motions were extremely strong despite the relative moderate magnitudes of the quakes (M_W 5.3-7.1). The events happened on a system of hitherto unknown faults, some of which are located directly below Christchurch. Earthquake environmental effects (EEE), especially liquefaction, were intense and widespread. It turned out that subsequent quakes reactivated the same feeder dikes of sand blows, showing that saturated sediments are susceptible of liquefaction no matter if they had been liquefied recently (also see the paper of Quigley et al. (2013) on the liquefaction effects). Another stunning lesson was the occurrence of intense rockfall in the vicinity of Christchurch. In a recently published study, Mackey and Quigley (2014) dated rockfall boulders with ³He and show that they allow to estimate the recurrence intervall of local seismic events like the 2011 series. This works is a very interesting way to use EEE for paleo-earthquake studies. more