Summer time is publishing time! Lots of new papers are out, today we have
Enjoy reading and tell us if something is missing!
At the XIX INQUA congress in Japan I had the chance to see the surface ruptures of the 1891 Nobi earthquake during the mid-congress excursion M-2. This quake caused huge damage, but more interestingly for me, it produced amazing surface ruptures which are preserved even more than a hundred years after the event. The M7.5-M8 quake occurred in a mountainous area and was mainly strike-slip (more than 8 m!), but significant vertical uplift was found at step-overs. In 1991, the wonderful Neodani Fault Museum opened to the public, its main attraction being a paleoseismological trench exhibiting more than 5 m of vertical offset! Simply astonishing. Thanks to Atsumasa Okada, Heitaro Kaneda and Keitaro for this great excursion! more
Great news from Italy – A new version of the Database of Individual Seismogenic Sources (DISS) is now online! A huge amount of work went into this latest release which has several important updates and a fantastic new amount of data. Our colleague Umberto Fracassi sent me the following description of the new features:
The EGU2015 will be held from 12 – 17 April in Vienna, but the abstract deadline is much closer: Day after tomorrow, 7 January! So if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to have a look at paleoseismology-related sessions at EGU: more
The EEE Metrics Project & IFG Paleoseismology and Active Tectonics will host two paleoseismology sessions at the XIX INQUA 2015 in Japan. The congress will be held in Nagoya from 27 July – 2 August. Deadline for abstract submission and travel grant application is 20 December, 2014, deadline for early bird registration is 28 February 2015. more
The 2011 Christchurch earthquake series had severe consequences and surprised scientists for many reasons. Ground motions were extremely strong despite the relative moderate magnitudes of the quakes (MW 5.3-7.1). The events happened on a system of hitherto unknown faults, some of which are located directly below Christchurch. Earthquake environmental effects (EEE), especially liquefaction, were intense and widespread. It turned out that subsequent quakes reactivated the same feeder dikes of sand blows, showing that saturated sediments are susceptible of liquefaction no matter if they had been liquefied recently (also see the paper of Quigley et al. (2013) on the liquefaction effects). Another stunning lesson was the occurrence of intense rockfall in the vicinity of Christchurch. In a recently published study, Mackey and Quigley (2014) dated rockfall boulders with 3He and show that they allow to estimate the recurrence intervall of local seismic events like the 2011 series. This works is a very interesting way to use EEE for paleo-earthquake studies. more
In 2013 the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) –www.globalquakemodel.org – published seven Requests for Proposal covering topics related to the compilation of basic datasets as well as the creation and calculation of an updated probabilistic seismic hazard input model for South America. This initiative is now named the South America Risk Assessment Project (SARA).
Five consortia of South American researchers responded to this request and submitted proposals for the Hazard Component of SARA. These proposals has been recently endorsed by GEM and will constitute different datasets or topic layers for SARA. They include databases on historical and instrumental seismicity, hazardous faults (Quaternary deformation), tectonic geodesy and ground motions. more
During the last three weeks I have been to Kazakhstan for paleoseismological field work and to summarize this journey: It was amazing! The trip was part of the Earthquakes without Frontiers project (EwF). This research project is funded by NERC and ESRC and aims on increasing the knowledge on earthquake hazards in Central Asia. The field work was lead by Richard Walker and scientists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the UK had a close look at fault scarps in the easternmost parts of the country. Our aim was to determine the slip rates of some of the longest and most prominent thrust and strike-slip faults in the area. more
Pa·le·o·seis·mic·i·ty [ pālē·ə·sīz·mĭs′ĭ·tē ] noun, plural -ties. Ancient earthquake activity.
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