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It’s May, and here at Soil System Science HQ we’re calming down after a busy yet fascinating fortnight at the General Assembly. Over the course of two weeks, we enjoyed many thousands of soil science presentations – each one representing a great contribution to our knowledge and understanding about the soil system. Of course, we should never forget that much of that research would not have b ...[Read More]
Orogens are the locus of intense deformation and metamorphism, mainly caused by convergent tectonics and burial. Yet, deeply buried rocks – metamorphosed at high pressure (HP) – are customarily met at the surface, even in “recent” systems such as the Alps. The long-standing question is naturally “how are these rocks brought back to the surface?” At the time John Platt wrote his manuscr ...[Read More]
This contribution is a very detailed field report of the Sino-French expedition in eastern Tibet that took place in 1980-1982. Armijo and coauthors accurately analyse the different tectonic styles present in the north and south of the Yarlung-Zangbo Suture Zone, frequently defined as the “chord” joining the eastern and western syntaxes of the Himalayan orogen (Fig. 1). North of the chord, strike-s ...[Read More]
South America is one of the most seismic regions where the collision of several tectonic plates is shaping the topography along the Pacific coast. On January 31, an Mw5.6 earthquake hit Southern Guyana near the border with Brazil. This event was largely felt in Boa Vista (Brazil), the nearest main city close to the epicentre (Figure 1, EMSC). Relatively small damages were reported and fortunately ...[Read More]
What we know On December 29, a strong earthquake Mw 6.4 hit Petrinja at 12:20 CET, a town located in Central Croatia. This event is the largest onshore earthquake rupture in Central Europe since the M 6.5 Norcia earthquake occurred in 2016 (e.g. Scognamiglio, 20181) which killed 299 persons and 4,500 became homeless. Recent reports on the Petrinja quake suggest seven fatalities and heavy damages o ...[Read More]
On the 12th of August 1898, Maria Vasilyevna Klenova was born to a working-class family in Irkutsk1. This city started as a military outpost in 1652, but had become a bustling city around the turn of the 20th century with around half a million inhabitants. In the year Maria was born, Irkutsk became connected to Europe by the infamous Trans-Siberian Railway. Maria did not stay in Irkutsk ver ...[Read More]
November was not highlighted by a large event (> M 7). However, the TOP 3 of the largest earthquakes include a deep focus rupture on November 30th in the Tatar Strait between eastern Russia and Sakhalin Island (Figure 1). This earthquake (M 6.4) occurred at a depth of ~600 km according to different seismology agencies. The moment tensor representation shows an oblique mechanism with a dominant ...[Read More]
In 1976 Oriol Riba published his paper on “Syntectonic unconformities of the Alto Cardener, Spanish Pyrenees: a genetic interpretation”, and despite appearing as a niche topic at first glance, it was voted as one of the papers in our Must-Read series. A major reason for that is that the paper presents a general model for syntectonic unconformities – an unconformity which illustrates both se ...[Read More]
In his 1968 paper “Rises, Trenches, Great Faults, and Crustal Blocks”, Jason Morgan added the missing pieces of the plate tectonics: the representation of plates’ motion in terms of spherical surface, and plate rigidity. In the very first lines of the paper he describes his contribution as an “extension of the transform fault concept [of Wilson, 1965; see the TS-must-read blogpost of October 15, 2 ...[Read More]
J.T. Wilson published “Did the Atlantic close and reopen?” in 1966, giving birth to the so called “Wilson Cycle”. The article is a key steppingstone for the theory of plate tectonics, and it is a must-read paper not only in tectonics studies but also in paleontology and stratigraphy. The questions raised can be generally abridged in two: “Why regions with similar fauna can be very far from each ot ...[Read More]
