Tectonics and Structural Geology

GeoTalk: A smart way to map earthquake impact

Sara Mynott April 28, 2016

Smart seismology. Credit: Kyle Spradley, CAFNR.

Last week at the 2016 General Assembly Sara, one of the EGU’s press assistants, had the opportunity to speak to Koen Van Noten about his research into how crowdsourcing can be used to find out more about where earthquakes have the biggest impact at the surface. Firstly, can you tell me a little about yourself? I did a PhD in structural geology at KULeuven and, after I finished, I started to ...[Read More]

When mountains collapse…

Jane Qiu April 27, 2016

The mountainsides, severely weakened by last year’s Gorkha Earthquake, is more likely to give way, especially during monsoons and aftershocks. (Credit: Kristen Cook)

Jane Qiu, a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, took to quake-stricken Nepal last month — venturing into landslide-riddled terrains and shadowing scientists studying what makes slopes more susceptible to failure after an earthquake. The journey proved to be more perilous than she had expected. What would it be like to lose all your family overnight? And how would you cope? It’s wit ...[Read More]

Counting the cost of natural disasters

Hazel Gibson April 21, 2016

'Earthquake damage in Zona Rossa, L’Aquila'. Credit: Nadine Hoffman (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Often, in the news, we are used to seeing disaster statistics reported as isolated figures, placed into context by the tragic human cost of floods, earthquakes and drought. The recent Ecuadorian earthquake that occurred on Saturday the 16th April, for example, was described as having an estimated economic cost of $820 million, which could rise as the scale of the disaster is revealed. But beyond t ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: recreating geological processes in the lab

Laura Roberts-Artal April 11, 2016

Geomorphic analog experiment (Normal Fault) . Credit: Stephane Dominguez (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Many of the processes which take place on Earth happen over very long time scales, certainly when compared to the life span of a person. The same is true for geographical scale. Many of the processes which dominate how our planet behaves are difficult to visualise given the vast distances (and depths) over which they occur. To overcome this difficulty, scientists have developed and resorted to a n ...[Read More]