AGU 2016

The American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting takes place this week in San Francisco. From our team Kristel Chanard is present and will give a presentation on Wednesday on her recent results:

Chanard K, Hetényi G, Baumgartner L. Licul A, Herman F (2016) Constraints on the extent and kinetics of eclogitization processes in the Indian lower crust. AGU Fall Meeting S43B-07.

Note that the meeting will move to New Orleans in 2017 and to Washington DC in 2018.

Thomas Bodin visiting

On Friday, November 25th Thomas Bodin from ENS Lyon will be our guest. He will first act as an external referee in Leonardo Colavitti’s PhD Proposal Defence; then at 15h in room 3799 he will give a seminar on Transdimensional Inference in the Geosciences. All are welcome!

14th Swiss Geoscience Meeting coming up

We will be at the 14th Swiss Geoscience Meeting on November 18-19 in Geneva.

All of us will have posters on Saturday:

  • Colavitti L, Hetényi G: 3-D shear-wave velocity model of the Central Alps using converted waves
  • Chanard K, Hetényi G, Baumgartner L, Licul A, Herman F: Constraints on the extent and kinetics of eclogitization processes in the Indian lower crust
  • Hetényi G, Le Roux-Mallouf R, Berthet T, Cattin R, Cauzzi C, Phuntsho K, Grolimund R: Mind the (seismic) gap: the 1714 Bhutan earthquake

Historical Bhutan earthquake in 1714

With the help of several historical documents as well as two geological sites studied with paleoseismological methods, we could constrain a hitherto unclear earthquake in the Himalaya. The results reveal that the 1714 earthquake occurred in Bhutan, and that it was a major event with a magnitude of 7.5-8.5. For details see our paper published in Geophysical Research Letters here.

Outreach: AGU, ScienceFGSE, Kuensel and Planeterde, followed by other portals.

Sofia Kufner visiting

Sofia Kufner, a postdoctoral research scientist at the GFZ Potsdam will be visiting us on 24-25th October. She will give the ISTE seminar on Deep India meets deep Asia: a seismological view of lithospheric slab interaction under Hindu Kush and Pamir, on Monday 24th at 17:15 in Géopolis-1620. Everyone interested in deep earthquakes, complex 3D geodynamics, seismology (and more) are welcome!

New publication on gravity and large earthquakes in the Himalaya

It took exactly ten years from the first discussion to the publication of the paper: our gravity projects in Nepal and Bhutan.

With about 80’000 person•kilometers travelled on crooked mountain roads, we could cover the Himalayas with sufficient gravity points to carry out an analysis of lateral, along-arc variations. These reveal segmentation of the India plate, which large earthquakes’ rupture extent seem to respect.

To read the full story, access our newest paper in Scientific Reports here.

Media appearance: UNIL, FGSE and its Géoblog.