I hope you all had a wonderful start into 2023. May it bring you health and success, great field trips, lots of data, and nice reviewers. Here’s the latest list of papers that already made it through review. Enjoy reading!

Alexander Strom and Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov will run their famous summer school again after it had to be cancelled due to Covid-19. The summer school is designed for students and will take place from 14-29 August, 2023, in Kyrgyzstan. The topics include mass movements, neotectonics, and geomorphology in the epicentral area of the M7.2 1992 Suusamyr Earthquake. Find all the details in the announcement below.

This is the last paper round-up in 2022. We have a lot of research on historical earthquakes and Asian tectonics. Don’t miss the new paper by Nurminen et al. on the updated surface rupture database. Enjoy reading!
(UPDATE 2022-12-02: I’ve added the new Alsop et al. paper because the free-to-read link expires in 50 days…)

Structure-from-Motion is now a standard technique for documenting outcrops and paleoseismic trenches. It is also widely used in archaeology, architecture, disaster response, etc. In a perfect world, we would always have lots of well-known ground control points (GCPs) for our 3D models, for example by using a differential GPS. However, quite often we can’t do that because we don’t have a dGPS, because we stumbled upon an outcrop by accident, because we don’t want to carry the tripod to the top of a summit, etc. The problem is that without GCPs we might end up with funny errors in our model. Ian Pierce has written a tutorial about how to overcome many of these problems by combining SfM with the scans of the iPad’s and iPhone’s built-in lidar sensor: https://neotectonic.github.io/posts/iOS_Surveying/

Thanks Ian!!

It’s early November – time for the latest paper roundup. This time there are many earthquake studies from China and California. New Zealand and Australia got some good coverage, too, but there’s also news from Central Europe. Plus, burglargrams! Enjoy reading.

Within the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (NPRR/PNRR), the University “Federico II” of Naples offers 1 PhD position with the title “Earthquakes and Volcanoes”. The project will be focused on the study of active faults and seismic hazard. The study area will be mostly located in Southern Apennines. The deadline for application is the 3rd November 2022.
More information can be found at the website: http://www.unina.it/en_GB/didattica/post-laurea/dottorati-di-ricerca/bandi-di-ammissione

For details, please contact Luigi Ferranti (luigi.ferranti@unina.it) or Francesco Iezzi (francesco.iezzi@unina.it).

Finally, after Posidi, Greece, 2018, we had a successful PATA Days meeting! The meeting in 2019 was cancelled due to organisational problems and we held a student summer school instead in Prague. All plans were set for Chile in 2020, but it had to be cancelled twice because of Covid-19. Now it finally happened! The organisers Magali Rizza and Stéphane Baize and their wonderful team took us to Aix-en-Provence…

Make sure to scroll down to learn about the future of PATA!

I am on my way back from the PATA Days in France, which were great. A detailed report will follow later. In the meantime, enjoy reading the latest papers – we have a nice variety of topics and working areas.

The PATA Days in France are just a few days away. Get in the right mood by checking out the programme or by reading the (short) abstracts. The field trip guide for the post-conference excursion is also available for download here. The official website has all the important news concerning logistics etc.: https://patadays-2022.sciencesconf.org/

See you all in Southern France!

The Aix-en-Provence PATA Days are fast approaching and the meeting programme looks super-exciting! Unfortunately, I’ll not attend the congress, but my soul will be there in poster form – presenting author is 1^st year PhD student Marco Pizza and the topic is the likelihood of primary surface faulting.

Some earthquakes produce surface faulting, others do not. Several factors affect the outcome of this dichotomous variable (faulting YES/NO), including magnitude, depth, earthquake kinematic and local lithology. The probability of having surface rupture for a given magnitude is a key ingredient in Fault Displacement Hazard Assessment (FDHA). This probability is derived from empirical datasets and the state of the art is summarized in Figure 1, taken from the recently published IAEA Tecdoc on probabilistic FDHA.