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The Asian Seismological Commission, with a geographical jurisdiction of all Asia and the South Pacific Region, including Australia and New Zealand, has been formed as a regional scientific commission affiliated to the IUGG/IASPEI. Asia, with its vast geographical dimensions and large population has the most intense seismicity and is vulnerable to a high degree of seismic hazard compared to other regions of the world. During the past hundred years, out of a total of 101 earthquakes of magnitude 8 and higher, 58 occurred in Asian and South Pacific regions. In view of this, mutual consultations and exchange of information and expertise among Asian and South Pacific region countries is essential. The first meeting of the Asian Seismological Commission was held at Tangshan, China, during the IASPEI regional assembly from August 1-3, 1996.
The Second Meeting of the Asian Seismological Commission and Symposium on 'Earthquake Hazard Assessment and Earth's Interior Related Topics' (ASC98) was held at the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), Hyderabad, India during 1-3 December, 1998. The event was sponsored by International Association for Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior, (IASPEI), Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India (DST) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India. About 200 abstracts were received. The event had an international gathering with delegates not only from India and other Asian countries but also from other parts of the world. About 150 delegates, with 70 participants from outside India from 26 countries attended the event.
The scientific programme included three invited ASC lectures, delivered by Y T Chen of China on "Source parameters of the Nov.8, 1997 Mani, northern Tibet earthquake", by E R Engdahl of USA on "High resolution P wave imaging of mantle structure beneath southern Asia" and by H K Gupta of India on "Major and great earthquakes in the Himalayan region"; and eight regular scientific sessions of invited and contributed papers, concerned with papers on eight broad topics: Earthquake Prediction and Seismic Hazard Assessment (S1); Process and Structure of the Lithosphere (S2); Earthquakes and Tectonics of Intra- and Inter-Plate Regions (S3); Physics of Earthquake Processes (S4); Recent Devastating Earthquakes (S5); Induced Seismicity (S6); Heat Flow and Crustal Thermal Structure (S7); and Current Trends in Dissemination of Seismological and Other Geophysical Information and Educating the Public on Seismic Disaster Mitigation (S8).
A workshop was held on GARNET (Global Alliance of Regional Networks) program. A pre-meeting International training Course on Seismic Monitoring, Data analysis and Exchange was held. The faculty consisted of scientists from NGRI, GeoForschungs Zentrum Potsdam (GFZ), Germany, the University of Bergen, Norway, Kinematrics SA, Switzerland and the India Meteorological Department. The course was attended by 25 trainees (selected from amongst 70 applicants ): India 8, China 6, Iran 3, Oman 2 and one each from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Yemen, Indonesia, Georgia and Zambia. The main topics covered in this course were: basics of seismology and seismometry; data acquisition; observatory practice; data analysis and exchange; and earthquake source parameters and mechanisms. A series of lectures, practical experiments in the field and plenty of hands-on exercises on computers were held. Nearly a dozen SUN workstations and Pentium PCs were available to the participants. Also, a scientific excursion to the epicentral site of the devastating Latur 1993 earthquake, which is situated about 250 kms away from Hyderabad, was organized. UNESCO, IDNDR, COSTED , IASPEI, GFZ , DST and INSA sponsorered the course.
The deliberations in the second meeting of ASC, which had a very involved participation of delegates from different parts of the world, demonstrates clearly and emphatically the need and the will for regional and global cooperation in the field of seismology with particular emphasis on seismic hazard related issues. Being encouraged by this, it was decided to hold the third meeting of ASC in the year 2000 almost along the same lines as the second meeting, but with the added scope of larger international participation. The international participation would be basically from the countries of Asia and, as at Hyderabad, all efforts will be made to invite key people from developed countries to address and share their experience with participants from coming from the developing countries. The main theme of the symposium would again be seismic hazard assessment and Earth's interior related topics - only the scope would be further enlarged. It is planned to hold a pre-meeting training course because regular training is the backbone of all scientific endeavors as it provides state of the art knowledge and expertise.
IASPEI intends to continue to make seismic risk reduction a top priority during the second half of the Decade. It has called upon seismological groups in member countries and individual Earth scientists to participate in the effort to reduce the great danger from earthquakes in many places around the world. IASPEI through its Commission for IDNDR has expanded its programs to study the main attributes of earthquakes and to disseminate globally knowledge on earthquakes to governments, engineers, planners, and the public.
An International Conference on Modern Preparation Response Systems for Earthquake, Tsunami, and Volcanic Hazard was held at Santiago, Chile 27-30 April, 1998. The Conference was organized by the Chile National Committee on the International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction under the auspices of IASPEI and IAVCEI. The lead work was taken, in Chile, by the Instituto Geografico Militar de Chile (the national mapping agency) and, internationally, by the IASPEI Commission for the IDNDR. The meeting began on the 27 April in the Centro Convenciones Edificio Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. The opening plenary and closing plenary sessions were attended by leading figures in the fields of disaster reduction and emergency response in Chile.
