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
Our colleague Efthymios Lekkas kindly uploaded a new report on the recent South Lefkada Earthquake. If you can read Greek, have a look at this website: http://www.edcm.edu.gr/. Alternatively, you can download the slideshow from his personal website here as a PDF: http://www.elekkas.gr/images/stories/Frontpage/2015_Lefkada/lefkada2015.pdf
The PDF contains info on the tectonic setting, historical and instrumental seismicity, followed by a collection of the earthquake (environmental) effects. more
On 17 November, 2015, a MW6.4 strike-slip earthquake occurred in Lefkada Island, Greece. Lefkada is close to the Cephalonia Transform Fault and has repeatedly experienced strong shaking in the past. The most recent event caused two fatalitites, some damage, and resulted in widespread environmental earthquake effects (EEE). A team of scientists visited the epicentral area after the quake and recorded the damage and the EEEs. They wrote a preliminary report, which can be downloaded here: Lefkada 17 Nov 2015 earthquake report (PDF, 3.9MB).
They document mass movements, damage to buildings, and present first data from seismology, GPS and satellite geodesy.
Thanks to George for sending us the report!
We published a new study dealing with paleoseismological work on the Milesi Fault near Athens, Greece. A slip rate was estimated based on GIS work, mapping, and trenching. Four surface-rupturing earthquakes in the last 4-6 ka were found, and we estimate magnitudes of around M6.2. With these input parameters, we developed a seismic hazard scenario that also takes into account site effects. Our results show that the official seismic hazard zonation in Greece, which is based on instrumental and historical records, contradicts geological data. We also show that extension in this region is not only confined to the Southern Evoikos Gulf graben system, but a significant amount of extension is accommodated by active faults closer to Athens. more
A shallow Mw6.5 earthquake hit western Greece today in the morning. The quake had a right-lateral strike-slip mechanism and occurred at the Cephalonia transform, offshore Levkada. Two people died and some damage to buildings was reported. The event caused environmental earthquake effects (EEEs), namely widespread rockfalls that produced an amazing dust cloud. The blog North Ithaca has some great pictures of collapsed walls, damage to buildings and the dust cloud.
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RWTH Aachen University seeks, as soon as possible,
a geoscientist (f/m) with a background in neotectonics, GIS and Remote Sensing skills for a PhD position in the research project ALMOND („Albania and Montenegro Neotectonic Deformation“). This project is a collaboration between RWTH Aachen University and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
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The first part of my report on the field work that I did in Kazakhstan this year focussed on the stuff we had done in the South. Here is part II which is all about the Dzhungarian Fault. You’ve never heard about this fault? That’s easily possible. There are only very few papers that deal with this fault. In the 1960s Soviet geologist V.S. Voytovich published results from extensive field work on this fault (Voytovich, 1965; 1969). 40-50 years later a few studies on geodesy and geodynamics covered the broader study area and Shen et al. (2003) did some work in the Chinese part of the fault, but it took until 2013 before Campbell et al. revisited the Kazakh side and came up with new field data. They focussed on the tectonic geomorphology of this structure and determined a slip rate. Given this little amount of research done one would assume that the fault is not very large and of minor importance, but the opposite is true. The fault is around 300 km long in its Kazakh section and probably twice as long in total! more
A few days ago, SRL published a special issue on the Gorkha earthquakes with lots of interesting papers. I especially like the work of Angster et al. with their impressive photos of the earthquake ground effects. Make sure to download the electronic supplement to this article!
Besides this special issue, a good number of other interesting papers have been published recently on paleoseismicity, active tectonics, seismic hazard, and tsunamis. Among them is Andi’s work on the Ejina basin and Serva et al. with a introduction of using the ESI scale for earthquake hazard assessments. Enjoy reading! more
