Bulger trial witness recalls brush with death

By Richard Valdmanis

BOSTON (Reuters) - A former professional gambler told jurors on Friday how he survived a gunfire attack that decapitated a passenger in his car, as prosecutors sought to pin the murder of 19 victims on reputed mobster James "Whitey" Bulger.

Bulger, who had been on the run for 16 years, faces a life sentence for the murders in a sensational trial that has riveted Boston and attracted large crowds, including Oscar-winning actor Robert Duvall on Friday.

Duvall, who starred in the movie "The Godfather" and is in Boston shooting a film called "The Judge," sat at the back of the courtroom.

"Just thought it was interesting that's all," he said, according to a tweet from Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy.

Frank Capizzi, 78, testified he was on his way to see his mother in Boston's North End when a torrent of gunfire struck the car he was in, riddling him with lead and decapitating one of his friends.

"I was hit in the head and could feel warm blood running down my neck," Capizzi said. He reached for a fellow passenger "and my hand went into his neck where his head should have been," he added.

Witnesses, including former Winter Hill Gang member John "The Executioner" Martorano, have sought to link Bulger to the bloody trail of killings that haunted the city for decades and inspired Martin Scorcese's Academy Award-winning 2006 film "The Departed."

Bulger, 83, is charged with killing or ordering the murder of 19 people as head of Boston's Winter Hill crime gang in the 1970s and 1980s. Bulger has pleaded not guilty to all charges. If convicted, he faces the possibility of life in prison.

The trial has transported jurors back to an era when machine-gun-toting gangsters shot each other in phone booths and buried bodies under bridges in a bloody quest for control of the lucrative criminal underworld of drugs dealers and bookies.

Prosecutors on Friday paraded an arsenal of assault weapons through the courtroom that ballistics experts said were seized from Winter Hill Gang members and their associates - ranging from World War Two-era automatic rifles called ?grease guns' to pocket-size revolvers.

Martorano, who confessed to 20 murders but received a lenient 12-year sentence for testifying against his former partners, said earlier this week he preferred a snub-nosed .38 revolver for late nights at the clubs.

SHOT IN THE BACK

Two family members of alleged victims of the Winter Hill Gang also spoke on Friday, including Joseph Angeli, who said he found out his father was killed on his 14th birthday.

"My mom determined it was too dangerous for us to travel to the funeral," he told the jury, adding his family had suddenly left Boston for California prior to his father's death because "things were dangerous."

Martorano previously testified that he killed Angeli's father, Joseph Notorangeli, in 1974 under orders from Bulger who believed the man had killed a mafia ally.

Testimony from Capizzi, a white-bearded man with dark sunglasses, was some of the most riveting to date in what is expected to be a four-month trial.

Capizzi agreed to testify after he was granted immunity by U.S. District Judge Denise Casper. He has said he suspects the shooters who injured him on March 19, 1973, were from the Winter Hill Gang, though he admitted on Friday under cross examination that there were several other criminal groups operating in Boston's North End at the time.

He said doctors removed 11 bullets from his back during a four-hour operation after the shooting, but left many others in. "I was imbedded," he said.

"I'll be 79 in November, I think," Capizzi said. He noted that he sometimes hears plain English as Sicilian due to a medical condition.

Bulger fled Boston after a 1994 tip from the corrupt FBI agent that arrest was imminent. He evaded arrest for 16 years before law enforcement caught up with him living in hiding in Santa Monica, California on June 22, 2011.

* Editor's note: This report contains material that may upset some readers

(Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Richard Chang)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bulger-trial-witness-recalls-brush-death-205613074.html

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Ebola thwarted in mice by drugs for infertility, cancer

Extensive search of existing medicines turns up two that seem to fend off deadly virus

Extensive search of existing medicines turns up two that seem to fend off deadly virus

By Nathan Seppa

Web edition: June 19, 2013

Two drugs already on the market for other purposes can halt Ebola virus in mice. The findings open the way for further testing of the drugs, clomiphene and toremifene, against the deadly virus.

