A lot of interesting stories on earthquakes, tsunamis and paleoseismology made it to the media last week – no wonder as the EGU2014 and the SSA meeting took place at the same time. I will try to catch up and I start with tsunami hazard in Israel:

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What a week. I’ve seen loads and loads of interesting posters and met great people. more

After a very nice Opening Reception yesterday, we today shift from “pure networking” to scientific talks and posters. The Earthquake Cycle session started off with highly interesting research on active tectonics in Central Asia and on the Chi-Chi and New Madrid EQs.

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As we are often use geodata and analyse, store them or visualize them using a GIS we depend somehow on the person on the other side to understand how a GIS functions or how to use the GIS. A webmap- like the well know google maps- is therefore an easy way to communicate your data and results. But creating a webmap is not always a funny thing to do as we are more geoscientists than programmers. QGIS2leaf for QGIS is a great plugin for creating a basic webmap. more

The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) was one of the most ambitious (and expensive) experiments in the history of active fault research. A borehole was drilled through the San Andreas Fault, 3.2 km deep and 1.8 km in horizontal direction. The borehole was equipped with a number of instruments in order to get data from right where the earthquakes occur, but most of the instruments failed already in 2008 due to the extreme conditions. While analyses of the drill core resulted in some great scientific achievements and enhanced our understanding of fault zones, almost no one seems to have much interest in the in-situ instruments. Or let’s say, no one can pay the necessary amount for re-equipping the hole, millions of dollars…  more

Vanja Kastelic and Michele M. C. Carafa (INGV, L’Aquila, Italy) recently published an article in the Bollettino di Geofisica Teorica e Applicata (an international journal of Earth sciences) entitled “Earthquake rates inferred from active faults and geodynamics: the case of the External Dinarides.” This article covers the area affected by the earthquake of Ml 4.7 (Mw 4.6) occurred on April 22, 2014.

The same authors also wrote a brief seismotectonic report dealing with such an earthquake. They share the report with us under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A quick seismotectonic report for the 22 April 2014 (Mw=4.6) earthquake in SW Slovenia

Vanja Kastelic¹ and Michele M. C. Carafa¹

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Dear friends and colleagues,

We are all looking forward to the 5th PATA Days meeting! Don’t forget to register for this conference in Busan, Korea. The meeting will take place from 21-27 September and all information can be found at http://www.pata-days.org.

The second circular is out now, please download the pdf here (PDF, 800 kb). more

If you can’t find funding for attending the 5th Pata-Days in Busan, Korea, there is still the chance to see and present some good research on earthquake geology in Germany. There will be a session Active Tectonics and Earthquake Geology at the GeoFrankfurt 2014 meeting in late September, so don’t miss the deadline:

Dear colleagues,

Within the frame of the conference GeoFrankfurt 2014 we are organizing a session on Active Tectonics and Earthquake Geology (B13). The conference is held at the Goethe Universität at Frankfurt, 21-24 September 2014.

Conveners: Ioannis Koukouvelas, Kurt Decker and Klaus Reicherter

Deadline for abstract submission: 25 April, 2014 more

Europe’s biggest geoscience conference, the EGU General Assembly 2014, is approaching! Held in Vienna, Austria since about ten years by the European Geoscience Union, it brings together loads and loads of scientists from even more scientific fields. It’s great to present your work to your scientific community (because it’s likely they are there) but it might be even more suitable to meet new people, who give you helpful or even challenging input for your work! more

During the month of March 2014, Sascha and I along with Tobi and Lauretta (BSc students from RWTH University) were in Greece for fieldwork. The fieldwork campaign started on the island of Crete; our institute at RWTH Aachen has a joint project with Mainz University to carry out paleotsunami investigations on the island. The western part of Crete was uplifted by approximately 9 m during the 21st July AD 365 earthquake and also hit by the associated tsunami. Due to the strong seismic and highly tsunamigenic activity of the nearby Hellenic Trench, it is suggested that numerous earlier tsunamis have also struck the island. more