Dear fellows,
please stop littering the beaches all over the world. Seriously. I like beaches and I guess so do you, so please, take your trash with you. Last week I’ve been to Oman and worked in the Al Sawadi area, where you have a great coast line (which will be spoiled by a huge hotel-apartment-something complex, soon). The only thing was, you almost couldn’t see the sand because it was covered with oil cans, plastic bags, bottles, tires, more oil cans, buckets, toilets (!), packaging shit, cups, and oil cans. Please, stop that.
more
Klaus, Ben, Sascha and me went to visit our colleague Gösta at the GUtech in the Sultanate of Oman. We did some fieldwork for our project which deals with coastal changes. Parts of the Omani coast subside, others appear to be stable or are even uplifted. This might be due to large scaled crustal movements (the Makran Subduction zone is nearby) and/or regional effects. We are trying to find good proxies for reconstructing the Holocene sealevel and climate changes. Additionally, we need to get a grip on the neotectonics that affect the coastal areas. more
A very interesting paper by Oskin et al. (2012) published in Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6069/702.full) a few days ago shows how the M 7.2 Mexico earthquake in April, 2010, has changed the landscape down to a few cm. The El Mayor–Cucapah earthquake produced a 120-kilometer-long multifault rupture through northernmost Baja California, Mexico. more
Now that the abstract submission deadline has passed you might be interested in somehow paleoseismicity-related sessions at the EGU2012. I decided to group the session by topic and my choice is absolutely based on personal interests. Sorry if I don’t mention every earthquake-related session.
more
The sun dominated the geo-news this week. A very strong coronal mass ejection (or was it a sunquake…?) occured and hit Earth’s magnetic field on 24 January. A geomagnetic storm (Kp=5) lead to intense and beautiful northern lights around the Arctic Circle. The web is full of great images, the best ones that I came across can be found here at spaceweather and at National Geographic. more
The University of Oklahoma has set up a “Global Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library“. Once registered, users may upload and geotag their (geological) field photos. Additionally, you can provide information on the geology/geomorphology. This could become a nice database if more people start uploading their images. Imagine you have a braided river system and you can compare different years and seasons. It’s up to you if you want to make your pictures public or if you prefer to keep them private.
more
Recently, scientists from Switzerland came up with the news that fractured bedrock might amplify earthquake shaking. The say they observed an increase by factor 10, which seems huge. I knew amplifying by sediment basins, but this is new to me.
100 years ago on 6 January, Alfred Wegener presented his continental drift theory for the first time. The Blogosphere was full with articles, among them: more
This beautiful, isolated rock stands in the Alkyonides Gulf, the northwestern part of the Gulf of Corinth. It has some beautiful notches, which indicate recent uplift. It is situated right on the footwall of an active fault, which was activated during the 1981 earthquake sequence. It is not so easy to use those notches as sea level indicators or for measuring tectonic movements if both effects have to be taken into account. The fault has a huge throw and a beautiful scarp (limestone) with lots of slickensides. One of my favourite places in Greece. Well, the entire Perachora peninsula is worth a visit – an earthquake geologist’s Disney Land!
more
Today is the 200th anniversary of the first event of the New Madrid Earthquake Series. There’s still an open debate on magnitudes, intensities, causative faults, recurrence intervalls and the implication for seismic hazard. Several websites and blogs have nice posts, among them:
more
A small comfort for all those who have missed the AGU2011 fall meeting (and so did I) might be that some sessions are now available on video for free. The AGU session on demand page has lots of videos, among them four sessions on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. So if you’re ready for ~8 hrs of earthquake talks, you should definitely have a look.
