The 2nd edition of “Tsunamiites – Features and Implications” has just been published by Elsevier. It collects 21 chapters on the sedimentology of tsunamis, written by a team of international scientists. The new edition (1st edition was published in 2008) also includes lessons learned from recent events such as the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The 482-pages book was edited by Tsunemasa Shiki, Yoshinobu Tsuji, Teiji Yamazaki, and Futoshi Nanayama.
In a recent post on this forum, Angela Landgraf shared a digest of the long and winding road having led to the publication of Seismicity, Fault Rupture and Earthquake Hazards in Slowly Deforming Regions. Reading this post in the midst of wrapping up the edition of our Minoan Earthquakes volume, I could only sympathize with her concerns and hopes for the future of edited books at a time when impact factors and other author-level metrics all too often dictate academic choices.
Four years and a half (!) after the Out of Rubble Leuven workshop (29-30 November 2012), we are proud to announce the publication of Minoan Earthquakes: Breaking the Myth through Interdisciplinarity at Leuven University Press. Reasons for such delay are manifold but chief among them is our editorial choice of producing a coherent volume that might be used as an up-to-date toolbox for readers interested in the broader field of archaeoseismology – not just Minoan archaeoseismology – and its (necessary) relationship to other, better established, disciplines. This choice is reflected by the structure of the book and breadth of topics covered by its authors, ranging from seismology, paleoseismology, geophysics, architecture, engineering and, of course, Minoan archaeology. Although we will ultimately leave readers to judge how successful we were in this endeavor, we are encouraged by Iain Stewart’s appreciation of the volume: more
Our colleague Åke Fagereng from Cardiff University will edit a textbook on problems in structural geology and tectonics together with Soumyajit Mukherjee and Andrea Billi. The editors invite contributions from the tectonics community. Perhaps you have a nice active tectonics exercise to share? Here is the announcement: more
Earthquake Environmental Effects (EEE) have proven to be valuable for describing past earthquakes and their geological imprints. The ESI2007 is a relatively new intensity scale dedicated to such effects, but also integrating traditional macroseismic scales. Examples of ESI2007 intensities assigned to large earthquakes are being collected in the EEE web catalogue hosted by the ISPRA and ESI2007-related work is conducted in the framework of INQUA.
Another milestone now has been achieved with the ISPRA volume “Earthquake Environmental Effect for seismic hazard assessment: the ESI intensity scale and the EEE Catalogue”. This book is now available online here. It contains updates on the ESI2007, examples of applications, documentation of the EEE Android App, a huge reference list and, most importantly, the ESI2007 description in ten languages: more
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Makran Earthquake and Tsunami. On 27 November, 1945, an earthquake of magnitude Mw8.1 occurred at the Makran Subduction Zone offshore Pakistan. A large tsunami was triggered that reached the coasts of Pakistan, Iran, India, and Oman. The quake and the waves left approx. 4,000 people dead. A new book collects interviews with survivors. The book has been published by the UNESCO through its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and is available for free download here. more
Together with Prof. Zvi Garfunkel and Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham, I am a co-editor of this book. The book focuses on various aspects of the fault system, from geophysics, to tectonics, paleolimnology, hydrology, seismicity, and PALEOSEISMICITY. Most relevant to this blog are the papers by Agnon and by Marco & Klinger.
Shmulik Marco and Yann Klinger review in a new light the on-fault paleoseismic studies carried out along the DST.
Amotz Agnon delves into the off-fault seismite archives (lake, cave).
Spain may not be as famous for its earthquakes as Greece, Turkey or Italy, but significant events do shake the western part of the Mediterranean, too. Numerous paleoseismological and archaeoseismological studies as well as research on historical quakes have been undertaken on the Iberian peninsula. A new book was now published by the IGME which collects all the information currently available on the geological effects of earthquakes in Spain. The book is in Spanish and available for free download here:
Intraplate earthquakes are those that occur far away from plate boundaries in what is often also referred to as slowly deforming regions or stable continental regions (SCR). Seismicity there is comparably low and earthquake recurrence intervals can easily exceed thousands of years for individual faults. However, intraplate quakes do account for a significant number of earthquake fatalities and killed more people than those that happened at plate boundaries during the last 100 years (England & Jackson , 2011). A new book has been published a few days ago, dedicated to summarizing our knowledge of these seismic events. more
A new book on paleoseismology, archaeoseismology and earthquakes on the Iranian Plateau has been published in the Developments in Earth Surface Processes series. Volume 17 is dedicated to Earthquakes and Coseismic Surface Faulting on the Iranian Plateau A Historical, Social and Physical Approach, and it is authored by Manuel Berberian. The book not only covers physical processes related to earthquakes in Iran like coseismic offsets, archaeoseismological effects, and geomorphological evidence, but its first part is all about Earthquake Hazard Warning in Oral Tradition and Literature on the Iranian Plateau. The volume comes with a foreword by Robert Yeats and Roger Bilham. Table of contents: