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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

Delphi is one of the most impressive places I’ve ever seen. The landscape is just breathtaking – the archaeological site is situated on the southern flank of the Parnassus Mountains, dominating the entire valley. You can see the Gulf of Corinth right from the temples, and due to the steep slope you feel like Delphi is built on many floors with the stadium being the roof. The oracle might be related to faults under the temple; some authors speculate that gas vents (ethane?) caused hallucinations of the priest, which were interpreted as the oracle. Another nice thing is that you can see the archaeoseismological damage from strong historical earthquakes everywhere – cracks, rotated and tilted walls, corner break-outs, dropped keystones in arches and so on. more

Here’s the Wednesday Geology Picture as part of Evelyn’s meme. Close to the Arches National Park in Utah there is Potash, a bizarre place with saltworks that shimmer in incredible colours. Here, salt is leached from the underground and then dried in the sun. The roads that lead to the Dead Horse State Park have to cross little creeks at times, where the salt precipitated and formed glittering crystals. I had the opportunity to do some research in that area with my great colleagues Heijn and Michael in May this year. more

It seems like everyone is at the AGU currently, and even the German media is full of geoscience news. The first really interesting thing that I came across was that hurricanes might trigger strong earthquakes. If Shimon Wdowinski from University of Miami is right, this would be a huge step forward for our earthquake understanding. If he should be right.

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Dear colleague,
we are pleased to invite you to submit your abstract to the Earthquake Geology session at the upcoming EGU meeting (22-27 April, Vienna). Deadline for submissions is January 17.
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Emil Wiechert was born 150 years ago (26 December 1861). He not only invented modern Geophysics and Seismology, but he also had the first chair of Geophysics worldwide (1898 in Göttingen, Germany). Wiechert became famous for his seismograph. Now the Deutsche Post released a special stamp showing Wiechert, his seismograph and the original seismogram of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as registered in Göttingen, Germany!

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Some preliminary results regarding geological, engineering and social aspects from the Van Mw 7.2 earthquake (23 October 2011) in Eastern Turkey from Prof. Lekkas and Prof. Karydis visit to the site. Have a look at the following link:
http://www.elekkas.gr/el/research/missions/turkey-mission.html

The public version of the EEE Catalogue,  a global catalogue of environmental effects induced by modern, historical and paleoearthquakes, is available at http://www.eeecatalog.sinanet.apat.it/terremoti/index.php. This public version has been developed on Google Earth and aims at providing basic information at earthquake, locality and site level, including the rupture zones (when available) and the local description of environmental effects, integrated by some imagery (photographs, stratigraphic logs, etc.). more

The preliminary report on the Lorca Mw5.1 earthquake from 11 May 2011 is now also available in English! The quake caused a lot of damages to building despite the relatively low magnitude. One building collapsed and nine people died. The report summarized the geological background, environmental earthquake effects and damaged infrastructure. more

I found Tannis‘ WoGE #289 more or less by accident, just having a quick look and suddenly realizing that I am in the right area. It was more difficult to find some literature about the Bomapau and Kiriwina Islands. A great area, very high seismicity and a complex tectonic situation. Seems to be a fantastic destination for holidays as well, all those beautiful atolls must be great for divers. more