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Two articles dealing with induced (or triggered?) seismicity caught my attention last week. Time came up with a report about “The Seismic Link Between Fracking and Earthquakes“. New studies on that topic had been presented at the SSA annual meeting in Alaska. Basically it’s now possible to link two phenomena: a) The huge increase in shale gas and oil development in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Kansas during the last few years; and b) the huge increase in earthquake activity in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Kansas during the last few years. more

On 4 April, 2010, the El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake occurred in NW Baja California, Mexico. It was magnitude 7.2 strike-slip event, and the (surface) ruptures were distributed over a set of faults in the area, among them the Laguna Salada Fault. The epicentral area was under surveillance by a technique similar to DInSAR –  Uninhabited Aerial
Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR). Comparison of images from before and after the M7.2 earthquake revealed that slip occurred not only in the epicentral area and at the Laguna Salada Fault, but also on faults to the north. These findings were recently published by Donnellan et al. (2014). more

“Doggerland” refers to a drowned landscape located where the North Sea stretches today. Fishermen have found numerous archaeological artifacts when fishing between the coasts of UK and Denmark/Germany (more or less), which led to the idea that an ancient culture lived in this area when the sea level was lower some thousands of years ago. Archaeological studies and modelling confirmed this hypothesis (e.g., see Coles, 2000 or see this paper with a really cool title: White, 2006). Slowly rising sea levels and/or land subsidence forced our ancestors to move to higher grounds and to finally give up Doggerland at all around 8 ka ago. Jon Hill and his co-authors now added some more spice to this story. At the EGU they presented modelling data which imply that the Storegga tsunami over-ran the remaining islands, and that the end of Doggerland was sudden. more

I still try to catch up with all the amazing new stories on earthquakes, tsunamis and paleoseismology that made it to the media last week. Here is #2 on a reviewed tsunami database for Australia.  more

Vanja Kastelic and Michele M. C. Carafa (INGV, L’Aquila, Italy) recently published an article in the Bollettino di Geofisica Teorica e Applicata (an international journal of Earth sciences) entitled “Earthquake rates inferred from active faults and geodynamics: the case of the External Dinarides.” This article covers the area affected by the earthquake of Ml 4.7 (Mw 4.6) occurred on April 22, 2014.

The same authors also wrote a brief seismotectonic report dealing with such an earthquake. They share the report with us under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A quick seismotectonic report for the 22 April 2014 (Mw=4.6) earthquake in SW Slovenia

Vanja Kastelic¹ and Michele M. C. Carafa¹

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Dear friends and colleagues,

We are all looking forward to the 5th PATA Days meeting! Don’t forget to register for this conference in Busan, Korea. The meeting will take place from 21-27 September and all information can be found at http://www.pata-days.org.

The second circular is out now, please download the pdf here (PDF, 800 kb). more

If you can’t find funding for attending the 5th Pata-Days in Busan, Korea, there is still the chance to see and present some good research on earthquake geology in Germany. There will be a session Active Tectonics and Earthquake Geology at the GeoFrankfurt 2014 meeting in late September, so don’t miss the deadline:

Dear colleagues,

Within the frame of the conference GeoFrankfurt 2014 we are organizing a session on Active Tectonics and Earthquake Geology (B13). The conference is held at the Goethe Universität at Frankfurt, 21-24 September 2014.

Conveners: Ioannis Koukouvelas, Kurt Decker and Klaus Reicherter

Deadline for abstract submission: 25 April, 2014 more

I added a couple of new papers to my literature collection last week. The studies deal with trenching in Iran and in China, tsunami research in Japan, Malta and Thailand, with archaeoseismology in Italy, and with seismic hazard of old oceanic lithosphere. Enjoy reading! more

At the end of last year, NHESS published a Special Issue on marine and lake paleoseismology. The volume 154 is an outcome of the ESF meeting Submarine Paleoseismology: The Offshore Search of Large Holocene Earthquakes that was held in
Austria in September, 2010. Guest editors are D. Pantosti, E. Gràcia, G. Lamarche, and H. Nelson. The Special Issue is open access and contains 16 research papers on all kinds of research on paleoseismology offshore. Some of the papers have been published as early as 2012, but others came out few weeks ago. more