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

Several interesting jobs are currently vacant for paleoseismologists and earthquake geology scientists, from PhD positions to professorships. more

The new issue of Seismological Research Letters has been published now and it contains a lot of articles for those liking old earthquakes. Some topics might sound familiar to you when you attended the PATA days conference as the authors presented parts of their work.

I have selected a few papers that are especially interesting to the paleoseismology community. They are about the use of Google StreetView for assessing macroseismic damage (Hinzen, 2013), archeoseismology in the Levant (Alfonsi et al. 2013), Earthquake rotated objects caused by the Emilia Romana earthquake – a fascinating EAE! (Cucci and Tertoulliani, 2013), a strong historical earthquake in Italy that likely did not happen at all (Camassi and Castelli, 2013) and new data on historical earthquakes in the Himalayan (Rajendran et al, 2013). Also, I added a paper on archaeoseismological investigations in northern Sicily that was published recently in Quaternary International (Bottari et al, 2013). Spend the rainy autumn evenings with a good read!

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On 15 October, 2013 a shallow Mw7.1 earthquake occured in Bohol, Philippines. The quake caused more than 200 fatalities and severe damages. Instrumental intensities of VIII – IX were recorded and the USGS estimates the maximum slip to be around 120 cm. Stéphane Baize from the French IRSN created a report not only on the seismological and tectonic background of the earthquake, but also on the earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) that were caused by the event. more

Dear colleagues and friends,

thank you very much for making the PATA Days 2013 such a great event! I hope you all had a safe trip back home or some more nice days with better weather. The abstract volume of the PATA Days is now available online. Currently, you can only download the entire volume, we will upload the single files into a sub-directory later.

Abstract volume Pata Days 2013: download more

Recent archaeoseismological studies have provided us with spectacular examples of skeletons as earthquake archaeological effects. Cases include the Neolithic skeletons of Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho (one of them beheaded by a fracture crossing the site!) published by Alfonsi et al. in SRL (2012) and the skeletons smashed by building collapse reported by Berberian et al. in JAS (2012).

To this list should now be added the case of Lajia (Guanting Basin, central China), where a team of Chinese researchers uncovered a series of skeletons buried under a thick layer of clay interpreted as the result of an enormous, earthquake-related mudflow c. 3950 cal BP. more