Let’s start with some good news: The first two Galileo satellites (Natalia and Thijs) will be launched today from Kourou. It’s a little behind the schedule (6 years) and the entire project has become a little more expensive than previously thought (1,600,000,000 €), but who cares? It will provide 1 m GPS resolution! 1 m!!!
There is one more Archaeopteryx! Really! Soemone who does not want his name to be told handed out the fossil to scientists. After a thoroughly investigation of that great piece of Solnhofen Plattenkalk, the anonymous collector will get back his bird. No, his dinosaur I mean. Ehm, his Archaeopteryx.
Dave Petley reported on a giant landslide in Iceland. It’s expected to have ~1,000,000 m³. See the amazing images, just great.
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9:00 The second day started with a great keynote, Chris Scholz talked about earthquake triggering and fault synchronization with examples from California and Iceland.
09:45 Next great keynote: Clark Burchfiel on the Wenchuan EQ!
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After the very successful 1st Workshop on Earthquake Archaeology and Paleoseismology held in the ancient roman site of Baelo Claudia (Spain, 2009), the INQUA Focus Group on Paleoseismology and Active Tectonics decided to elaborate a bi-annual calendar to support this joint initiative with the IGCP-567 “Earthquake Archaeology”. This second joint meeting moved to the eastern Mediterranean, a tectonically active setting within the Africa-Eurasia collision zone and located in the origins of the pioneer’s works on archaeoseismology. However, for the coming year 2012, at least a part of us will move also to the New World, where the 3rd INQUA-IGCP 567 international workshop will take place in Morelia, Mexico in November 2012. It is planned to proceed with the meeting, so we are thinking of Aachen, Germany, to be the host in 2013, possibly together with Louvain, Belgium.
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A new paper published in Natural Hazards today discusses post-depositional changes of tsunamites. At sites in Thailand covered by sediments of the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, Szczuciński (2011) has documented significant changes in the deposits over the last seven years. Not only were the tsunamites altered, eroded or re-deposited by animals and seasonal rain, but also vanished in certain cases.
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A new book with focus on paleoseismology has been published by GSA. Special Paper 479 – “Geological Criteria for Evaluating Seismicity Revisited: Forty Years of Paleoseismic Investigations and the Natural Record of Past Earthquakes” is edited by Franck A. Audemard M., Alessandro Maria Michetti and James P. McCalpin. Again, a lot of interesting reading stuff for your flight to Corinth…
Yesterday, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake happened near Mineral, Virginia in a depth of 6 km only (37.936°N, 77.933°W) with a thrust faulting mechanism. Media report that the quake was felt as far as Boston and even Canada to the north, but significantly less far away in southern direction. The US East Coast quakes are normally felt in a wide range, since the crust there is old, cold and dense which makes it easy for the seismic waves to propagate. Some damage occurred at the epicentral area, but apparently there were no fatalities. From the earthquake effects (Chimneys collapsed, walls cracked, some springs showed changes) and instrumental measurements an epicentral intensity of VII can be determined. more
It is our greatest pleasure to announce that a new special issue on paleo- and archaeoseismology has been published. The special issue of Quaternary International mainly consists of contributions from a selection of those presented during the first International Workshop on Earthquake Archaeology and Palaeoseismology held at the ancient Roman City of Baelo Claudia (South Spain) in September 2009. There in Southern Spain, the first joint meeting of the INQUA Focus Area on Palaeoseismology and Active tectonics and the UNESCO-IUGS programme IGCP567 on Earthquake Archaeology took place. This volume is one of the first accounts of an integrated approach in the study of past earthquakes combining recent advances in palaeoseismology and earthquake archaeology.
There’s a lot of great reading stuff or the summer holidays or on the plane to Corinth… more
Our new paper on lake Ohrid was published in the ZDGG: Reicherter, K., Hoffmann, N., Lindhorst, K., Krastel, S., Fernandez-Steeger, T.M., Grützner, C., Wiatr, T. 2011. Active basins and neotectonics: morphotectonics of the Lake Ohrid Basin (FYROM and Albania). Z. dt. Ges. Geowiss 162 (2), 217 -234. more
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
This week’s centerfault is a very prominent one that you will know for sure – the Dead Sea Fault. The sinistral strike-slip fault marks the boundary between the Arabian plate and the Sinai. The entire system is more than 600 km long and has accommodated ~107 km of slip since Miocene. Magnitude 7 is no problem for this structure and the recurrence intervalls are short. more