The Conference was rated as very valuable by the two hundred participants. These included leading figures in the social and technical aspects of preparation and warning of natural hazards from North America and Europe. Some thirty countries were represented. The opportunity to discuss integrated mitigation of the three related geological hazards was a feature.
The Conference was opened by an address by Philippe Boulle, Director of the United Nations Secretariat for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. He spoke on "Towards Natural Disaster Reduction in the 21st Century" and stressed that the most effective approach to reducing losses is prevention. "There is an unfounded tendency to consider that investigation to strengthen the existing infrastructure before disasters will cost much more than the cost of response after disasters. It is exactly just the reverse."
Some ninety papers were presented during the regular sessions of the conference and the abstracts of most of them are contained in a book of abstracts published by the Instituto Geographico Militar and are available on request (seisvolc@conf.dgf.uchile.cl ). These papers contain many up-to-date statements of the hazards, particularly in the Americas, and the present technical status of warning and alert systems. During these oral lectures, simultaneous English and Spanish translations were provided. There was attention, for example, to gas and electric utility systems, exposed to significant geologic hazards, thus causing unacceptable disruptions in customer service and threats to life safety. It was pointed out that modern instrumentation systems that collect, analyze, distribute, and archive data on earthquakes and associated hazards have already been put in place successfully in a number of countries. These have improved the accuracy of long-term assessments of the likelihood of future hazards, including ground shaking and tsunami generation, and improve the speed of emergency response through the rapid determination of earthquake location and extent and level of earthquake damage.
Another highlight was the effort of five Working Groups with membership drawn from conference participants with diverse countries and expertise represented. A set of recommendations from the Working Groups is now being prepared in a separate conference manual, which will be distributed widely to participants at the IUGG Assembly in Birmingham, England in 1999. It is believed that these recommendations will provide a strong and lasting conclusion to IASPEI's and IAVCEI's contributions to the International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction.
At the end of the Conference there was a Field Trip to the Observatorio Volcanologico de Los Andes del Sur, Villarrica Volcano, and Puerto Saavedra (ruined by the great 1960 tsunami). The excursion was led by Dr. H. Moreno Rios.
Special thanks for their sustained efforts are due to Brigadier Sergio Matus (Chile IUGG representative), Crl Juan Gutierrez, Secretary of the Local Organizing Committee, and Professor E. Kausel, of the IDNDR Commission. The Conference was supported financially by participant fees, grants from the IUGG and IASPEI, Kinemetrics Inc. and Risk Management Solutions, Inc. The Instituto Geografico Militar made substantial contributions to expenses and Conference staff.
Modern scientific investigations of earthquakes began in the 1880's, and the International Association of Seismology was organized in 1901 to promote collaboration of scientists and engineers in studying earthquakes. With rapid advances in the 20th century, many branches of seismology developed and there is not an authoritative reference that summarizes our present knowledge about earthquake and engineering seismology. We think it is appropriate that an international handbook be published on the occasion of the Association's centennial in 2001. It is our hope that this Handbook will help to bridge the gap between seismologists and earthquake engineers and will be truly international in scope.
Our aims for the Handbook are:
It will consist of about 84 chapters grouped into 10 parts, with 3 CD-ROMs containing materials to augment the printed chapters, and including a compilation of seismic data from around the world and a global earthquake database with software for displaying seismicity maps. We plan to have the manuscripts ready by the summer of 1999, reviewed and revised by the summer of 2000, and published in the year 2001.
It is also our desire to prepare an affordable publication. Academic Press will publish the Handbook as a 1,200 page, 8 1/2 by 11-inch casebound volume with 3 CD-ROMs, for a price of about $150.
The publication of this Handbook is under the auspices of the Committee on Education of the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior (IASPEI). The Handbook is being edited by Willie Lee, Hiroo Kanamori, and Paul C. Jennings. To help us in organizing the contents of the Handbook and in reviewing manuscripts, we have organized an editorial advisory board.
IASPEI has formed two new standing working bodies, a) the Sub-Committee on Training within its Committee on Education and b) the Working group on the Manual of Seismological Observatory Practice within its Commission on Practice. The former aims at identifying training requirements, initiating training opportunities, consulting in the organisation of courses and the production of training materials. The Sub-Committee provides, through the IASPEI Home Page, information on available training opportunities and related training materials as hard copies or in electronic form.