Scientists screened more than 2,000 drugs against Ebola, a process that required the highest level of safety precautions because the virus is so lethal. Several drugs called selective estrogen receptor modulators showed promise, including clomiphene, marketed as Clomid and prescribed to treat infertility, and toremifene, used to treat advanced breast cancer.

In the June 19 Science Translational Medicine, researchers report that each drug prevented Ebola virus from commandeering cells in lab-dish experiments. The researchers also injected mice with one form of the Ebola virus, and nine of 10 mice given clomiphene one hour after exposure survived a month-long observation period. Five of 10 mice getting toremifene died within 10 days, but the other five survived the month. All mice given the virus without the drugs died within a week.

The drugs bottled up Ebola in a cell compartment called an endosome, which the virus uses as a way station when it invades a cell. How the drugs thwart the virus there is unclear, says study coauthor Gene Olinger, a virologist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md. But the results suggest that the drugs might stop other versions of the Ebola virus and the related Marburg virus, another deadly pathogen. In theory, the drugs would be given to patients and health care workers in an outbreak, he says.

?This is an interesting study, and it?s the way one wants to go with these viruses,? says Stephan Becker, a virologist at Philips University in Marburg, Germany. Ebola burst on the scene in 1976 with deadly outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan. But it has been a sporadic menace, racking up fewer than 2,300 victims worldwide. Despite a stunning mortality rate, Becker says, the small numbers suggest that the best strategy against Ebola is to repurpose drugs already cleared for other uses.

While testing an established drug for a new use is faster than starting from scratch, Olinger says, approval of these drugs for Ebola might still take five to 10 years. There is currently no cure for an Ebola infection.

---

Suggested Reading

N. Seppa. Ebola Die-Off: Gorilla losses tallied in central Africa. Science News. Volume 170, Dec. 9, 2006, p. 371. [Go to]

N. Seppa. Studies shed light on Ebola?s M.O. Science News. Online August 24, 2011. [Go to]

J. S. Towner et al. Generation of eGFP expressing recombinant Zaire Ebolavirus for analysis of early pathogenesis events and high-throughput antiviral drug screening. Virology. Volume 332, 2005, p. 20. [Go to]

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/351110/title/Ebola_thwarted_in_mice_by_drugs_for_infertility_cancer

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App to protect private data on iOS devices finds almost half of other apps access private data

June 20, 2013 ? Almost half of the mobile apps running on Apple's iOS operating system access the unique identifier of the devices where they're downloaded, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have found. In addition, more than 13 percent access the devices' location and more than 6 percent the address book. The researchers developed a new app that detects what data the other apps running on an iOS device are trying to access.

The findings are based on a study of 130,000 users of jailbroken iOS devices, where users have purposefully removed restrictions that keep apps from accessing the iPhone's operating system. Most apps in the study were downloaded from Apple's App Store and access the same type of information on unlocked, jailbroken, phones and on locked phones, said Yuvraj Agarwal, a research scientist in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, who co-authored the study with fellow researcher Malcolm Hall. Agarwal will present the findings at ACM MobiSys, the premier mobile systems conference, which takes place June 25 to 28 in Taipei, Taiwan.

The findings suggest that although Apple's App Store no longer accepts new apps or app updates that access the unique identifier as of March of this year, many apps can still get a hold of that information. The unique identifier allows app vendors and advertisers to track users' behaviors across all the different apps on their devices, including iPhones, iPads and iPods. In addition, some apps can associate the unique identifier with the user's email and other personal information.

The researchers believe that it's the first time anyone has done such an extensive privacy study focused on iOS-based apps across a large user population.

