Author: György Hetényi

Lors du confinement du printemps 2020 et la fermeture des écoles, le radio RTS La 1ère a transformé son programme Vacarme pour devenir Brouhaha. Un jour, un thème, sur lequel les enfants peuvent poser des questions et auront des réponses par un expert, accompagné d’une histoire imaginaire. Le 6 mai le sujet était les tremblements de terre, et l’histoire racontait le sort du dragon Ronchonchon! Vous pouvez réécouter toute l’émission ici, ou l’histoire seule ici.

Following our paper’s publication on the Seismology-at-school-in-Nepal project earlier this month, a nice and comprehensive summary article features in AGU’s Eos magazine, written by Rachel Fritts.

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across various regions with more and more people (semi-)confined, there are multiple observations that manmade environmental noise is reduced. The level of this vibration decrease varies spatially. Here are our contributions:

• in Nepal,
• as part of a global comparison,
• at our now empty workplace,
• dans un article dans Le Temps.

Two M5+ earthquakes hit Zagreb this morning, causing a lot of damage in the historical centre. The magnitude 5.4 event hit at 6:24 in the morning (local time), the second (M5.0) shortly after 7h. The waveforms are clearly recorded at our test station near Sion, in the Valais, 670 km away. Zooming on the wave onset of the two events reveals a high level of similarity; the earthquakes likely happened on the same fault.

Our project Seismology at School in Nepal and its progress so far has been summarized in an article that was accepted for publication today at Frontiers‘ special volume The Power of Citizen Seismology: Science and Social Impacts. The article, Seismology at School in Nepal: a program for educational and citizen seismology through a low-cost seismic network, is available online.

Welcome to Konstantinos Michailos and Andrew Greenwood who join our research group for the second phase of project OROG3NY.

Konstantinos has recently completed his PhD degree at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. His work will focus on the spatial and temporal distribution of Himalayan earthquakes, especially in the lower crust.

Andrew’s work focuses heavily on the DIVE project, with the long-term goal to Drill the Ivrea-Verbano zonE,  a particular place in the Western Alps where rocks rarely seen on the surface are exposed.

On January 15th, 1934 (Maagh 2nd, 1990 in the Nepali calendar) a disastrous earthquake has hit Nepal. Its date was later selected to hold the National Earthquake Safety Day.

This year, Maagh 2 falls on January 16th, and Nepali people celebrate this event for the 22nd time. The Seismology at School in Nepal project participated with two events:

• A newspaper article in Kantipur – see here (in Nepali),
• A coordinated “jump near your seismometer” action in schools participating in the program.

Pictures of the latter event at schools, and observed waveforms and shaking are shown below. Click on the photo for full-size version download, or get the PDF.

The earthquake highlight in Switzerland in 2019 was the swarm in the Wildhorn-Sanetschpass area which started in early November. An often-asked question is whether the swarm is already over. It is not an easy to question to answer, as there is generally some background seismic activity in the area. The figure below shows the located earthquakes near the recent swarm throughout the year 2019 and until today. Based on this, it seems too early to answer whether the swarm has really finished; for that, a longer observation time will be needed.

Late November Iain Stewart was the guest of the ELSTE Earth science MSc program, and gave a great and enlightgening talk on “Natural hazards: how to communicate to save lives“. The full videorecording can be viewed freely online at this page – highly recommended for those interested!