Ancient Earthquakes book

This post qualifies for both my blogs, socarchsci.blogspot.com on archaeometry, and this one, shakingearth.blogspot.com on earthquakes.

The Geological Society of America has come out with a volume on Ancient Earthquakes, edited by Manuel Sintubin, Iain S. Stewart, Tina M. Niemi, and Erhan Altunel, 2010, 280 p., $85.

Ancient earthquakes are pre-instrumental earthquakes that can only be identified through indirect evidence in the archaeological (archaeoseismology) and geological (palaeoseismology) record. Special Paper 471 includes a selection of cases convincingly illustrating the different ways the archaeological record is used in earthquake studies. The first series of papers focuses on the relationship between human prehistory and tectonically active environments, and on the wide range of societal responses to historically known earthquakes. The bulk of papers concerns archaeoseismology, showing the diversity of approaches, the wide range of disciplines involved, and its potential to contribute to a better understanding of earthquake history. Ancient Earthquakes will be of interest to the broad community of earth scientists, seismologists, historians, and archaeologists active in and around archaeological sites in the many regions around the world threatened by seismic hazards. This Special Paper frames in the International Geoscience Programme IGCP 567 “Earthquake Archaeology: Archaeoseismology along the Alpine-Himalayan Seismic Zone.”

New Jersey earthquake

You may recall that I have my (tongue in cheek) holiday quake hypothesis.

Well, sure enough, there was a Christmas day magnitude 2.0 earthquake in New Jersey!

U.S. Geological Survey

But of course, with about 1.5 million earthquakes every year above magnitude 2, about the threshold which will be felt by people if close enough, there are many such small quakes somewhere in the world every day.

Earthquakes in Israel

Today being Christmas (not my own religious cup of tea), I thought I'd post on earthquakes in the "Holy Land."

The USGS has a page on earthquakes in Israel, as it does for many other regions of the world.

A sesimicity map from recent years shows the location of a number of small quakes along the Dead Sea Rift zone.

Israel actually seems to have little of the way of online resources, at least in English, about their earthquake situation, either through the Israel Geological Survey, or the Geophysical Institute of Israel.  After the recent tragedy of the wildfires in the northern part of the country, I wonder if Israel is prepared for earthquake hazards, despite what appears to be a significant seismic risk:

GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences

A good summary of the regional tectonics can be found in the 2007 Tectonophysics article "Stress tensor and focal mechanisms along the Dead Sea fault and related structural elements based on seismological data," by Rami Hofstetter et al.

Spacequakes

I didn't know the term spacequakes before, but I came across it in an article in the Christian Science Monitor (a periodical and now web site that I respect, despite its origin and title).

Aurora (from Christian Science Monitor)

Like an earthquake in space, so-called spacequakes are temblors in Earth's magnetic field caused by plasma flying off the sun that could help generate the colorful auroras that dance high in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests.

"Magnetic reverberations have been detected at ground stations all around the globe, much like seismic detectors measure a large earthquake," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA.

And these rumbles can pack a punch.  "The total energy in a spacequake can rival that of a magnitude 5 or 6 earthquake," according to Evgeny Panov of the Space Research Institute in Austria. Panov is first author of a paper reporting the results of a study on spacequakes in the April 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Energies of earthquakes and other phenomena (from USGS)

I like it when different physical phenomena inter-relate!  Especially this one, that crosses over from my major specialty within geophysics, which is actually not earthquakes/seismology but geomagnetism. So wholistic!

Carbon sequestration and earthquakes

There were a few interesting talks at the American Geophysical Union meeting on geoengineering. Personally, I can't really figure out how mucking with natural systems, which got us into the global change conundrum we are now in, can still be seen as a viable approach, Aren't there likely to be further unknown and unforeseen consequences?

Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback discussed the possibility of carbon sequestration causing small and moderate earthquakes. "While those earthquakes are unlikely to be big enough to hurt people or property, they could still cause serious problems for the reservoirs containing the gas.  ... When we start perturbing the system by changing fluid pressure [as we inject massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the subsurface], we have the potential for activating faults," he said.

"The problem Zoback foresees is that the seismicity could create small pathways through the rock by which carbon dioxide would gradually seep back into the air.  If the carbon dioxide permeates back out of the reservoir, the effort to keep it out of the atmosphere will have been futile," he said.  In addition to failing to solve the problem, a lot of time and money would turn out to have been wasted."

Is the Haiti earthquake no longer newsworthy?

Interesting that if you do a Google search for the AGU meeting and the Haiti earthquake, essentially nothing turns up. There was other news to come out of the AGU meeting, but I guess the Haiti story is just "old hat."

 Dave Petley's AGU blogosphere Landslide blog did report on the specifics of the session I outlined in my last post. One of the speakers, Brian Mcadoo, is a friend and colleague who worked with me on an archaeological geophysics project in Jamaica in 1999. We probably didn't realize at the time that where we were working in Mandeville was not far from the westernmost extention of the Enriquillo-Plaintain Gardens fault zone which was related to the generation of the Haiti quake.

Haiti earthquake at the American Geophysical Union

There will be a "union" session on the Haiti earthquake at the AGU. The oral presentations set for Monday morning are as follows. (The organizer Eric Calais was the subject of a recent post here.)

U11A    Moscone South: 104     Monday 0800h

The 12 January 2010 M7.0 Haiti Earthquake    

Presiding: E Calais, Purdue University; S E Hough, U.S. Geological Survey

0800h  U11A-01 The January 12, 2010, Mw 7.0 earthquake in
Haiti: context and mechanism from an integrated geodetic study:
E Calais, A M Freed, G S Mattioli, F Amelung, S Jonsson, P E Jansma,
T H Dixon, C Prepetit, R Momplaisir

0815h  U11A-02 The Role of Science and Engineering in Rebuilding
a More Resilient Haiti (Invited): D Applegate

0830h  U11A-03 Networks in disasters: Multidisciplinary
communication and coordination in response and recovery to
the 2010 Haiti Earthquake (Invited): B G McAdoo, J Augenstein,
L Comfort, L Huggins, N Krenitsky, S Scheinert, T Serrant,
M Siciliano, S Stebbins, P Sweeney, Title of Team: University of
Pittsburgh Haiti Reconnaissance Team

0845h  U11A-04 The Role of Science and Engineering in Response
and Reconstruction Following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake (Invited):
W D Pennington

0900h  U11A-05 The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault in Haiti:
Holocene Offsets and Seismic Hazard: C S Prentice, A J Crone,
P Mann, R D Gold, K W Hudnut, P Jean, R W Briggs

0915h  U11A-06 The 2010 Haiti earthquake sequence: new insight
of the tectonic pattern from aftershocks and marine geophysical
data : Haiti-OBS cruise: B F Mercier De Lepinay, Y Mazabraud,
F Klingelhoefer, V Clouard, Y Hello, D Graindorge, B Marcaillou,
J Crozon, J Saurel, P Charvis, B S Mildor, A Deschamps, M Bouin,
J Perrot

0930h  U11A-07 Seismic Monitoring and Post-Seismic
Investigations following the 12 January 2010 Mw 7.0 Haiti
Earthquake (Invited): J Altidor, A Dieuseul, W L Ellsworth,
D D Given, S E Hough, M G Janvier, J Z Maharrey, M E Meremonte,
B S Mildor, C Prepetit, A Yong

0945h  U11A-08 Triggering of the 2010 Haiti earthquake by
hurricanes and possibly deforestation: S Wdowinski, I Tsukanov,
S Hong, F Amelung