The ProtectMyPrivacy App

To carry out their study, researchers developed an app of their own, called ProtectMyPrivacy, or PMP. It lets users know what personal information the other apps on their devices are trying to access. PMP enables users to selectively allow or deny access to this information on an app-by-app basis, based on whether they feel the apps need the information to function properly -- for example, a map app needs to access the location of a device to provide driving directions. iOS devices currently notify users when apps try to access location, photos and contacts. But they do not notify users when apps access the unique identifier or music library and users can't deny access to those two pieces of information.

Since gathering data for the study, researchers have also added notifications and recommendations for when an app accesses other privacy-sensitive information, such as a devices' front and back camera, microphone and photos.

PMP also makes recommendations about whether to allow the other apps to access user data, based on an extensive crowdsourcing 'recommendation engine' that compiles the privacy decisions made by other users.

"We wanted to empower users to take control of their privacy," said Agarwal, who is also an alumnus of UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. "The choice should be in users' hands."

For locked devices, researchers are currently providing a web page that tells users which information more than 150 apps for iOS -- some of the most popular -- are trying to access and gives recommendations about whether to allow or deny access. The page can be viewed at http://www.protectmyprivacy.org/liveview/

For example, Facebook, the most popular app, accesses the devices' identifier, location and contacts. PMP's crowdsourcing engine recommends denying access to the identifier and contacts music, but allowing access to location.

Findings by the numbers

ProtectMyPrivacy has already been downloaded from the Cydia store by more than 130,000 users since March 2012. Its users have downloaded and used more than 225,000 unique apps from Apple's App Store. The researchers analyzed the data accessed by those apps and found that 48.1 percent of them accessed the device's unique identifier; 13.2 percent the location information; 6.2 percent the address book; and 1.6 percent the music library.

As of January 2013, Apple reported that it had sold 500 million iOS devices. Estimates of how many are jailbroken vary, but Forbes reported in February 2013 that seven million devices had been jailbroken in just four days after a new jailbreaking tool was released. Cydia, an app store that caters only to jailbroken devices, had 23 million users as of March 2013 -a sizeable portion of Apple's mobile devices.

Recommendations to protect your privacy

Almost all of PMP's users -- 99 percent-- voluntarily shared their privacy decisions, indicating which apps they think should be allowed -- or denied -- access to their privacy-sensitive data. These decisions -- which are contributed anonymously -- are then processed on PMP servers to generate the crowdsourced privacy recommendations shown to users. As a result, PMP is able to make recommendations for 97 percent of the 10,000 most popular iPhone apps. "We have already shown millions of recommendations, and more than two-thirds of all our recommendations are accepted by our users, showing that they really like this unique feature of PMP," said Agarwal. Users chose to deny access to one or more pieces of sensitive data for 48.1 percent of apps.

The version of PMP available in the Cydia store gives users the option to feed fictitious or anonymized information to nosy apps. Examples include an address book filled with made-up entries, a random location that may be in a completely different country, and a randomly generated unique identifier.

The researchers say that they do not recommend jailbreaking your iPhone to install PMP, because doing so could potentially leave a user open to other vulnerabilities. But in order to conduct their research, they needed to be able to intercept information about the privacy-protected data that apps were accessing. This required low-level access to the operating system, which is not technically possible on locked, non-jailbroken, iOS devices.

Sometimes, it is not the apps themselves that access the data, but a third-party library or code contained within the apps. For example, Flixster, a popular app for movie reviews and recommendations, in its 5.2 version, was flagged for accessing some private data. Flixster contacted Agarwal and Hall to say that it does no such thing. The computer scientists did some digging and found that a third-party ad library used by the app was accessing users' address books and sending back information. "We provided feedback to the app's developers in case they are unaware that a third party library may be accessing their users' private data," recalled Hall, a visiting researcher in Agarwal's Synergy Lab at UC San Diego. He also pointed out that "an updated version of Flixster now uses another ad library that does not access this kind of information."

Agarwal and Hall tried submitting to the Apple Store a "lite" version of their app that wouldn't interact with the iOS operating system, but the app was rejected. That version would have given users information about the data specific apps access and recommendations about what to allow and deny. It would not have given users the ability to protect their data by providing fictitious information.

