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Dear Colleagues and Friends,

we are pleased to announce that the 6^th  INQUA International Workshop on Active Tectonics, Paleoseismology and Archeoseismology will be held in Pescina (Abruzzo, Central Italy) in the period 19 – 24 April 2015.

We invite all scientists in the fields of earthquake geology, paleoseismology, archeoseismology, tsunami studies, earthquake engineering, seismic hazard assessment to join this event.

We will celebrate the centenary of the 1915 M7 Fucino earthquake, that has been one of the most devastating earthquakes occurred in the Apennines. The earthquake produced extensive surface faulting and left a strong imprint in the landscape giving rise to an incredibly rich seismological, geological and paleoseismological amount of studies in the last century.

Scientific sessions will be attended in the unique historical and cultural atmosphere of the Pescina village, followed by 2 days-field trip in the Fucino and L’Aquila area, retracing on the field the path of faults, landscapes, castles and ancient settlements. Moreover, a pre-congress archaeoseismic tour in Rome will be offered to all the participants.

Soon a specific website dedicated to this event will be available, where you will find more detailed and updated information, including information on the Participation, Travel Grants and Scientific Programme.

The Fucino 2015 Organizing Committee 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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I came across several interesting papers on paleoseismology and related disciplines, most of them published recently. They deal with “classical” paleoseismology, with earthquake environmental effects like coseismic landslides and tsunamis, and also with geomorphological indicators for active faulting. Let me know if I missed some! more

A team of geologists mapped the earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) of the two M6+ events that occurred at the Greek Island of Cephalonia on 26 January and 3 February, 2014. G. Papathanassiou, A. Ganas, S. Valkaniotis, M. Papanikolaou and S. Pavlides participated in these field campaigns. George Papathanassiou sent me the preliminary report today. The team found widespread evidence for “liquefaction, road-fill failures, rock falls, small landslides and stonewall failures“. more

On 26 January and 3 February, two strong and shallow earthquakes of magnitude 6+ occured at the island of Kefalonia/Cephalonia in Western Greece. The events caused intense damage to buildings and infrastructure. A team of EERI (Earthquake Engineering Research Institute) scientists went to the island to map these kind of damages. Earthquake Environmental Effects (EEE) like rockfalls, landslides, and lateral spreading were also caused by the events. George Papathanassiou and his colleagues mapped these features and sent me the following photos from Lixouri. 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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Typhoon Haiyan was among the strongest storms ever recorded and likely the strongest one to make landfall in historical times. This mega storm hit the Philippines with windspeeds of more than 300 km/h. It caused thousands of fatalities, widespread flooding and devastation especially in its direct path. NASA’s Terra satellite is equipped with the ASTER sensor. This sensor is perfect for producing false color images of land cover and vegetation. In this image series it becomes clear that typhoon Haiyan destroyed a significant part of the vegetation around Tacloban. 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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On 15 October, 2013 a shallow Mw7.1 earthquake occured in Bohol, Philippines. The quake caused more than 200 fatalities and severe damages. Instrumental intensities of VIII – IX were recorded and the USGS estimates the maximum slip to be around 120 cm. Stéphane Baize from the French IRSN created a report not only on the seismological and tectonic background of the earthquake, but also on the earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) that were caused by the event. more

After the strong earthquake in Pakistan a good part of the media coverage was about the fascinating story of the new island that emerged off Gwadar. While this was really amazing I think now it’s time to think about the consequences of the quake itself. We have seen a shallow M7.7 event that produced severe shaking across a large area. Peak ground acceleration exceeded 1 g in the 0.3 s period and was still intense in longer periods. 515 people have reportedly been killed and more than 100,000 are homeless. more