Obituary of Prof. Maurice Mattauer

I have read today in the Geo-Tectonics distribution list the obituary of Prof. Maurice Mattauer, who passed away on the 8^th of April of 2009. I copy it here, and please accept my apologises for the late posting, but I just read that this morning:

Homage to Professor Maurice Mattauer *

** Holding the latest scientific advice that he wanted to give on the earthquake of Aquila in Italy, to appear in the "Gazette de Montpellier", 9 April of this year, Professor Maurice Mattauer died accidentally at his home April 8 2009.

Born in 1928 in Sentheim (Alsace), he makes his higher education in Besançon, he joined the CNRS in 1951, to conduct a thesis in Ouarsenis Algérien, then it will work for the service of the Card. He returned to France, appointed Professor at the University of Montpellier in 1959 where he became the leader of the team of Structural Geology. It will remain at his post as leader of Geology montpelliéraine until 1996, then Professor Emeritus of the University of Montpellier 2 until 2003. It will continue until the last few days, to come to the meeting of young researchers and former students to give its advice and criticism.

Motivated and dynamic teacher, he brought his passion for geology, rocks and fossils, to generations of students, who followed his footsteps and then raised his voice and his methods in other universities.

His books and numerous publications in the direction of specialists in the discipline "Tectonics" or the general public to share his love of the mountains and rocks all have a huge national and international success.

The mountains were his passion, and has published numerous works in "écumant " first outcrops around Montpellier, discovering in himself, with his legendary flair, fossils largest in the region such as dinosaur eggs from the Upper Cretaceous. It will launch here the foundations of the modern tectonic mapping is special for students awarded by Montpellier. It shows the importance of observing the microstructures in the understanding of mountain ranges.

After the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Massif Central where he will propose the first coherent tectonic models, he embarked on the visit of the mountains of South America and Asia, in cooperation with the Andean countries and China. He will also visit the Mountains of North America, but also the Mediterranean for which he published in 2008, the last scientific article, full of new ideas and always served by the quality of its graphics innate.

All persons who have approached Maurice Mattauer and all students have recognized him quickly an outstanding scientist and passionate living for his Science.

It forms part of this, these few men, leading others by communicating their passion to advance or to excel. It was, ultimately, a chance to have met!

During his career Maurice Mattauer has received numerous awards and honors, especially the prices of Geological Societies of France and Belgium and the Academy of Sciences.

He was also promoted to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor.

Pr. Maurice Brunel, Montpellier

* His funeral have been held in Grammont-Montpellier on Tuesday 14 April *

Mw 6.3 Earthquake in Italy

We got up this morning with the terrible news from Italy, where last night an earthquake affected significantly the location of L’Aquila in the Central Apennines region resulting in more than 90 killed (so far, at 14.00 GMT, and surely the number will increase in the next hours).

The Apennines are an accretionary wedge formed as consequence of the subduction of the Adriatic microplates under Italy from east to west, whilst from the south to the north the convergence of Africa against Europe builds the Alpine orogen and opening the Tyrrhenian sea to the west of the Italic peninsula.  

I won’t extend much in this entry; you can read better and more updated information in the news:

Powerful Italian quake kills many (BBC website)

Magnitude 6.3 – Central Italy (USGS website)

"Eine verlässliche Vorhersage war es auf keinen Fall“ (Tagesschau.de, in German)

Sadly an Italian geophysicist predicted the event –kind of–. We cannot rely on predictions. We cannot expect –yet– to trust correlations between indirect measurements and seismic phenomena. What we can do?

What we can do as geologist is help the authorities educating people, promoting the knowledge of geohazards and how to behave in the case of an Earthquake. Authorities have in their hands the power of approve correct standards for construction. A 6.3 earthquake shouldn’t have caused any fatality in a rich country like Italy. Why it has been like that? Seismicity in the Central Apennines is not new. Historic earthquakes include the one  of 1997 (Mw 6.0) which includen in a period of 2 months several M5.0 events (the Umbria-Marche seimic sequence).

Our support to the people in despair for this earthquake.

(Later I will update this article with some images and corrections... I am sending this from my email!)

Tonga and bad science

In the recent weeks we have witnessed through the media the eruption of the Tonga submarine volcano reaching the oceanic surface. Spectacular images make us feel small in this wonderful planet. The volcano is emerging day after day and, as reported by Associated Press, it is located at 10 km from the main island, Tongatapu, in a cluster of nearly 60 other volcanoes.

