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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

After the 1^st Iberfault meeting in 2010, the 2^nd meeting will take place in Lorca, Spain from 22-24 October, 2014. Any research on active tectonics and paleoseismology in Iberia is welcome, a special focus will be set on the QUAFI database. The conference will be organized by José Martinez Díaz (UCM), Eulàlia Masana (UB) and Miguel A. Rodríguez (IGME). Lorca became famous in 2011 when a shallow M_W5.1 earthquake killed 9 people and caused severe damages in the city (there is an ongoing discussion whether or not groundwater lowering for irrigation during the last decades has caused, triggered, or influenced the quake).

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A special issue on “Geology and Archaeology of Earthquakes” has currently been published in Cuaternario y Geomorfología (Quaternary and Geomoprhology, ISSN: 0214-1744), which is the official journal of the Spanish Quaternary Union (AEQUA) and the Spanish Geomorphological Society (SEG): Vol 27, No 3-4 (2013) – Geología y Arqueología de Terremotos. The issue includes an introduction and ten research papers on earthquake geology and archaeoseismology of the Iberian Peninsula. Most papers are in English, few in Spanish. more

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

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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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

A course on Paleoseismology and Archeoseismology will be held at the Annual Meeting of the Union Geofisica Mexicana on 2 and 3 November 2013. The course will be coordinated by Víctor Hugo Garduño. Also, we would like to advertise three special sessions on paleoseismology, faults, and active tectonics at the same meeting:

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This is a nice and short video performed by 9-10 year old kids and conducted by two teachers of the School “Escuelas Francesas” located at Sevilla (Spain), and in collaboration with our Spanish colleagues Miguel, Jorge and Pablo. The kids read about our work on earthquake effects on archaeological sites and they have reproduced in a easy way the main EAEs in the Roman buildings of Baelo Claudia: the aqueduct, the drop of the key stone in arches and oriented fallen columns. (EAE: Earthquake Archaeological Effect; see Rodríguez-Pacua et al., 2011). more