The M6.0 Napa earthquake came along with some interesting effects. It produced relatively large surface ruptures, but only minor secondary earthquake environmental effects like localized lateral spread, almost no liquefaction and rockfalls, but some hydrological changes. Dozens of geoscientists went out for mapping the earthquake ruptures, supported by InSAR data that precisely show where the ground moved.
Now the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association published a 400-pages report on their findings. The report is available for download here. Make sure to read it, it’s full of data and great photographs of surface ruptures.
Other interesting articles and posts on the Napa quake: more
The Friends of the Pleistocene went on a fieldtrip few days ago to study the 4D Architecture of an Oblique Rift Margin in Baja California, NW Mexico. The tour focussed on the paleoseismology of the Borrega and Laguna Salada Faults, especially on the 1982 and 2010 surface ruptures, and took place fom 27 February to 2 March, 2014. You can download the detailed field guide and the road log here. more
An interesting paper has been published in Nature Geoscience by Murphy et al.: Limit of strain partitioning in the Himalaya marked by large earthquakes in western Nepal. It doesn’t happen too often that paleoseismological papers are published in this journal and it’s also not too often that authors publish such beautiful photos. The authors identified a more than 60 km long rupture in W Nepal with 10 m of surface offset (strike-slip with a normal component). 14C dating points to seismic activity between AD 1165 and 1400. That’s pretty surprising for many reasons: more
