If you are interested in visiting the epicentral areas of the recent earthquakes in the Central Apennines, Italy, this is your chance: A four days field trip will be held from 19-22 July, 2017, led by researchers who have studied the earthquake effects in detail. The trip focusses on the fault system that ruptured during the 1997 Umbria Marche, 2009 L’Aquila, and 2016 Norcia events. The trip is organised by scientists from Italy, France, UK, and Greece, and supported by a number of universities, state agencies, and INQUA, with the Università di Camerino as the main coordinator.
More information will be published soon. more
Our colleague Paolo Galli is in the epicentral area of the M6.6 Italy earthquake and he sent us some amazing images. I’ll just reproduce them here without further comment, they speak for themselves. Captions by Paolo. Thanks a lot Paolo, and stay safe! more
In the last two posts I have reported on the scientific sessions of the Fucino15 conference and on the first of the field trips. This post is about the L’Aquila field trip. I haven’t been to this city before and I was curious to see the place that sadly became so famous in earthquake science. I was surprised by how many heavily damaged buildings were still standing and by the overwhelming amount of historical buildings that await their reconstruction. We were given a great tour through the Palazzo Ardinghelli which is currently being rebuilt, then we had a look at the worst-affected parts of the city. Here’s a report in images. more
On 28 February, an earthquake of MW4.4 occurred in the Fucino Basin in Central Italy. The event did not cause any damage and was not widely felt. Such an earthquake is nothing special for this area, but it’s interesting because from 19-24 April the 6th INQUA meeting on paleoseismology will be held in Pescina. The conference will bring together scientists from all around the world to discuss latest developments in active tectonics, paleoseismology and similar topics, and its date and location were chosen to commemorate the devastating Fucino earthquake of 1915. This quake left more than 33,000 people dead and was one of the largest earthquakes to hit the Mediterranean in modern history. It was also subject to a number of paleoseismological studies (see links below). more
The 6th INQUA workshop on Active Tectonics, Paleoseismology and Archaeoseismology will be held from 19-24 April, 2015, in Pescina, Fucino Basin, Italy.
We will remember the centenary of the 1915 M7 Fucino earthquake, that was one of the largest and most devastating earthquakes ever occurred in Central Italy.
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The latest issue of the Seismological Research Letters (SRL) has at least three papers dealing with topics interesting for paleoseismologists.
Hinzen et al. studied the rotation of objects (e.g., monuments) during the L’Aquila earthquake of 2009. They scanned the rotated objects with a high-res laser scanner, built discrete-element-models from the data and simulated the shaking necessary to cause the deformation. The results help to better estimate earthquake parameters from earthquake archaeological effects (EAEs).
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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
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
A new story came up recently that sounds like the L’Aquila case, but the other way round. Dr. Roger Bilham from the University of Colorado, a well-known earthquake researcher, was denied entry to India earlier this year. He was on a flight to Bhutan and supposed to change planes in New Delhi when Indian officials sent him back to the plane he just arrived on. Officially, he was accused with having the wrong type of visa. Himself and many colleagues, however, are sure that he was deported because he stated that the seismic hazard in India is underestimated. 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
