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It’s been a while since the last Friday links, so today’s list is rather long. Of course the Russian meteoroid-meteor-meteorite (yes, in this order!) was an absolutely amazing, though destructive phenomenon. The air blast was registered equivalent to an earthquake of magnitude 2.7. Read Livescience’s article here and read this text to get to know about meteors and seismograms in general. more

Dear colleagues,

please consider submitting abstracts to the following session to be held at the IAEG XII Congress in Torino, 15-19 September 2014:

• Off-fault coseismic surface effects and their impact in urban areas
• Surface fault-rupture hazard in urban areas

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Something many people have been waiting for happened last week. Judge Marco Billi explained his verdict in the L’Aquila case. In a 950 page document he published the so-called “motivazione”, stating that “the deficient risk analysis was not limited to the omission of a single factor, but to the underestimation of many risk indicators and the correlations between those indicators.” This should have been understood by the scientists, but instead they delivered a “superficial, approximate and generic” analysis. more

Annals of Geophysics’ latest Special Issue 55-5 is focussed on Earthquake Geology: Active tectonics in the Mediterranean and Europe: site studies and application of new methodologies. This issue was edited by L. Cucci, P. M. De Martini, E. Masana, and K. Vanneste and contains seven papers. As always, all articles are open access. more

I am not entirely sure why the following video was produced, what it is aiming for and if it should be used in geoscience education, but I like it. It very nicely illustrates what a green potato would experience if it was on a cruise ship, from there went down to the seafloor with a yellow submarine, was trapped by a submarine landslide and subducted into the Calabrian Arc and then by using a time machine spit out by Stromboli volcano or so. I always wanted to learn about this. more

Since the L’Aquila trial has caused a lot of attention and an outcry of the scientific community, topics like earthquake prediction and earthquake forecasting are widely discussed in blogs and media. Often enough, people that claim to be scientists pretend they could predict earthquakes. These pseudo-predictions are based either on measuring geophysical phenomena (like temperature, gas emissions, electromagnetic fields, light phenomena, sun-moon-earth tidal forces and interactions etc.), animal behaviour (toads, snakes, dogs etc.) or even crazier things (horoscopes, blasphemy, earthquake weapons…). None of these “methods” works. Earthquake prediction is currently not possible. more

For me the most important geo news this week was the court decision on the L’Aquila trial on Monday. A local court sentenced six scientists and one official for manslaughter to six years in prison – 2 years more than claimed by the prosecutor. Even though the scientists may not have found the best words to describe the earthquake hazard in L’Aquila, the decision is ridiculous in my opinion and caused an outcry throughout the scientific community. Especially the consequences for any risk assessment and public information might be fatal. I am really concerned. In the following I link to some blog posts that I found particularly interesting:

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Breaking news are sad ones for the earthquake community. A court in Italy found seven scientists guilty of manslaughter in multiple cases and sentenced them to prison. The scientists had to give a statement about the likelyhood of a major quake after a series of tremors occurred in L’Aquila. They stated that there was no higher risk for a forthcoming major event; few days later a M6.3 earthquake devastated the historical city and more than 300 people died.

The scientific community tried to support the italian scientists by clarifying that earthquake prediction is still impossible. Also, more than 5000 scientists signed an open letter in support of the Italian colleagues. This is surely a sad day for earthquake geology and I am sure it will change the way we communicate our findings to the public and to officials.

Annals of Geophysics, the former Annali di Geofisica, published its latest issue today, dedicated to the 2012 Northern Italy earthquakes: Vol 55, No 4 (2012): The Emilia (northern Italy) seismic sequence of May-June, 2012: preliminary data and results. On 20 May 2012 an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw6.1 hit Finale Emilia, on 29 May an Mw5.8 event followed. The earthquakes caused a number of fatalities and significant damage. Earthquake environmental effects were widely observed, too. more

Currently I spend my time working on some papers that deal with tsunamis in the Eastern Mediterranean and earthquakes in Spain. Searching for literature and looking for data on the Minoan catastrophe I came across this new open access publication by Simon Jusseret and Manuel Sintubin:

• All That Rubble Leads to Trouble: Reassessing the Seismological Value of Archaeological Destruction Layers in Minoan Crete and Beyond. Seismological Research Letters, 83, 4, 736-742, doi:10.1785/0220120011.

Our colleagues from IGCP567 – Earthquake Archaeology put a lot of effort into getting rid of catastrophism and into making archeoseismology a more reliable, quantitative science. By the way, don’t miss the next workshop on archeoseismology and active tectonics in Mexico 2012! more