While there exist good text books and many university curricula on more general or theoretical, research-oriented aspects of seismology there is a lack of job-related education, training and instruction material in the field of observational seismology. Although the last (1979) edition of the Manual of Seismological Observatory Practice (MSOP) is now (largely) available on the web via http://www.seismo.com/msop/msop_intro.html it covers analogue techniques only. Computer and communication technologies, as well as the availability of modern broadband sensors, have revolutionised seismological practice during the last two decades of the 20th century. This necessitates the elaboration of a new MSOP. It is currently under development as an electronic data base and can be acceded through the above internet address.
The web-based NMSOP is maintained as continuously up-graded, up-dated and complemented reference source with integrated training modules. This shall be achieved through an open interactive dialog between users and contributors. A condensed version is planned to be published as a handbook, complemented by an easy to update loose-leave collection of job-related worksheets.
The systematically structured tutorial body of the manual aims at creating a broader interdisciplinary problem awareness and understanding of the scientific-technical and theoretical fundamentals of seismological observations and their routine analysis and at the motivation of observatory personell. It will be complemented by self-explanatory worksheets and exercises with solutions. They provide instructions, relevant formulae, programs, references data and sources needed for proper execution of the most important observatory tasks such as site selection, instrument installation and calibration, seismogram analysis, earthquake location, parameter determination etc. Manual chapters and worksheets may be used as training modules for observatory practice.
The European Seismological Commission (ESC), with the financial support of IASPEI and UNESCO, has sponsored two training courses for Young Seismologists in order to expose them to data acquisition, processing techniques and empirical evaluation of site effects under the tutorship of many established seismologists throughout Europe and the world. The recent training course in Tel Aviv, Israel, took place in the two days before the ESC General Assembly, 20-21 August, 1998, and focused on empirical evaluation of site effects. The lecturers, Avi Shapira, Sam Frydman, Pierre-Yves Bard and Kuvvet Atakan, each covered their specialist subjects.
Thirteen students attended the course from nine countries. Questionnaires were distributed amongst the students inviting them to comment on the overall impression of the course together with level struck by each individual lecturer. The responses indicated a high rating for the course, overall, although the individual lecture questionnaires produced a mixed reaction with regard to the level of difficulty and detail, and these constructive comments will be taken into account for future training courses. Distribution of lecture notes before the course was recommended in order to expose the students to the material and allow them to prepare for the lectures. An extension of the course to three days was also proposed by many of the students who felt that too little time was allocated to each subject.
It was clear that the students had a varied level of experience and background knowledge, a situation which is always difficult to cater for. The lecturers are, therefore, commended for the acknowledged overall success of the course which resulted from their care and attention to content and providing the students with lecture notes (a recommendation from the YSTC in Reykjavik).
It is recommended that, in future, lecturers receive prior information on participants' experience. Lecture notes should be distributed prior to the training course to allow students to review material before attending. These notes will also serve as a reference set when students have returned to their institutes.
Following receipt of a positive report on the training course, the ESC Bureau thanked the lecturers and organisers on behalf of ESC members and endorsed a proposal to hold a third training course before the next General Assembly in Portugal (3-8 September, 2000).
An IUGG/SSB International Training Course sponsored by IASPEI on Continental Earthquakes and Mitigation of Seismic Hazard, was held in Beijing, China, 26 September - 5 October 1998. The training course was dedicated to an introduction to recent developments in modern seismology and its application to seismic hazard mitigation. The analysis of digital seismic data, quantitative aspects in engineering seismology, empirical approaches to earthquake prediction study, and sociological problems of seismic hazard mitigation were highly stressed during the training course. Field investigation and computer practice were also arranged. The training course was especially designed for young scientists from countries (especially developing countries) suffering or potentially suffering from seismic hazard.
As part of IASPEI's outreach effort, the publication transfer program of the Committee for Developing Countries makes available basic texts and publications on seismology and related earth sciences to institutions in need. The IASPEI Secretary-General serves as a clearing house for requests and offers. Institutions who have publication needs, as well as those with surplus publications, including back runs of journals, should send a list to the Secretary-General. Requests for payment or reimbursement of reasonable shipping costs can be made to IASPEI.
The current holdings of the IASPEI Office are listed below:
IASPEI uses this system to broadcast announcements about forthcoming meetings and other information of interest to IASPEI members.
IASPEI continues development of its Home Page on the WorldWideWeb which contains organizational information, a publications list, meeting announcements and Internet connections and other information of interest to IASPEI scientists. The current address for this web site is: http://www.seismo.com/iaspei/
The IASPEI Secretariat with the assistance of Carl Kisslinger (Editor) has published a 26 page Brochure entitled "The International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior: Cooperation for Better Understanding of the Earth". Copies can be obtained from the IASPEI Secretariat.