Agarwal will join the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor in the fall.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/mlY34Ht1veE/130620101202.htm

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PS3 users report 4.45 update locks up systems, may be tied to large HDDs (updated)

Planned to turn on your PS3 for some The Last of Us action tonight? According to a thread on the PlayStation Support forums, if you're prompted to install the latest firmware update version 4.45 then you may want to hold off for the moment. A number of owners are reporting their systems will no longer fully boot up after the update, although the problem may only affect users with hard drives installed that are 500GBs or larger. According to the changelog, it was supposed to allow users to select whether or not they want an in-game notification when a trophy is earned. If it is tied to user-replaced hard drives, then it wouldn't be the first time -- v3.41 resulted in a few corrupted PlayStation 3 drives a few years ago. Check the thread for more details, if we hear anything from Sony then we'll let you know when it's safe to press OK.

Update: It appears the update has been pulled and users are no longer being prompted to download it, but we still haven't received any official response from Sony on the situation.

Update 2: According to the PlayStation Europe Twitter account, Sony is aware of the problem, and has taken 4.45 offline to investigate the issue.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony

Comments

Via: @Wario64 (Twitter)

Source: PlayStation 3 Support Forum, PlayStation Europe (Twitter)

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/0GvdbDTQjDg/

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Afghan leader balks at Taliban talks

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Afghanistan's president said Wednesday he will not pursue peace talks with the Taliban unless the United States steps out of the negotiations, while also insisting the militant group stop its violent attacks on the ground after it claimed responsibility for a rocket attack that killed four Americans.

Hamid Karzai's strong response and the Taliban attack deflated hopes for long-stalled talks aimed at ending nearly 12 years of war in Afghanistan, just a day after the United States and the Taliban said they would begin initial meetings in Qatar.

Karzai had said Tuesday that he would send representatives from his High Peace Council to Qatar for talks but aides said he changed his mind after objecting to the way the announcement was handled, in particular the Taliban's use of its formal name "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" in opening an office in Doha.

Shafiullah Nooristani, a member of the High Peace Council, told The Associated Press that the use of the name violated agreements Karzai's government had made with the U.S. and caused diplomatic issues for Afghanistan.

"The agreement was that the office should open only ? and only ? for negotiations, not as a political entity like a parallel institution to the Afghan Embassy which is already there," Nooristan said.

In an attempt at damage control, Qatar's Foreign Ministry said late Wednesday that the Taliban had violated an agreement with them to call the office the "Political Bureau of the Taliban Afghan in Doha." It was not clear from the official Qatar News Agency report, however, if the Taliban would be forced to change the name.

Karzai also suspended talks with on a new U.S.-Afghan security deal that would allow some American troops to remain in the country after the international combat mission ends in 2014 to protest the fact that his government was being left out of the initial process.

The twin statements came despite an olive branch from Barack Obama to Karzai, with the U.S. president telling reporters during a visit to Berlin that "ultimately we're going to need to see Afghans talking to Afghans."

Obama said later the U.S. had anticipated "there were going to be some areas of friction, to put it mildly, in getting this thing off the ground. That's not surprising. They've been fighting there for a long time" and mistrust is rampant. Obama said it was important to pursue a parallel track toward reconciliation even as the fighting continues, and it would up to the Afghan people whether that effort ultimately bears fruit.

Violence also cast a pall over the talks, with the Taliban claiming responsibility for a rocket attack on the Bagram Air Base that killed four American soldiers.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the insurgents fired two rockets into the base outside the Afghan capital, Kabul, late Tuesday. American officials confirmed the base had come under attack by indirect fire, a term used for mortar shells or rockets, and that four U.S. troops were killed.

