Tag

The Main Kopeh Dagh Fault in Turkmenistan is more than impressive. It’s a NW-SE trending right-lateral strike-slip fault with a wonderful morphological expression that can be traced for several hundreds of kilometres. This fault marks the northernmost deformation front of...

Turkmenistan hosts one of the most spectacular faults in Central Asia. The Ashgabat Fault is a more than 300 km long strike-slip feature with a significant vertical component of motion and a remarkable expression in the landscape. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s capital, is...

From 7-11 September, 2016, the conference “Earthquake science and hazard in Central Asia” took place in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The meeting brought together earth scientists and social scientists from the EwF project, and scientists and decision makers from Kazakhstan....

Background: one of our priorities in the Earthquakes without Frontiers project has been to understand how earthquake science is used in disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts across the partnership countries. To what extent are DRR activities informed by, or underpinned by,...

One of the focus areas of the EwF project is the Tien Shan, especially the northern part of the mountain range in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Here we can study how the continents deform as a far-field effect of the convergence between India and Eurasia. We investigate how the...

The Tien Shan in Central Asia is one of the largest mountain belts on Earth, stretching for more than 1500 km. Its ongoing deformation is driven by the collision of India with Eurasia. Some of the strongest intracontinental earthquakes that we know about have hit the region...

A new Earth-observation satellite called Sentinel-1A has been used for the first time to map the ground movements caused by the magnitude 6 earthquake that shook up California’s wine-producing Napa Valley on 24 August 2014 (European Space Agency). The interferogram of the rupture...

One of the topics that has emerged as a major concern across the Earthquakes without Frontiers partnership during the first two years of the project is the problem of earthquake-triggered landslides. While it is well known that large earthquakes can trigger many thousands of...

By Yu Zhou (University of Oxford) This April, part of the EwF group (Professor Philip England, Professor Barry Parsons and Dr. Richard Walker from the University of Oxford; Professor Lena Dominelli and Dr. Katie Oven from Durham University; John Young from the Overseas...

New Zealand is a country with a high rate of tectonic activity, such that earthquakes are an ever-present hazard across much of the country.  In South Island the most important geological structure is the Alpine Fault, which runs for about 500 km along the west side of the...

It is hard to miss the mountains in Almaty, Kazakhstan. If you look south between the trees and the tall buildings rising all around the city, you can catch a glimpse of the snowy peaks of the Zailisky Alatau from nearly everywhere in the city. They rise to nearly 5000 m, and...

By Dr John Elliott, project partner and Post-Doctoral Research Associate at COMET+, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford This article was first published in the Blue Marble,The magazine of the UK’s National Centre for Earth Observation, in Winter 2011. Almost two...