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Klaus, Ben, Sascha and me went to visit our colleague Gösta at the GUtech in the Sultanate of Oman. We did some fieldwork for our project which deals with coastal changes. Parts of the Omani coast subside, others appear to be stable or are even uplifted. This might be due to large scaled crustal movements (the Makran Subduction zone is nearby) and/or regional effects. We are trying to find good proxies for reconstructing the Holocene sealevel and climate changes. Additionally, we need to get a grip on the neotectonics that affect the coastal areas. more

Now that the abstract submission deadline has passed you might be interested in somehow paleoseismicity-related sessions at the EGU2012. I decided to group the session by topic and my choice is absolutely based on personal interests. Sorry if I don’t mention every earthquake-related session.

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The sun dominated the geo-news this week. A very strong coronal mass ejection (or was it a sunquake…?) occured and hit Earth’s magnetic field on 24 January. A geomagnetic storm (Kp=5) lead to intense and beautiful northern lights around the Arctic Circle. The web is full of great images, the best ones that I came across can be found here at spaceweather and at National Geographic. more

Recently, scientists from Switzerland came up with the news that fractured bedrock might amplify earthquake shaking. The say they observed an increase by factor 10, which seems huge. I knew amplifying by sediment basins, but this is new to me.

100 years ago on 6 January, Alfred Wegener presented his continental drift theory for the first time. The Blogosphere was full with articles, among them: more

A small comfort for all those who have missed the AGU2011 fall meeting (and so did I) might be that some sessions are now available on video for free. The AGU session on demand page has lots of videos, among them four sessions on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. So if you’re ready for ~8 hrs of earthquake talks, you should definitely have a look.

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It seems like everyone is at the AGU currently, and even the German media is full of geoscience news. The first really interesting thing that I came across was that hurricanes might trigger strong earthquakes. If Shimon Wdowinski from University of Miami is right, this would be a huge step forward for our earthquake understanding. If he should be right.

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Goto et al. published a short paper on the Japan 2011 tsunami and implications for paleotsunami research in Marine Geology: Goto, K., Chagué-Goff, C., Fujino, S., Goff, J., Jaffe, B., Nishimura, Y., Richmond, B., Sugawara, D., Szczuciński, W., Tappin, D.R., Witter, R.C., Yulianto, E., 2011: New insights of tsunami hazard from the 2011 Tohoku-oki event. Marine Geology, 290, 1-4, 46-50.

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Dear colleagues,

We would like to bring your attention to a special session at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Seismological Society of America (17-19 April, 2012, San Diego, California):”Earthquakes and Tsunamis at Coastal Archaeological Sites”.

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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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