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Besides the two special issues on tsunamis and paleoearthquakes that I’ve already blogged about, some more interesting papers on paleoseismology have recently been published. They deal with paleoseismology of the North Anatolian Fault, with tectonic geomorphology of S Spain, and with the ESI scale applied on a quake in Kashmir. more

Annals of Geomorphology has now published a new volume on Paleotsunamis in its Supplementary Issues. Issue 57 (4) is all about Reconstructing and modeling palaeotsunami events by multi-proxy geoscientific analyses. The volume is an outcome of the 2011 Corinth conference and edited by Andreas Vött, Klaus Reicherter and Ioannis Papanikolaou. I especially like it not only because I’ve organized the conference, but also because I am familiar with some of the study sites. Finally, I am co-author of the last paper. more

Witold pointed me to a new book on tsunamis that was published by Springer. It’s called Tsunami Events and Lessons Learned – Environmental and Societal Significance and it is edited by Y.A. Kontar, V. Santiago-Fandiño and T. Takahashi. The book contains 25 papers on the following topics:  more

The new open access journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences recently appeared. Its first published article in the Structural Geology and Tectonics section is an overview piece by Chief Editor Agust Gudmundsson about Great challenges in structural geology and tectonics. The article provides a nice round-up of some basic questions in tectonics that are still not well enough understood and which definitely need to be addressed in the (near) future. It starts from questions which sound easy to be answered (How many tectonic plates are there?), but actually aren’t. more

Elsevier has put together a number of papers that were published in its various journals on the Wenchuan 2008 earthquake and made a “Virtual Special Issue” out of that. So, the good news is not about new papers on that quake (some work was already published in 2011), but rather that this selection of papers is free until 14 February 2014 via this link: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/tectonophysics/virtual-special-issues/virtual-special-issue-on-the-2008-wenchuan-earthquake/

That’s not open access as we like it, but at least a step in the right direction.

The new issue of Seismological Research Letters has been published now and it contains a lot of articles for those liking old earthquakes. Some topics might sound familiar to you when you attended the PATA days conference as the authors presented parts of their work.

I have selected a few papers that are especially interesting to the paleoseismology community. They are about the use of Google StreetView for assessing macroseismic damage (Hinzen, 2013), archeoseismology in the Levant (Alfonsi et al. 2013), Earthquake rotated objects caused by the Emilia Romana earthquake – a fascinating EAE! (Cucci and Tertoulliani, 2013), a strong historical earthquake in Italy that likely did not happen at all (Camassi and Castelli, 2013) and new data on historical earthquakes in the Himalayan (Rajendran et al, 2013). Also, I added a paper on archaeoseismological investigations in northern Sicily that was published recently in Quaternary International (Bottari et al, 2013). Spend the rainy autumn evenings with a good read!

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Recent archaeoseismological studies have provided us with spectacular examples of skeletons as earthquake archaeological effects. Cases include the Neolithic skeletons of Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho (one of them beheaded by a fracture crossing the site!) published by Alfonsi et al. in SRL (2012) and the skeletons smashed by building collapse reported by Berberian et al. in JAS (2012).

To this list should now be added the case of Lajia (Guanting Basin, central China), where a team of Chinese researchers uncovered a series of skeletons buried under a thick layer of clay interpreted as the result of an enormous, earthquake-related mudflow c. 3950 cal BP. more

A new paper by Esposito et al. has been published in Springer’s Landslide Science and Practice that will help to better constrain intensities on the ESI scale. Landslides induced by twelve moderate to strong earthquakes events during the last 300 yrs have been analyzed. The authors calculated distance vs. magnitude and distance vs. ESI epicentral intensity relationships, similar to the famous correlations by Keefer (1984). more

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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The INQUA Early Career Researcher inter-congress meeting will take place from 2 – 6 December, 2013 at Wollongong University, Australia. The meeting will bring together young earth scientists with a research focus on the Quaternary, from grad students to PostDocs. Thematic workshops on scientific writing and Quaternary science will be held and you’ll have the chance to discuss with colleagues fromn all over the world. The application deadline for travel support is 15 September, abstract submission and registration should be made before 1 October. There will be a Special Issue in INQUA’s journal Quaternary International in support of this meeting. This is a unique chance for ECRs, so spread the word and submit articles!  more