If you are looking for a last minute Christmas present, these shoes might not be the right choice. Also, I am not exactly sure if it’s too nerdy, but the idea is great and the shoes are beautiful. Think about customized shoes with the geological map of your home area…  more

An interesting paper has been published in Nature Geoscience by Murphy et al.: Limit of strain partitioning in the Himalaya marked by large earthquakes in western Nepal. It doesn’t happen too often that paleoseismological papers are published in this journal and it’s also not too often that authors publish such beautiful photos. The authors identified a more than 60 km long rupture in W Nepal with 10 m of surface offset (strike-slip with a normal component). 14C dating points to seismic activity between AD 1165 and 1400. That’s pretty surprising for many reasons: more

The EGU2014 will take place from 27 April – 2 May, 2014 in Vienna, Austria. The call for abstracts is open and submission deadline is 16 January, 2014. So it’s time to start thinking about which sessions would be interesting – not only for presenting own work, but also for listening to great talks. Here’s a list of sessions that a paleoseismologist could find interesting: more

Paleoseismologists from northern Central Europe are meeting regularly for discussions, usually twice a year, and the next small workshop will take place in Utrecht on 9 January, 2014. The one-day meeting is dedicated to present latest results of ongoing research on active faults in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany (intraplate seismicity). Participants from the Geological Survey of North Rhine-Westphalia, the VU Amsterdam, TuDelft, ULG Liége, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, TNO-GDN Utrecht and RWTH Aachen University will discuss the possibilities of joint projects and collect ideas on how to proceed with ongoing studies.
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Witold pointed me to a new book on tsunamis that was published by Springer. It’s called Tsunami Events and Lessons Learned – Environmental and Societal Significance and it is edited by Y.A. Kontar, V. Santiago-Fandiño and T. Takahashi. The book contains 25 papers on the following topics:  more

The new open access journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences recently appeared. Its first published article in the Structural Geology and Tectonics section is an overview piece by Chief Editor Agust Gudmundsson about Great challenges in structural geology and tectonics. The article provides a nice round-up of some basic questions in tectonics that are still not well enough understood and which definitely need to be addressed in the (near) future. It starts from questions which sound easy to be answered (How many tectonic plates are there?), but actually aren’t. more

Elsevier has put together a number of papers that were published in its various journals on the Wenchuan 2008 earthquake and made a “Virtual Special Issue” out of that. So, the good news is not about new papers on that quake (some work was already published in 2011), but rather that this selection of papers is free until 14 February 2014 via this link: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/tectonophysics/virtual-special-issues/virtual-special-issue-on-the-2008-wenchuan-earthquake/

That’s not open access as we like it, but at least a step in the right direction.

Dear all,
just before everybody is leaving for the AGU to San Francisco, we want to draw your attention to our session at the EGU 2014 (27 April – 02 May) in Vienna about:

Active Tectonics and the Earthquake Cycle (TS5.1/NH4.10/SM2.7) co-sponsored by GSA-SGT

Active Tectonics studies may shed light onto the understanding of the long-term and short-term deformation patterns in intraplate domains and along plate boundaries. A wide range of approaches such as paleoseismology, paleogeodesy, paleotsunami investigations, tectonic geomorphology and high-resolution datation methods bring unprecedented constraints on the identification of active structures, the distribution of associated deformation and the size and timing of past earthquakes. This, in turn, may be used to better understand i) the earthquake cycle through the characterization of its inter-seismic, co-seismic and post-seismic periods and ii) related hazard (including earthquake, tsunami and triggered mass movements) through the characterization of recurrence patterns.
This session seeks contributions on the study of earthquake-prone areas in interplate and intraplate regions that combine approaches such as earthquake geology and geomorphology, seismotectonics, geophysical imaging (including GPR and seismics) and remote sensing (including InSAR and LiDAR surveys). We also encourage contributions that incorporate such observations into seismic hazard assessment.

Deadlines are November, 29 for Support Applications and January, 19 for Abstract Submission.

Looking forward to an interesting session and see you in Vienna,
the conveners,
Matthieu Ferry, Geosciences Montpellier, France
Kris Vanneste, Royal Observatory, Belgium
Esther Hintersberger, University of Vienna, Austria

Researchers have discovered the remains of a royal wine cellar at the Tel Kabri archaeological site in Northern Israel. They found ~40 crushed jars, which equals about 3,000 bottles, and they were able to analyse the chemistry of the organic traces from the jars. It’s clear that they contained red and white wine, which was spiced with “honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins” as it was common 1,700 BC. The fact that all jars contained wine with the same chemical fingerprint led the researchers to conclude that the wine had a high quality and was, therefore, likely part of the Canaan palace’ reserve. This is already a pretty good story, but the New York Times also mentiones that “the cellar was destroyed 3,600 years ago in some violent event, perhaps an earthquake“. Yee-haw, archeoseismology! Here we go! But wait – what do we actually know about the earthquake? more

Typhoon Haiyan was among the strongest storms ever recorded and likely the strongest one to make landfall in historical times. This mega storm hit the Philippines with windspeeds of more than 300 km/h. It caused thousands of fatalities, widespread flooding and devastation especially in its direct path. NASA’s Terra satellite is equipped with the ASTER sensor. This sensor is perfect for producing false color images of land cover and vegetation. In this image series it becomes clear that typhoon Haiyan destroyed a significant part of the vegetation around Tacloban. more