Also Tuesday, five Afghan police officers were killed at a security outpost in Helmand province by five of their comrades, officials said, the latest in a string of so-called "insider attacks" that have shaken the confidence of the nascent Afghan security forces. Local official Mohammad Fahim Mosazai said the five officers had only been on the local force for three months. He blamed the killings on Taliban infiltrators, saying the gunmen escaped with the victims' weapons.

The U.S. and Taliban announced Tuesday they would begin preliminary peace talks in Qatar without the Afghan government. The expectation had been that Karzai's High Peace Council would follow up with its own talks with the Taliban a few days later but that now seems unlikely, at least in the near term.

Nooristan, however, held out hope it would still be possible.

"We are working to solve these contradictions and fix these problems and act based on the agreements we had before so the High Peace Council can go there and start the peace talks," he said.

The Taliban have for years refused to speak to the Afghan government or the Peace Council, set up by Karzai three years ago, because they considered them to be American "puppets." Taliban representatives have instead talked to American and other Western officials in Doha and other places, mostly in Europe.

Obama cautioned that the peace talks with the Taliban would be neither quick nor easy but that their opening a political office in Doha was an "important first step toward reconciliation" between the Islamic militants and the government of Afghanistan.

Following meetings with high-ranking Afghan politicians and Peace Council executive members, however, Karzai's office said they had decided not to participate at all unless their conditions were met.

"Until the peace process is completely Afghan, the High Peace Council will neither attend nor participate in the talks in Qatar," Karzai's office said in a statement.

He also said talks could not begin until the Taliban end violent attacks in Afghanistan.

"The continuation of the Taliban's message of fighting and bloodshed during the opening of this office totally contradicts the pursuit of peace," his office said.

Earlier Wednesday, Karzai said negotiations with the U.S. on what American and coalition security forces will remain in the country after 2014 have been put on hold in the wake of the announcement by the Taliban and the U.S. The deal was expected to define the future of American troops here and pave way for billions in aid to the Afghan economy. It was not immediately clear how long Karzai planned to suspend the negotiations on the agreement.

"In view of the contradiction between acts and the statements made by the United States of America in regard to the peace process, the Afghan government suspended the negotiations, currently underway in Kabul between Afghan and U.S. delegations on the bilateral security agreement," Karzai's statement said.

Karzai's deputy spokesman Fayeq Wahedi told The Associated Press that among other things, the president opposed the Taliban's use of its formal name "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" in opening the office ? the name it had used when it ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

"We had already communicated that to the U.S.," he said.

In setting up the office, the Taliban said they were willing to use all legal means to end what they called the occupation of Afghanistan ? but did not say they would immediately stop fighting. They also did not specifically mention talks with Karzai or his representatives.

The NATO-led force is to be cut in half by the end of the year, and by the end of 2014 all combat troops are to leave and be replaced ? contingent on Afghan governmental approval ? by a smaller force that would be on hand for training and advising.

The U.S. has not yet said how many troops will remain in Afghanistan, but it is thought that it would be a force made up of about 9,000 Americans and 6,000 allies.

Six years ago, Afghan security forces numbered fewer than 40,000, and have grown to about 352,000 today. But questions remain if they are good enough to fight alone.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-leader-backs-away-taliban-talks-133211624.html

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Contribution of particulate matter from air pollution to forest decline

June 19, 2013 ? Air pollution is related to forest decline and also appears to attack the protecting wax on tree leaves and needles. Bonn University scientists have now discovered a responsible mechanism: particulate matter salt compounds that become deliquescent because of humidity and form a wick-like structure that removes water from leaves and promotes dehydration. These results are published in "Environmental Pollution."

Nature conservationists call it "lingering illness," and the latest report on the North-Rhine Westphalian forest conditions confirms ongoing damage. Bonn University scientists have now shown that salt deposits on leaves may decrease the drought tolerance of trees, thereby contributing to forest decline. "Our study reveals that so-called wax degradation on pine needles may develop from deposited particulate matter," says Dr. J?rgen Burkhardt from the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation. Wax helps to protect leaves and needles from water loss.

