More than half of all the people in the world now live in dense urban centres. The rapid expansion of cities, particularly in low-income nations, has enabled the economic and social development of millions of people. However, many of these cities are located near active tectonic faults that have not produced an earthquake in recent…
Tag: Faulting
PhD Position Available in Fault Geomorphology and Seismic Hazard of Major Fault Zones
Lead Supervisor: Dr John Elliott (Leeds) Co-supervised by: Dr. Laura Gregory (Leeds), Dr Ekbal Hussain (BGS) & Prof. Andy Hooper (Leeds) Contact email: j.elliott@leeds.ac.uk Application: Apply through the University of Leeds portal here: Deadline: 17th June. Funding: The PhD stipend is funded for four years and is open to UK and EU applicants only (the…
Growth of Geological Structure & Topography
The relationship between individual earthquakes and the longer-term growth of topography and of geological structures is not fully understood, but is key to our ability to make use of topographic and geological data sets in the contexts of seismic hazard and wider-scale tectonics. Using observations of an earthquake at the edge of the Tarim Basin,…
Seismic Cities
The rapid urbanisation of cities alongside and on top of poorly characterised faults that are has resulted in large populations being exposed to a potentially large hazard. I am leading a recently funded project called Seismic Cities which will attempt to develop a blueprint to better tackle the question and improvement of resilience to earthquakes in…
Hazard in regions of distributed shortening
The 2011 October 23 MW 7.1 Van earthquake in eastern Turkey caused ∼600 deaths and caused widespread damage and economic loss. The seismogenic rupture was restricted to 10–25 km in depth, but aseismic surface creep, coincident with outcrop fault exposures, was observed in the hours to months after the earthquake. We combine observations from radar interferometry, seismology, geomorphology and…
Pinpointing the unbroken section of Nepal fault line and showing why Himalayas keep growing
In our study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, we show that a kink in the regional fault line below Nepal explains why the highest mountains in the Himalayas are seen to grow between earthquakes. This kink has created a ramp 20km below the surface, with material constantly being pushed up and raising the height of…
Insights into seismic and aseismic shortening of the Zagros sedimentary cover
Our findings on the 2013 Khaki earthquake in Iran suggest lithology plays a
significant role in the depth extent of slip found in reverse faults in folded belts, providing an important
control on the potential size of earthquakes.
Earthquake Monitoring Gets Boost from a New Satellite
Europe’s Sentinel-1A spacecraft and its extraordinary images of slip from the South Napa earthquake herald a new era of space-based surveillance of faults.
John Elliott 