Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are one of the most important tools in geosciences and can be helpful in almost every discipline. They are widely used not only in academia, but also in industry and administration. Obviously, it’s a good idea to know how to use these softwares. There are dozens, if not hundreds of different GIS versions available, but only few of them are freeware, like QGIS. Our colleague Riccardo Klinger from Digital Geography started a crowdsourcing initiative to get money for creating a free online video tutorial for everyone who wants to learn QGIS. If you like this idea, support him here at startnext.de.
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17 January – 18th anniversary of the Kobe EQ, Japan
18 years ago, a magnitude 7.2 (mb6.8, Mj7.3) earthquake struck Kobe, Japan. The consequences of The Great Hanshin Earthquake were disastrous: thousands of houses collapsed, infrastructure was severely damaged, widespread fires started, more than 6000 people died. Several blogs commemorated this event, the most interesting post in my opinion came from David Bressan (again!), who also discusses early anti-seismic buildings and earthquake resilient structures.
Landsat continues
This is good news for all of us who use remote sensing data: read about the Landsat Data Continuity Mission here.
Describe your job using only the 1000 most common words
Anne Jefferson from Highly Allochthonous is collecting job descriptions from geoscientists. Strange job descriptions, because the rule is to use the 1000 most common words only. There are some very great results – worth reading! Mine somehow vanished in the interwebs.
IRENA – global atlas for solar and wind
Renewable energies are one of the fastest growing techniques worldwide, and here in Germany some effort is made to increase their contribution to the overall energy mix. Well, currently, this process slowed down if not endangered for several reasons of which lobbyism surely isn’t the least important one, but I don’t want to get into politics too deeply. Now there’s a global atlas for solar and wind, telling you where you could place your panels or your wind power plant. Great! Read the press release from the German Aerospace Agency (DLR) here.
Car disappears in sinkhole
I am not sure if this is faked, but it looks real and everyone who wanted to fake this could have made a better quality. In Brazil, a car disappears in a sink hole during heavy rains. These things happen not as rarely as one might think. Here, it could either be a “real” sinkhole or a waste water channel which the car broke into. However, amazing.
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Three interesting papers on earthquakes
Finally, I found three papers that might be interesting for the EQ community:
- Tang, G., Barton, P.J., McNeill, L.C., Henstock, T.J., Tilmann, F., Dean, S.M., Jusuf, M.D., Djajadihardja, Y.S., Permana, H., Klingelhoefer, F., Kopp, H. 2013. 3-D active source tomography around Simeulue Island offshore Sumatra: Thick crustal zone responsible for earthquake segment boundary. Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2012GL054148
- Yan, Y., Pinel, V., Trouvé, E., Pathier, E., Perrin, J., Bascou, P., Jouanne, F. 2013. Coseismic displacement field and slip distribution of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake from SAR amplitude image correlation and differential interferometry. Geophys. J. Int. DOI: 10.1093/gji/ggs102
- Sawazaki, K., Snieder, R. 2013. Time-lapse changes of P- and S-wave velocities and shear wave splitting in the first year after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, Japan: shallow subsurface. Geophys. J. Int., DOI: 10.1093/gji/ggs080
Geological Society of London public lectures on video
The Geological Society has published videos of their recent public Shell lectures on YouTube.
1.) Reconciling Past and Future Worlds: Geology and Ground Engineering by Jackie Skipper:
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2.) Learning to love the meteorite by Ted Nield:
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Have a nice weekend!
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