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The Aix-en-Provence PATA Days are fast approaching and the meeting programme looks super-exciting! Unfortunately, I’ll not attend the congress, but my soul will be there in poster form – presenting author is 1^st year PhD student Marco Pizza and the topic is the likelihood of primary surface faulting.

Some earthquakes produce surface faulting, others do not. Several factors affect the outcome of this dichotomous variable (faulting YES/NO), including magnitude, depth, earthquake kinematic and local lithology. The probability of having surface rupture for a given magnitude is a key ingredient in Fault Displacement Hazard Assessment (FDHA). This probability is derived from empirical datasets and the state of the art is summarized in Figure 1, taken from the recently published IAEA Tecdoc on probabilistic FDHA.

While working on my project on distributed faulting, I dig into the literature looking for additional case studies beside those contained in the SURE (SUrface Ruptures due to Earthquakes) database.

I retrieved information on 18 normal and strike-slip events occurred between 1905 and 2011, with a magnitude range of Mw 5.9 – 8.3. I digitized rupture traces from published maps at a variable scale, dependent on the resolution of the original map. Earthquakes are from Iran (7 events), Mongolia, China, Turkey, Greece (2 events for each country), Italy, Kenya and Japan (1 event).

These are the latest papers on paleoseismology, earthquakes, and active tectonics. Enjoy reading! more

There is a wonderful, amazing, extraordinary postdoc position open at Oxford University: Palaeoseismology of Central Asian Earthquake Ruptures.

We seek to appoint a postdoctoral research assistant to undertake investigations of large earthquakes within the interior of Asia. The post is part of a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust called EROICA. The successful candidate will work closely with Professor Richard Walker, and will join a vibrant community of active tectonics researchers in Oxford within the Earthquake Geology and Geodesy group.

The researcher will be responsible for the detailed mapping of palaeo-earthquake ruptures, the construction of slip distributions from individual earthquakes, the analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery, the construction of digital topographic models, and the selection of sites for long-term slip-rate determination using field investigation. The PDRA will also be involved in planning and carrying out fieldwork to verify remote-sensing observations, to collect samples for dating, and to excavate and interpret palaeo-seismic trenches. We expect the researcher to help in supervising doctoral and masters student research projects, in addition to undertaking their own research.

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A lot of interesting papers have been published in the past month, including studies on recent moderate to strong earthquakes, geomorphology, fault physics, and some classic paleoseismology. These are the latest articles on paleoseismology and active tectonics – enjoy! more

Report on the International Field Trip “From 1997 to 2016: three destructive earthquakes along the Central Apennine fault system”, 19^th-22^nd July 2017, Italy

Website: http://convegni.unicam.it/TDEq_centralItaly ( including program and abstracts, field trip guidebook and list of participants)

Authors: Chiara Frigerio¹, Alessandro Maria Michetti¹, Francesca Ferrario¹, Franz Livio¹, Emanuele Tondi²

¹Università dell’Insubria, Dipartimento di Scienza ed Alta Tecnologia, Como, Italia

²Università di Camerino, Sezione di Geologia, Scuola di Scienze e Tecnologie, Italia more

Last October I was given the chance to attend the “iRALL school on field data collection, monitoring, and modeling of large landslides” in Chengdu, China. During the school, we spent one week in the epicentral area of the Ms=8.0 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, where I was able to take some interesting pictures of earthquake damage and coseismic landslides. Then other things happened, like the earthquakes in Italy and New Zealand, with exciting sights from the field shared here, and I never ended up sharing my Wenchuan pics, which I want to do now. more

Now that the new dates for the 8th PATA Days 2017 in New Zealand are fixed, it is time to bring to your attention an exceptional paper that was already published in 2016. I planned to write a review long time ago, but I just managed to do so now. The paper by Quigley et al. is not only likely to become your favourite read during the long flight to New Zealand, but it will also serve as an extremely valuable contribution to the study of earthquake environmental effects (EEEs) in general. The authors report on, and summarise, the effects that the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence had on the environment. The paper is special in many ways: more

Our friend and colleague Alessandro Michetti pointed me to this impressive video. It shows the surface ruptures of the 30 October earthquake from a helicopter: more

The EMERGEO Working Group has conducted extensive field work after the 24 August 2016 Amatrice Earthquake in Italy and put together a report on the coseismic effects. The report is in English and can be downloaded from the INGV earthquake Blog here: PDF (6.1 mb)

The report includes data on environmental earthquake effects like surface ruptures, fractures, landslides, and rockfalls. More than 2400 data points have been collected.

Please cite the report as follows:

• EMERGEO Working Group (2016). The 24 August 2016 Amatrice Earthquake: Coseismic Effects. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.61568

The EMERGEO Working Group consists of Pucci S., De Martini P.M., Nappi R., Pantosti D., Civico R., Ricci T., Moro M., Cinti F., Brunori C.A., Di Naccio D., Sapia V., De Ritis R., Gori S., Falcucci E., Caciagli M., Pinzi S., Villani F., Gaudiosi G., Burrato P., Vannoli P., Kastelic V., Montone P., Carafa M., Patera A., Vallone R. (all INGV) and Saroli M., Lo Sardo L., Lancia M. (University of Cassino and southern Lazio).

Thanks to Francesca Cinti for pointing me to this!