It has long been known that air pollutants accelerate wax ageing and that "wax degradation" is closely related to forest damage. "Wax degradation was addressed by many studies in the 1980s and 90s, but sound explanations for both the degradation mechanism and the high correlation with forest damage have yet been missing," Dr. Burkhardt reports. Previous approaches assumed chemical reactions for wax degradation, whereas the present study reveals physical reasons. "The deposition of hygroscopic salts is capable of decreasing the drought tolerance of trees," co-author Shyam Pariyar says.

Accelerated dehydration of needles treated with salt solutions

The scientists sprayed salt solutions on Scots pine needles and recorded their weight loss after abscission. The needles treated with salt solutions dried out significantly faster than the untreated control needles. Using an electron microscope, the scientists observed the salts becoming deliquescent and moving into the stomata of the needles. Stomata are tiny pores used by plants to take up carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and release water vapor and oxygen. The deliquescent salts form very thin liquid connections between the surface and interior of the needle, and water is removed from the needles by these wick-like structures. Because the plants are unable to counteract this removal of water, the plants dehydrate more rapidly. Therefore, polluted air containing large amounts of particulate matter may directly reduce the drought tolerance of trees. Simultaneously, the deliquescent salts make wax appear "degraded." "This newly described mechanism was not considered in earlier explanations of Central European forest decline," states Dr. Burkhardt.

Conceivable aggravation of forest decline by climate change

A new type of electron microscope enabled the observation of particle deliquescence and dynamics under changing air humidity. In addition, a long-lasting scientific paradigm had excluded any aqueous movement into the stomata, and only recently had Bonn University scientists confirmed its existence.

Recently, regional forest damage has been reported in the western USA and other parts of the world. A relationship with increasing climate change-type drought has been proposed, but the newly discovered mechanism involving particulate matter might contribute to the regional forest damage. "Particularly because air concentrations of hygroscopic particles have largely increased within the last decades," says Dr. Burkhardt.

The study was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the European Union (project ?CLAIRE).

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/EtnZ-S9ROrs/130619101438.htm

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Seismic gap outside of Istanbul

Public release date: 18-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: F. Ossing
ossing@gfz-potsdam.de
49-331-288-1040
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Is this where the expected Marmara earthquake will originate from?

Earthquake researchers have now identified a 30 kilometers long and ten kilometers deep area along the North Anatolian fault zone just south of Istanbul that could be the starting point for a strong earthquake. The group of seismologists including Professor Marco Bohnhoff of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences reported in the current online issue of the scientific journal Nature (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2999) that this potential earthquake source is only 15 to 20 kilometers from the historic city center of Istanbul.

The Istanbul-Marmara region of northwestern Turkey with a population of more than 15 million faces a high probability of being exposed to an earthquake of magnitude 7 or more. To better understand the processes taking place before a strong earthquake at a critically pressurized fault zone, a seismic monitoring network was built on the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara off Istanbul under the auspices of the Potsdam Helmholtz Centre GFZ together with the Kandilli Earthquake Observatory in Istanbul. The Princes Islands offer the only opportunity to monitor the seismic zone running below the seafloor from a distance of few kilometers.

The now available data allow the scientists around GFZ researcher Marco Bohnhoff to come to the conclusion that the area is locked in depth in front of the historic city of Istanbul: "The block we identified reaches ten kilometers deep along the fault zone and has displayed no seismic activity since measurements began over four years ago. This could be an indication that the expected Marmara earthquake could originate there", says Bohnhoff.

This is also supported by the fact that the fracture zone of the last strong earthquake in the region, in 1999, ended precisely in this area - probably at the same structure, which has been impeding the progressive shift of the Anatolian plate in the south against the Eurasian plate in the north since 1766 and building up pressure. The results are also being compared with findings from other fault zones, such as the San Andreas Fault in California, to better understand the physical processes before an earthquake.

