A team of Ecuadorian and French geologists has started to map the coseismic effects of the M7.8 earthquake that hit Ecuador on 16 April, 2016. The quake occurred at a depth of about 20 km and caused more than 600 fatalities, mainly in the area near Muisne. Two strong aftershocks of M6.7 and M6.8 shook the epicentral area on 18 May, among hundreds of smaller shocks that were recorded. The mapping is coordinated by the Instituto Geofísico. First results show earthquake environmental effects like liquefaction, mud venting, and surface cracks. Some impressions from the field work can be found here:
http://www.igepn.edu.ec/servicios/noticias/1332-levantamiento-geologico-de-los-efectos-del-sismo-del-16-de-abril-en-la-zona-entre-esmeraldas-y-manta
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Today’s paper round-up covers a very wide spectrum of earthquake related studies. We have work on tsunamis, turbidites, and lake paleoseismology, paleoseismological data from Asia, Archaeoseismology, mud volcanoes, the ESI-2007 scale, and an explanation on what the rise of the Andes is driven by. Enjoy reading!
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On 16 April an earthquake of magnitude Mw7.0 hit the district of Kumamoto, Kyushu Island, Japan. The quake was preceeded by a Mw6.1 foreshock one day before. It occurred on the ENE striking, right lateral Futagawa-Hinagu fault zone. Our colleague Koji Okumura from Hiroshima University has prepared a short report on this surface-rupturing event. Download the report here (PDF, 612 kb). The report will be continuously revised and corrected, so check for regular updates. Thanks Koji for providing this summary!
This is the April edition of my paper round-up. Today I recommend papers on high-resolution topography data, fault mechanics, earthquake environmental/archaeological effects (liquefaction, rotated objects, landslides), Quaternary dating, a fault database for Asia, and tectonics of New Zealand and Martinique. Enjoy! more
The 4th International Colloquium on Historical Earthquakes and Macroseismology will be held from 2-3 May, 2016, in Vienna, Austria. Attendance is free of charge and registration is possible until 31 March. The meeting is organised by Christa Hammerl and Wolfgang Lenhardt and will be hosted at the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik. The exciting program is available now for download: 2nd circular (PDF, 500 kb).
Our colleagues Stéphane Baize and Oona Scotti from the French IRSN finished a report on the 2014 Napa Earthquake: Post-seismic survey report, with special focus on surface faulting. On 24 August 2014, an earthquake of magnitude Mw6 occurred on the West Napa Fault in shallow depth. The quake caused significant damage, an interesting pattern of surface ruptures, and the immediate attention of hundreds of geologists. The primary and secondary effects were mapped only hours after the event, which turned out to be extremely important – a large amount of afterslip was recorded in the following days. The earthquake was not only recorded by a huge seismometer network, but the ground motion was also captured by GPS sensors and InSAR images. The new IRSN report is especially concerned with the surface faulting hazard, since this agency is responsible for the safety of nuclear installations in France. more
Plenty of paleoseismology papers have been published in late 2015 and early 2016 already! Especially those on the Gorkha earthquake made it to the news (Science and NatureGeoscience), but there is much more to discover. Check them out and – as always – tell us what we’ve missed. more
Dear friends and colleagues,
The 7th International Workshop on Paleoseismology, Active Tectonics, and Archaeoseismology (PATA Days) will be held in the USA from 30 May – 03 June, 2016. The workshop is sponsored by the INQUA-TERPRO Commission and mainly organized by James McCalpin. The workshop includes several excursions and we welcome presentations on a broad list of topics related to seismic hazards and active tectonics: more
This is this year’s last issue of my paper round-up, and it includes some pretty interesting stuff. Our Greek colleagues published a report on the liquefaction caused by the 2014 Lefkada earthquakes, just in time with the recent earthquake that hit more or less the same area again (Papathanassiou et al., and see earlier posts here). Long et al. published a paper on iceberg-induced tsunamis, found in the sedimentary record – that’s a great story, isn’t it? Jacobson’s PhD on the Lake Heron Fault (NZ) is an interesting read, and Iván Sunyol’s paper on paleoseismological trenches in Mexico is especially interesting for those who attended the 2012 Morelia meeting. Zhou et al. come up with a great dataset of Pléiades imagery from the El Mayor-Cucapah Quake, Calais et al. have a close look on the northeastern Caribbean, and finally, Kufner et al.’s paper is about the collision between India and Asia deep below the Pamir and Hindu Kush.
Enjoy reading and Merry Christmas!
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Marta Ferrater from the Universitat de Barcelona did a lot of research on the Alhama de Murcia Fault. Her most recent paper deals with how good we can measure lateral offsets along faults which move only very slowly. This is probably of great interest for many people working on slow faults, so I am glad that she agreed to write the following guest post: more