A few days after after the volcano got protagonism, the media also informed of a relevant earthquake in the area, happened on the March 19th, 2009. A 7.6 magnitude earthquake shaked the conctact between the Pacific, also in the vicinity of Tonga.

Well. No. Not really. I mean, yes, it happened, but not in the "vicinity of Tonga". It happened 260 km of the location of the volcano. Anyone with a slight knowledge of geology would think: "Yeah, they are close, relatively, but surely not related at all".


This thought didn't pass through the mind of the responsible of choosing the title of the news in the BBC website...: Quake may have caused eruption. Well, why do they choose this title if the video doesn't make any connection between both events? Very few people would have seen the video (hey, it's science, not a celebrity in Cannes), and most of the readers have kept in mind just that: The earthquake and the volcano may be related.

It is hardly explainable how an earthquake in such a tectonic framework (an oceanic convergence) can cause, or trigger, or affect a volcano 250-300 km away. Both phenomena are perfectly understandable if we take them independently. So, why the story in the news? Possibly is easier to sell the story like that.

I remember how difficult is to explain people how two events can happen at the same time but be absolutely independent: "Sorry, are you saying that the tsunami in Sumatra is not related with global warming? but... surely is related. We destroy our planet! And anyway, you work with satellites, you haven't been in the field". Argh.

Anyway, the good news is that there is not any material harm, and general news are talking about geology. Woohoo.

(Reading about the Tonga volcano and the earthquake I got know the blog of Maria Brumm, "Green Gabro". Take a look, is well worth doing it)

Virtual Seismic Atlas

During the 80's the explorationists had in their shelves the unique work of A.W. Bally, "The Seismic Expression of Structural Styles", published by AAPG ("AAPG Studies in Geology" series). This atlas presented and explained in several volumes different seismic lines of all around the world and touched all different types of deformation and deposition. But new times mean changes. Geology isn't an exception to this rule, and for a few years we have available online the Virtual Seismic Atlas.


The Virtual Seismic Atlas is an independent and free project based in contributions by public and private organisations and companies. It collects paradigmatic examples of seismic in differente regions, tectonic / sedimentary frameworks, deposition environments, etc. It is possible to browse it using different criteria (environment, types of structures, depositional environment and so).

http://www.seismicatlas.org/

The Virtual Seismic Atlas is sponsored by BG Group, Shell, BHP Billiton, StatoilHydro, HESS, NERC and PESGB. It also counts with the collaboration of British Geological Survey, The Geological Society, CGG Veritas, Fugro, Badley Geoscience and Midland Valley. The project director is Rob Butler, and it is hosted in the servers of the Universidad de Leeds.

Software for stereographic projection. Stereonet

It is never a bad idea to refresh our memory about the software available online for free (freeware, GNU licenses, etc) in our profession. I have thought that it would be a good idea to dedicate some posts in our website to that topic. So we start today with...:

Software for stereographic projection

There are several pieces of software that you'd like to check out for that purposes. Basically all of them do the same job: project, display, analise and modify orientation data on a stereonet. More in detail, you can project in equal area, or you can choose to project in equeal projection. You can choose the hemisphere (high or low), you can choose to work with a pole or with a plane projection... And of course, rose diagramas, changes in directions for palaeocurrents, etc.

As we know, that is a basic procedure in structural geology, and therefore, my first recommendation is to masterise the stereonet by hand, using (oh, yes!) drafting paper, a pencil and a paper stereonet (And a flat pin, of course*). It is not difficult at all, and it can be fun. I loved it during my degree.

OpenStereo: Reviewed in one of my articles here: http://www.structuralgeology.org/2011/01/openstereo-stereographic-software.html. So far, I am really impressed by it!

Stereonet (by Rick Allmendinger): In his website you can download not only Stereonet, but a fair amount of other useful tools. For non commercial purposes. It is my favourite one, as it works very well, and I haven't found any bugs in it. Go here: http://www.geo.cornell.edu/geology/faculty/RWA/programs.html

StereoNett: German software produced in the University of Bochum. This is the old version, but perhaps it can be still useful in some old machine... anyway the new version is Stereo32, that you find in this article, below :-) : http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/hardrock/downloads.htm

Stereo32: Same software than the one mention above, but rewritten and designed for Windows 2000, XP and Vista: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/hardrock/downloads.htm

If you know more software, please mention it in the comments of this article and I will add it to the list.

