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On 26 October two shallow normal faulting earthquakes occurred in Central Italy, very close to the epicentre of the Amatrice Earthquake from earlier this year. The first quake reached a magnitude of M5.5 and was followed by a M6.1 just two hours later. The events caused serious damage (see here for a video and some images), but luckily only one person died as most people had left their houses after the first moderate shock. This could have turned out much worse. Apparently the quakes at least partly filled the gap between the 1997 Colfiorito events and the 2016 Amatrice Earthquake. more

The first joint assembly of the Tectonic Studies Group (TSG), Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group (VMSG), and British Geophysical Association (BGA) will be held at the University of Liverpool from 4-6 January, 2017. Among the many interesting sessions the following one will be of special interest for … well … us:
S.12 – Earthquakes, palaeoseismology, and rates of fault slip: from milliseconds to millions of years. The session is chaired by Laura Gregory, Ed Garett, and Luke Wedmore, deadline for abstracts is 5 November. more

The EMERGEO Working Group has conducted extensive field work after the 24 August 2016 Amatrice Earthquake in Italy and put together a report on the coseismic effects. The report is in English and can be downloaded from the INGV earthquake Blog here: PDF (6.1 mb)

The report includes data on environmental earthquake effects like surface ruptures, fractures, landslides, and rockfalls. More than 2400 data points have been collected.

Please cite the report as follows:

• EMERGEO Working Group (2016). The 24 August 2016 Amatrice Earthquake: Coseismic Effects. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.61568

The EMERGEO Working Group consists of Pucci S., De Martini P.M., Nappi R., Pantosti D., Civico R., Ricci T., Moro M., Cinti F., Brunori C.A., Di Naccio D., Sapia V., De Ritis R., Gori S., Falcucci E., Caciagli M., Pinzi S., Villani F., Gaudiosi G., Burrato P., Vannoli P., Kastelic V., Montone P., Carafa M., Patera A., Vallone R. (all INGV) and Saroli M., Lo Sardo L., Lancia M. (University of Cassino and southern Lazio).

Thanks to Francesca Cinti for pointing me to this!

A special session on the Amatrice Earthquake of 24 August in Italy was held at the Congress of the Geological Society of Italy (Naples, 7 September, 2016). A video of the entire session is now available online. Although the talks are in Italian, it is easy to understand and the slides tell the story.

See the full video here: more

There will be a Special Session on the Amatrice Earthquake of 24 August at the Congresso Società Geologica Italiana, 7 September, 2016, in Napoli. See http://www.sginapoli2016.it/home/ for the congress details.

Session programme:

Il terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016 7 settembre 2016, ore 20.00, Aula tbd

Chairmen: Carlo Doglioni, Alessandro Maria Michetti

• 20.00 – INGV Amatrice working group : La sequenza sismica di Amatrice 2016
• 20.10 – Bonano M., Castaldo R., Casu F., De Luca C., De Novellis V., Lanari R., Manunta M., Manzo M., Pepe A., Pepe S., Tizzani P., Zinno I. : Deformazione superficiale associata al terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016: primi risultati da interferometria radar dallo spazio
• 20.20 – Lavecchia G., Brozzetti F., Boncio P., de Nardis, Cirillo, Ferrarini: controllo strutturale sulla sequenza sismica di Accumoli 2016 – analisi preliminare
• 20.30 – Blumetti A.M., Bonadeo L., Brunamonte F., Comerci V., Cowie P., Di Manna P., Ferrario M.F., Faure Walker J., Frigerio C., Fumanti F., Gregory L., Guerrieri L., Iezzi F., Livio F., McCaffrey K., Michetti A.M., Mildon Z., Phillips R., Piccardi L., Pompili R., Rhodes E., Roberts G., Vittori E., Walters R.J., Wedmore L., Wilkinson M. : Rotture al suolo ed effetti ambientali associati al terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016: risultati preliminari e work in progress.
• 20.40 – Galli P. et al. : Distribuzione dell’intensità macrosismica e implicazioni sismotettoniche del terremoto del centro Italia del 24 agosto 2016:
• 20.50 – Amanti M. : Eventi franosi nell’area epicentrale del terremoto di Amatrice.

The Chilik-Chon Kemin Fault Zone is a major left-lateral strike-slip fault zone in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, just a few tens of kilometres east of Almaty and north of Lake Issyk Kul. It has seen one of the largest continental earthquakes ever recorded in 1889, with an estimated magnitude of ~M8.3. In July and August I had the chance to visit this fault zone for two weeks together with Angela Landgraf from Potsdam and Aidyn Mukambaev from the National Data Centre, thanks to a travel grant from COMET (thanks so much, COMET!) and with support from the EwF Project. We wanted to find out more details about the tectonic geomorphology of this fault zone and we wanted to study the slip rate and earthquake recurrence intervals. So we took our drone, shovels and picks and set off for a field trip into the mountainous wilderness. Since I will leave for another field trip to Kazakhstan (Dzhungarian Fault) tomorrow, I will leave you with some impressions from our field work and provide more information once the paper is published…
Enjoy!  more

The geometry, length, and displacement of fault ruptures that breach the surface provide critical information on the behavior of faults during seismic events (coseismic deformation), and on their long-term behavior. The study of coseismic fault ruptures has concentrated almost exclusively along continental faults, while submarine studies have been scarce, and only a few provided quantitative constraints in parameters such as fault displacement (e.g., Tohoku Earthquake). In addition to represent more than two thirds of the Earth’s seismicity, submarine faults can also be associated with tsunamis, potentially increasing the seismic hazard that these structures pose.

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Today’s paper round-up is rather short. Maybe this is due to the start of the field work season and many editors being involved in field research, maybe it’s just holiday season. Maybe I’ve missed some papers because I have been in the field, too. However, there are some very interesting studies, especially concerning tsunamis. Enjoy reading and please tell me what I’ve missed in the comments.

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It’s June and it’s time for a new paper round-up, isn’t it? When I compiled the list during the past weeks I already realized that there’s a lot of new literature out there, and I guess this month’s post is probably the longest list we’ve ever had – 21 articles! So here are the latest papers on paleoseismology, tsunamis (maaaany tsunami papers this time), and active tectonics. As always: Any suggestions are highly appreciated. Enjoy reading!

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Some weeks ago we published a new study on the classification of earthquake-induced landslide event sizes based on seismotectonic, topographic, climatic and geologic factors. Our idea was that this classification could be used to help improve seismic hazard assessment by contributing to a better prediction of landslide hazards induced by an earthquake when the geologic, topographic and climatic context is well defined. Possible applications could be the short-term prediction right after an earthquake or scenario modeling, e.g. for critical infrastructure. Since earthquake triggered landslide event sizes are also an important proxy for the estimation of magnitude and intensity of past earthquakes, I thought our study might be interesting for the paleoseismicity community as well, and so I put together a brief summary.

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