The Accredtionary Wedge #30 blog carnival hosted by Mountain Beltway came up with a tasting idea in January: The Geological Bake Sale. Explore and enjoy thematic food like the moon surface cake, the pillow lava bread and the debris flow vegetables. If you create a sweet fault or a tasty trench, we promise to publish it on paleoseismicity.org.  more

Oxford University Press is currently selling selected books with up to 75% off. The promotion covers dozens of books, among them titles on Archeology, GIS and Geography.

Most titles are related to human sciences, but there might be something interesting for paleoseismologists and earthquake geologists, too. more

The California Geological Survey provides a great online-tool for geoscientist: A fault map of California (Alquist-Priolo-Fault-Zone with all datasets available in PDF and GIS format for free! Start here.

A volunteer panel that assesses earthquake risks in Utah said it examined nearly 130 school buildings in the state and found more than half fail to meet federal earthquake safety guidelines. Bad news from here.

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The Alaska Science Center is advertising five new permanent research geologist positions.  Applications are open between December 1, 2010 and February 15, 2011, and that selection will occur during late spring of 2011. More information on their homepage, including the following announcement:

“This hiring initiative inaugurates a team approach to geologic research in Alaska (Photo gallery). The five positions will together make up a working group that will respond to the USGS’ ongoing need for research in framework geology of the 49th state.  Project work is expected to support a broad range of research topics related to crustal evolution and surficial processes.  We expect projects will involve collaboration with researchers from other USGS offices, federal agencies, state agencies, and academia.
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The deadline of the International Workshop on Advanced Ground Penetrating Radar (IWAGPR) to be held in Aachen, June 2011 has been extended to 28 February:

“Dear Colleagues,

Due to many requests for extension, we have extended the deadline for submitting an extended abstract (camera ready paper, 4-6 pages) for IWAGPR2011 to February 28, 2011.
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The L’Aquila earthquake from 6 April, 2009 caused more than 308 fatalities and destroyed about 15,000 buildings. A new initiative set up by the British architect Barnaby Gunning aims on creating a 3D model of the destroyed city in its present state with SketchUp for GoogleEarth. The model will be used for “creating a valuable resourcef for masterplanning the reconstruction”, Gunning states on the project’s homepage. more

On Wednesday night the Etna on Sicily showed strombolian activity and glowing lava flows were visible from Catania. Don’t miss the great photos here and the webcam of the INGV and EtnaTrekking. This is the first larger eruption since May 2008 and surely one of the most beautiful ones. News coverage with more great videos here.

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Dear Researchers and Other Interested Parties!

We invite you to submit an abstract to the special session “Archeoseismology: Learning about Ancient Earthquakes from the Archeological Record” of the Seismological Society of America Annual meeting to be held in Memphis, TN, April 13-15th. This is a reminder that the abstract deadline for the 2011 SSA annual meeting is 5 PM PST on 11 January.

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On 4 January, 2011 a partial solar eclipse was visible in Central Europe (up to 80% coverage of the sun).  Werner Kraus shot some nice photos through a number of filters, but the best picture surely has been made by Thierry Legault from Muscat, Oman – the partial eclipse with the ISS transiting! Incredible.

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The online science magazine “spektrumdirekt” reports on the archeoseismological and paleoseismological studies in Baelo Claudia, Southern Spain. The article focusses on tsunami hazard in the Mediterranean region and the two earthquakes that devastated the Roman town of Baelo Claudia hundreds of years ago. more