Soil-gas radon anomalies in three study areas of Central-Northern Calabria (Southern Italy)

One of the most critical issues in the management of post-earthquake emergency is the prompt identification of the most damaged urban areas. Rapid detection of damage distribution is crucial for Civil Protection during the management of the first emergency phase, in order to both address assistance teams and identify priorities in planning the usability inspections, thus permitting people to go back, as safe as possible, to their houses. Generally, the estimation of building usability is performed by means of a building-by-building survey based on a form to be filled out by expert technicians (Masi et al. 2016). Different countries adopt different forms whose result in terms of usability is dependent essentially on building damage and, in some cases, vulnerability conditions of buildings. When the affected area is large, usability inspections can require a lot of time and a huge number of expert technicians. Therefore, great efforts have been made during past earthquakes in order to define rapid procedures to identify areas not severely damaged and then potentially with a low percentage of unusable buildings. In this framework, many experiences have been carried out worldwide in order to identify, in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, the damage distribution through remote sensing approaches, possibly combined to field survey data (e.g., Saito and Spence 2004; Yamazaki et al. 2004; Chesnel et al. 2007; Zhai et al. 2016; An et al. 2016; Huang et al. 2016).

     

Seismic precursors to a 2017 Nuugaatsiaq,Greenland, earthquake–landslide–tsunami event

High-frequency (5–20 Hz) seismic signals precursory to and embedded within the June 17, 2017 M_L?=?4 earthquake–landslide event are analyzed. This event in western Greenland generated a tsunami in Karrat fjord inundating Nuugaatsiaq village 32 km distant. Spectrogram and wavelet analyses of seismic data from the Greenland Ice Sheet Monitoring Network (GLISN) corroborate observations of seismic precursors at Nuugaatsiaq reported by Poli (Geophys Res Lett 44:8832–8836, 2017) and Caplan-Auerbach (in: AGU fall meeting abstracts, 2017) and reveal additional high-frequency arrivals being generated after the apparent initiation of fault rupture. New observations of seismic precursors 181 km from the Event at Upernavik, Greenland are correlated with those seen at Nuugaatsiaq. Wavelet analysis presents?>?100 significant energy peaks accelerating up to and into the earthquake–landslide event. The precursor events show a distinct, power law distribution, characterized by b values of ~?2.4. Results are compared and contrasted with small precursors observed in the studies of a natural chalk cliff landslide at Mesnil-Val, Haute Normandie, France. The earthquake–landslide appears to have been initiated by seismic precursors located at the fault scarp, leading to a small seismic foreshock and small landslide initiation, followed by a larger earthquake at the fault scarp, precipitating the primary landslide into the Karrat Fjord, which caused the subsequent tsunami.

     

Discussion of “Consequences of dike breaches and dike overflow in a bifurcating river system” by Anouk Bomers,Ralph M. J. Schielen and Suzanne J. M. H. Hulscher

In this discussion, the authors will point out that even if Bomers et al. (Nat Hazards 97:309–334, 2019) tackle an important problem, ignoring the uncertainties related to the roughness coefficients, Manning coefficients, the downstream boundary and most importantly the errors of the chosen software, HEC-RAS, are serious shortcomings of their study.