Ben Johnson, a PhD student from the University of Oxford, describes his experiences from fieldwork over the summer of 2021. Read on to find out more about the Alai valley, glacial histories, and shortening across the northern margin of the Pamir.
Category: research updates
The South Caspian Basin (SCB) is an aseismic block that moves independently to its surroundings. Together with the Arabia-Eurasia collision, it controls the active tectonics of Turkmenistan. The directions, rates, and rotation poles of the SCB relative to Iran and Eurasia are not well resolved. In a new paper recently published in TECTONICS, we constrain the motion of the SCB by measuring the slip rate of the Main Kopeh Dagh Fault (MKDF) in Turkmenistan. Here’s what we found:
In November 2021 two of us (Ian Pierce and Richard Walker) were able to travel to Baku to begin a collaborative project between the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and the University of Oxford addressing regional tectonics, active faulting, and earthquake hazard. The project was due to begin in early 2020 but was postponed due to travel restrictions.
In this blog post, Ian Pierce reflects on some of the innovations in aerial survey introduced during his recent fieldwork in the Kyrgyz Tien Shan.
Our team has published a new paper on the seismic hazard in the Almaty region, Kazakhstan. We use high resolution satellite imagery to map faults around Almaty, Kazakhstan, and then use GEM’s OpenQuake to calculate shaking, damage and losses to the city from earthquake scenarios. Here’s what we found.
The COMET Central Asia Fault Database integrates decades of fault mapping and field-studies by researchers from the UK NERC Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET), and global collaborators.
Central Asia is home to one of the world’s great mountain ranges–the Tien Shan–which is formed by vigorous crustal convergence across a multitude of tectonic faults. Here we describe the motivation to assemble the database and the choices that we have made in its structure, which are based on utility, necessity, and limitations in available information. We are working towards a full public release of the dataset, so keep an eye out!