News

On Monday January 14th, Laura Airaghi from the Institut des Sciences de la Terre de Paris will visit ISTE. She will present a seminar on Linking microstructures to petro-chronology in low-grade metamorphic rocks: an approach to investigate large-scale deformation mechanisms in collisional settings (eastern Tibet and Pyrenees) at 11h00 in room 2121.

The AGU Fall Meeting took place last week in Washington D.C. Our group member’s contributions:

• Subedi S, Hetényi G, Denton P and Sauron A (ED51C-0677). Seismology-at-School in Nepal: a first regional educational and seismic network.
• Colavitti L,Hetényi G and AlpArray Working Group (S31D-0535). A new technique to construct 3-D Vs models: Implementation of Ray Tracing, Model Parameterization and Inversion.
• Alvizuri CR, Walter F and Hetényi G (S51D-0367). Seismic moment tensor and single force analysis of landslides in Switzerland and Greenland.
• Scarponi M, Hetényi G, Plomerova J, Solarino S, Berthet T, Baron L and AlpArray-Ivrea Working Group (T51G-0249). High-resolution imaging of the Ivrea Geophysical Body: A joint seismic and gravity approach.
• Pistone M, Petri B, Müntener O, Almqvist BSG, Hetényi G, Zappone A and Baumgartner L (V33D-0272). Unravelling magma emplacement mechanism in the lower crust: A forensic investigation of the Mafic Complex, Ivrea-Verbano Zone (Italy).

The meeting will take place in San Francisco (California) in 2019.

Today Bjarne Almqvist from Uppsala University is visiting ISTE. In the afternoon he will present a seminar on Collisional Orogeny in the Scandinavian Caledonides (COSC) Project: Investigating mountain building through scientific drilling at the usual time and place.

The School seismology project in Nepal has recently featured in the Raspberry Shake news. You can read the full story on their website.

The whole group is contributing to the 16th Swiss Geoscience Meeting in Bern, with one poster per person, in sessions 1, 7 an 16. Check the meeting program here.

The first paper on crustal structure in western Nepal, a study from our group, is recently accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). The Moho and the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT) is investigated using the receiver function technique. It should be an important finding as the Moho and the MHT is poorly known in the area. Now, it has a DOI and can be officially cited.

Subedi S, Hetényi G, Vergne J, Bollinger L, Lyon-Caen H, Farra V, Adhikari LB, Gupta R (2018), Geophysical Research Letters.  doi:10.1029/2018GL080911

Early November has seen Shiba Subedi successfully installing the second Raspberry Shake seismometer in the Nepali school seismology network. The station is online, and the records can be seen here. The first ever RS station in Nepal is functioning well (records are here).

Magnitudes of differential stress in the lithosphere, especially in the crust, are still disputed. Our recent work addressing this topic with numerical modelling and geophysical data from the field has just been accepted at Geophysical Journal International:

Schmalholz SM, Duretz T, Hetényi G, Medvedev S (2019) Distribution and magnitude of stress due to lateral variation of gravitational potential energy between Indian lowland and Tibetan plateau. (weblink)

Thanks to a dedicated team lead by Simon Hiscox, there are three videos available from the recent HKT2018 conference. The highlight is the invited talk of Peter Molnar about The Growth of the Tibetan Plateau, now online in full length and resolution, both here below and on YouTube.

The 33rd HKT conference is over and we keep a great memory of this event! A final, post-conference message is yet to come, with the group photo, the keynote speech’s video, etc.

Following the advice of one of the participants and a good colleague, I here share the PDF version of a 7-year old article that is not so visible, showing that seismic low-velocity zones in South Tibet are present in spots, and do not form a continuous layer.