The INGV has published some new data on the earthquake that hit Italy in the morning of 20 May, 2012 and caused damages and casualties. Peak ground accelerations (PGA) reached 28%g in the epicentral area. This is not unusual for an event of that size. Peak ground velocities (PGV) were as high as 20 cm/s. The spectral response is more interesting. The 3s period response is 1.5%g only, at 1s period the area encountered 18%g, and for the 0.3s period the values reached 49%g, which is quite a lot for a Mw6.1 quake. However, the longer periods tend to be more dangerous for buildings. more
An earthquake of magnitude Mw6.1 (EMSC data; USGS: M6.0) rocked Northern Italy on 20 May, 2012 at 2 am UTC. The epicentre was located on 35 km NNW of Bologna in the Po Plain at around 10 km depth. Media report at least 6 people dead and up to 50 injured. Intensities reached up to EMS VIII. Especially old brick buildings suffered severe damages and many collapses are reported. more
A very strange story happened in OC California some days ago (thanks @EricFielding for pointing me to that). A woman suffered serious burns because some rocks her kids found at a beach combusted spontaneously in her pocket. Immediately, a discussion started on twitter. What kind of rocks could that be? Hydrocarbon-bearing sediments? Coal? Phosphor? There have been some accidents with phosphor from World War II weapons that was washed upon the shore of the Baltic Sea. People confused it with amber. However, this is unlikely at California beaches. Mysterious rocks… more
Matthew’s WoGE #345 looked pretty much like an ocean shoreline, but it turned out to be Lake Khanka located at the border of Russia and China. This lake is very shallow but has a large area and it is famous for its biodiversity and strongly influenced by flood events. There have been plenty of beach-WoGEs lately, so I decided to take you to another environment. more
The INQUA has set up an Early Career Researchers Committee (INQUA_ECR), and I am proud being a member of that. Its aim is to support young scientists, to get young scientists involved in INQUA activities, to build up (scientific) networks, and to use social media. I think that’s a great idea, because up to now, you won’t find INQUA on Twitter, Facebook etc. We have set up a Facebook page now – come on in and like us, share links and find job offers! Twitter will follow soon. We will organize young scientists meetings at conferences (e.g. in Australia next year) and provide a lot of infos for early career scientists.
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Klaus and me went to the SSA 2012 annual meeting in San Diego in April. The conference was great and very focussed. I really like that kind of rather small meetings, where almost everything is interesting for me. I saw a lot of interesting posters and great talks and especially liked the paleoseismology and archeoseismology sessions (of course!).
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Databases for active faults are a major input for seismic hazard assessment and have been widely developed in several countries (such as USA, Japan, Italy and New Zealand). Despite the fact that Greece is the country of highest seismicity in Europe where almost 50% of the total seismic energy is realized, no official or unofficial active fault database exists. This is partly due to the fact that there are so many active faults that introduce a heavy workload, whereas several of them are also located offshore. This is particularly difficult for engineers since according to the latest the seismic building code that was released in 2000, no houses should be founded on active faults. more
Last week was really weird for earthquake geologists. We have seen one of the strongest earthquakes ever measured and another handfull of major events, all of them showing strike-slip fault movement. Manuel came up with the perfect description at his Planeet Aarde Geoblog: It’s strike-slip week on Planet Earth. more
I have made a video of our fieldwork in Greece, because I guess somehow we must communicate to the public what our work is about. Also, we must encourage young people to study geosciences. Well, now I concentrated on the second task: Hey, clever young people out there! Do you like science? Do you like nature? Are you interested in the big questions like “Where does this rock come from? When will the next earthquake happen? Where can I find groundwater? Why do volcanoes erupt? Which coast is threatened by Tsunamis?” Do you like to travel abroad, to work hard and to still have fun in the evenings? Do you want to meet nice people? If you answered “yes” to at least one of the above, think about studying geoscience. more
A postdoctoral position is open at ICIST-IST (Institute for Structural Engineering, Territory and Construction – Instituto Superior Tècnico) under the framework of the project FINDER – Fault Investigation with LiDAR for Earthquake Reassessment, PTDC/CTE-GIX/1138662009, funded by the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT/MCTES). more