The IASPEI Secretary-General prepares and distributes irregularly an Association Newsletter. The content is primarily personal reports by IASPEI Commission Chairs, meeting organizers, and other member scientists involved in IASPEI sponsored activities. The Newsletter is irregularly distributed to those who have Internet addresses using the IASPEI Bulk E-Mail System. Hard copy versions of the Newsletter are distributed to those who do not have Internet addresses with the assistance of the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad, India.
The IASPEI Committee for Developing Countries circulates bi-annually from Hyderabad a Newsletter intended to provide a forum for exchanging news and views of geophysical importance among geoscientists, particularly from developing countries.
The IASPEI/IDNDR Secretariat in Beijing, China, circulates irregularly a Newsletter concerning IASPEI/IDNDR activities. The Secretariat also publishes a news magazine in Chinese.
Klemperer, S.L. and Mooney, W.D. (Editors). Special Issue. Deep Seismic Reflection Probing of the Continents, I: General Results and New Methods, Selected papers from the 7th International Symposium held at Asilomar, California, USA, 15-20 September 1996, Tectonophysics, v. 286, 1998.
Klemperer, S.L. and Mooney, W.D. (Editors). Special Issue. Deep Seismic Reflection Probing of the Continents, II: A Global Survey, Selected papers from the 7th International Symposium held at Asilomar, California, USA, 15-20 September 1996, Tectonophysics, v. 288, 1998.
Johnston, M., Parrot, M. (Editors). Special Issue. Electromagnetic Effects of Earthquakes and Volcanoes, Proceedings of the IASPEI Symposium held during the 28th General Assembly in Boulder, USA, Tectonophysics, v. 105, 1998.
Trifu, C.I., Fehler, M. (Editors). Special Issue. New Trends in Seismological Research: Studies of Seismicity Induced by Mining, Petroleum and Geothermal Activitiers, Proceedings of the IASPEI Symposium held during the 28th General Assembly in Boulder, USA, Tectonophysics, v. 289, 1998.
Cermak, V. (Editor). Special Issue. Heat Flow and the Structure of the Lithosphere - IV, Selected papers from the 4th International Workshop held at Trest, Czech Republic, 9-15 June 1996, Tectonophysics, v. 291, 1998.
Suyehiro, K., Montagner, J.-P.. (Editors). Special Issue. Seafloor Observatories and Geophysical Networks: The Present and the Future, Proceedings of the IASPEI Symposium held during the 28th General Assembly in Boulder, USA, Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, v. 108, 1998.
The Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program (GSHAP) was launched in 1992 by the International Lithosphere Program (ILP) with the support of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), and endorsed as a demonstration program in the framework of the United Nations International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (UN/IDNDR).
In order to mitigate the risk associated to the recurrence of earthquakes, the GSHAP promotes a regionally coordinated, homogeneous approach to seismic hazard evaluation; the ultimate benefits are improved national and regional assessments of seismic hazards, to be used by national decision makers and engineers for land use planning and improved building design and construction.
The GSHAP was implemented in the 1992-1998 period with active participation by IASPEI commissions and working groups and is coming to conclusion. All regional activities are now completed, and the publication of all regional results and of the GSHAP map of global seismic hazard is under way.
Regional reports, GSHAP yearly reports, summaries and maps of seismicity, source zones and seismic hazard are on the GSHAP homepage on http://seismo.ethz.ch/GSHAP/. This report summarizes the development, the regional activities and the achievements of the GSHAP.
IASPEI continues its participation in STEND, an information exchange program aimed at increasing awareness of available technology which is being developed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Each software volume of the IASPEI Software Library includes the executable code, examples on floppy diskettes, and printed documentation.
Under the auspices of the Working Group on Personal Computers, a PC shareware library is being published on diskette, including files with short-form manuals of the programs. The Library provides for fast and wide distribution of geophysical programs and utilities, reduced or demonstration versions of geophysical software, and beta-versions of new programs to be included in future volumes of the SSL
In accordance with the recommendations of the IASPEI Working Group on International Seismological Data Centers adopted 20 August 1997 during the the 29th General Assembly, Greece, the initiative group including Prof. N.V. Kondorskaya, Dr. M.N. Zhizhin, Dr. E. Chirkov, Dr. A.E. Beriozko suggest the Workgroup "World Data Centers" to organize the teleconference with the provisional name "Virtual Seismological Observatory (Seismological Data and Observation Practice)". World Data Centers collaboration will serve as the structural basis of the teleconference. Joint Institute of Physics of the Earth RAS and World Data Center B (Moscow) have supported the idea of the teleconference and will share their hardware and network resources with it. The teleconference "Virtual Seismological Observatory (Seismological Data and Observation Practice)" is starting operation and available on WWW-site http://socrates.wdcb.rssi.ru/wdcwg/.
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November 20, 2007
Maintained by: Alice Walker abw@bgs.ac.uk at the British Geological Survey