Currently, the GFZ is intensifying its activity to monitor the earthquake zone in front of Istanbul. Together with the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkey AFAD, several 300 meter deep holes are currently being drilled around the eastern Marmara Sea, into which highly sensitive borehole seismometers will be placed. With this Geophysical borehole Observatory at the North Anatolian Fault GONAF, measurement accuracy and detection threshold for microearthquakes are improved many times over. In addition, the new data also provide insights on the expected ground motion in the event of an earthquake in the region. Bohnhoff: "Earthquake prediction is scientifically impossible. But studies such as this provide a way to better characterize earthquakes in advance in terms of location, magnitude and rupture progression, and therefore allow a better assessment of damage risk."

###

Marco Bohnhoff, Fatih Bulut, Georg Dresen, Peter E. Malin, Tuna Eken, Mustafa Aktar: "An earthquake gap south of Istanbul", Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2999, 18.06.2013)

Images in printable resolution: http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/gfz/Public+Relations/M40-Bildarchiv/Bildergalerie+Erdbebengefahr+Tuerkei

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[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 18-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: F. Ossing
ossing@gfz-potsdam.de
49-331-288-1040
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Is this where the expected Marmara earthquake will originate from?

Earthquake researchers have now identified a 30 kilometers long and ten kilometers deep area along the North Anatolian fault zone just south of Istanbul that could be the starting point for a strong earthquake. The group of seismologists including Professor Marco Bohnhoff of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences reported in the current online issue of the scientific journal Nature (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2999) that this potential earthquake source is only 15 to 20 kilometers from the historic city center of Istanbul.

The Istanbul-Marmara region of northwestern Turkey with a population of more than 15 million faces a high probability of being exposed to an earthquake of magnitude 7 or more. To better understand the processes taking place before a strong earthquake at a critically pressurized fault zone, a seismic monitoring network was built on the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara off Istanbul under the auspices of the Potsdam Helmholtz Centre GFZ together with the Kandilli Earthquake Observatory in Istanbul. The Princes Islands offer the only opportunity to monitor the seismic zone running below the seafloor from a distance of few kilometers.

The now available data allow the scientists around GFZ researcher Marco Bohnhoff to come to the conclusion that the area is locked in depth in front of the historic city of Istanbul: "The block we identified reaches ten kilometers deep along the fault zone and has displayed no seismic activity since measurements began over four years ago. This could be an indication that the expected Marmara earthquake could originate there", says Bohnhoff.

This is also supported by the fact that the fracture zone of the last strong earthquake in the region, in 1999, ended precisely in this area - probably at the same structure, which has been impeding the progressive shift of the Anatolian plate in the south against the Eurasian plate in the north since 1766 and building up pressure. The results are also being compared with findings from other fault zones, such as the San Andreas Fault in California, to better understand the physical processes before an earthquake.

Currently, the GFZ is intensifying its activity to monitor the earthquake zone in front of Istanbul. Together with the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkey AFAD, several 300 meter deep holes are currently being drilled around the eastern Marmara Sea, into which highly sensitive borehole seismometers will be placed. With this Geophysical borehole Observatory at the North Anatolian Fault GONAF, measurement accuracy and detection threshold for microearthquakes are improved many times over. In addition, the new data also provide insights on the expected ground motion in the event of an earthquake in the region. Bohnhoff: "Earthquake prediction is scientifically impossible. But studies such as this provide a way to better characterize earthquakes in advance in terms of location, magnitude and rupture progression, and therefore allow a better assessment of damage risk."

###

Marco Bohnhoff, Fatih Bulut, Georg Dresen, Peter E. Malin, Tuna Eken, Mustafa Aktar: "An earthquake gap south of Istanbul", Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2999, 18.06.2013)

Images in printable resolution: http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/gfz/Public+Relations/M40-Bildarchiv/Bildergalerie+Erdbebengefahr+Tuerkei

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/haog-sgo061813.php

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