Soon, more software...

____________
* That reminds me my lessons of "Structural Geology" in the second year of my degree. I studied Geology in Spain, where the basic degrees was, and still is, 5 years. Two of my classmates had exactly the same results during a test, and the lecturer knew perfectly who copied from who: one of them presented his drafting paper without a hole in the center for the pin!!
:-)

Congress: Salt tectonics, sediments and prospectivity

I joined the Geo-Tectonic mail list (www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/geo-tectonics.html) several years ago and, in my opinion, one of its most useful features is the contribution of news about congresses and meetings related with structural geology and adjacent areas (of knowledge!).

In this case, Ian Alsop has sent the information related with a very interesting congress on salt tectonics, titled "Salt tectonics, sediments and prospectivity", due to be celebrated in The Geological Society next January. Not a long way, after all!

Salt Tectonics, Sediments and Prospectivity

International conference sponsored by The Geological Society, Petroleum Group and SEPM

January 20-21st 2010

The Geological Society, Burlington House, Picadilly, London.

This two day international conference aims to bring together academic and industrial geoscientists to review recent advances in our understanding of halokinetic processes and to explore the links between salt tectonics and sediments. Encouraging the interaction between structural geologists and sedimentologists is a desired outcome. Contributions are invited that address key technical issues that include:

• How does salt tectonics manifest itself in sedimentary basins?
• Comparisons of subsidence rates between tectonically generated basins and salt withdrawal minibasins?
• Prediction of reservoir presence and quality and new generation facies models
• What traps hydrocarbons in salt flank structures – salt side seal or sand pinch out?
• Salt as a trapping and breaching mechanism – are salt welds sealing or leaky?
• To what extent does salt suppress hydrocarbon maturation?
• What role does salt play in sandstone diagenesis?
• Sub-salt imaging – how far have we come, new approaches / techniques to make further improvements?
• Papers are welcomed from a wide range of sub-disciplines including, earth surface processes and landforms, outcrop or mining data, subsurface seismic, well and core data, potential fields and physical and numerical modelling.

More information, abstract deadlines and posters to download etc may be found at our web page:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/geology/events/saltsediment/

Convenors

Stuart Archer ( University of Aberdeen)

Ian Alsop (University of Aberdeen)

Adrian Hartley (University of Aberdeen)

Neil Grant (ConocoPhillips)

Richard Hodgkinson (Bowleven)

Trishear deformation: the yet to bloom concept

We are used to draw fault related folds using graphic methods involving kink folding and parallel folding. This methods allow us to get an idea of the folding mechanism ruling some structures, but in general nature is more complicated than that...

Rick Allmendinger, structural geologist from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University explains it in full in his website :-)

What the heck is "Trishear," anyway?
Eric Erslev (1991) deserves full credit for developing the concept of trishear. During his studies of the Laramide Rocky Mountain foreland in Colorado and Wyoming, he noticed that discrete fault zones within the basement diffuse outward and upward in a triangular zone of deformation in the overlying sedimentary section. He called these triangular zones of deformation "trishear." Trishear provides an alternative to the parallel kink fold description of fault-propagation folding. Unlike the simple kink fold model, trishear can produce footwall synclines, downward steepening dips and thickening and thinning of forelimb strata. Furthermore, trishear provides a richer description of heterogeneous strain distribution at the tips of propagating faults (see the above graphic), which may ultimately prove useful, for example, in studies of fracture distribution and orientation. However, whereas parallel kink fold angular relations can be determined graphically (e.g., Suppe & Medwedeff, 1990), trishear models can only be calculated numerically.
Since 1997, we have been studying trishear extensively at Cornell and have concluded that trishear structures are far more widely distributed than previously recognized. We have written general 2D and pseudo-3D trishear modeling programs which enable us to explore the complete broad range of trishear-associated deformation In these web pages, we give a brief, mostly graphical, introduction to trishear, with the intent of illustrating how it might be used. Be sure to check out the trishear movies!
This material in this site is partly based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. EAR-9814348. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Additional support comes from the Donors to the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society. And finally, there is a lot of unsupported stuff in here as well :-)

I think a good understanding of this concept should be a requirement to anyone approaching structural geology in a degree. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be a very spread idea yet. So you know... Visit it, play it, learn it!

http://www.geo.cornell.edu/RWA/trishear/default.html