ALBERT

Description: The Alna district in Oslo, Norway is a high profile (residential, commercial and industrial) area exposed to multiple hazards, in particular to quick clay landslides. Quick clay is a marine clay sediment where the salt that binds the clay together has been washed away over time. Thus, the structure becomes unstable, and increased point loads or erosion of waterways can trigger landslides. In case of a landslide, the quick clay becomes liquefied, and major material damage and danger to life can occur. To support the authorities in selecting the optimal risk-mitigation action, this study develops the multi-criteria decision-making methodology, which accounts for the stakeholders' preferences. The Decision Support System framework includes three key steps: 1) Identify criteria for assessing the impacts of multi-hazard scenario; 2) Identify possible measures that can reduce the impacts; 3) Give objective/subjective weighting of the identified criteria, reflecting the stakeholders’ preferences. The framework is demonstrated in a multi-hazard scenario (i.e., quick clay, flood and fire) of interest to the Oslo stakeholders. The impact of the considered scenario is evaluated in terms of five categories (i.e., life and health, nature and environment, economy, societal stability, and governance and control) and 13 single criteria. Through workshops with stakeholders, possible alternatives as well as the respective cost and mitigated impacts were estimated, and stakeholders’ preferences were collected. The optimal action under given circumstances is identified quantitatively and is highly dependent on stakeholders' preferences. Further details of the impact analysis are needed to understand the risk landscape of different alternatives.

Description: Accurate seismotectonic studies on and around Spitsbergen, European Arctic, are impeded by a number of difficulties. The largely glaciated environment and the geographic distribution of land and sea restrict geotectonic mapping, as well as the deployment of dense, local seismic networks. The nature of tectonic seismicity in the region, which is episodic and dominated by moderate to low event magnitudes, imposes additionally its own challenges. So far, the best studied activity has been the Storfjorden 2008-2016 earthquake series (Mw 6.1, 21 February 2008; Mw 5.1, 29 March 2016) and background seismicity in the offshore area east of southern Spitsbergen, and to a lesser extent, seismicity in Heerland, on central Spitsbergen (mb 5.5, 18 January 1976). Despite the aforementioned challenges, the improvement of the regional seismic network from 2010 onward, has been offering enhanced insight into Svalbard seismotectonics, in particular in areas best covered by seismic station distribution. One such case, is the Hornsund area, where the calculation of moment tensor solutions was possible for two moderate magnitude, onshore events (Mw 4.3, 4 July 2015; Mw 4.6, 31 May 2017). The nearby broadband station facilitates event focal depth determination, insights into the local tectonic structure enabled by geological mapping. We will present the focal characteristics of the activity associated with these earthquakes and discuss their placement within the local and regional geotectonic setting.

Description: “Geoscience Connections” is a project to connect the eight IUGG Associations through interviews with early-career scientists (ECS), secretary generals and presidents of each association. The main objective of this project is to transfer scientific knowledge to the general public by connecting a variety of scientific subjects from all IUGG associations. Science outreach movies have a great potential to attract the attention of the public, especially through social media. The project is interdisciplinary, diverse, international and inclusive.Short movies were produced especially with ECS to emphasize the importance of the great variety of topics related to IUGG and to encourage young students to pursue careers related to geodesy and geophysics. The interviews with the IUGG secretary generals and presidents will be filmed during the IUGG Assembly, where most of them will be present. The documentary containing these interviews will be published at the IUGG Social Media Channels until December, 2023. In this talk we will show how the interviews were designed and some examples of short movies with ECS.

Description: Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are important parts of the Earth system. The physical and biological properties here to a large degree control and shape other parts of the Earth through atmospheric, cryospheric and oceanic connections. The Troll Observing Network – TONe - is a new comprehensive infrastructure centered around the Norwegian Troll Research Station in Dronning Maud Land. It will be an important contribution to global research efforts in this part of Antarctica, closing data gaps in Antarctic environmental observations and providing key data required to respond to the fundamental societal challenges and uncertainties facing the world today. The Norwegian and international partner consortium in TONe is in the process to develop the state-of-the-art, multi-platform, multi-disciplinary observatory network for environmental observations, and a remotely piloted aerial system (RPAS) services to collect data for studying and monitoring the atmosphere, terrestrial and marine environment. The observatory network consists of 8 observatories: an integrated cloud observatory, an atmosphere composition observatory, an infrasound array, an ionospheric observatory, a seismic array, an ice-shelf observatory, a multidisciplinary open ocean moored observatory and a sea-bird observatory. The key aspect of TONe is to ensure wide and free access to the data from the observatories and the RPAS services to the entire national and international research community. TONe as a whole will be implemented and fully operational from 2027, while single parts of the infrastructure will be available before that.

Description: Carbon capture and storage technologies are an essential part of EU’s decarbonisation efforts. Combined with sustainable energy resources, they are necessary to move Europe towards a net zero carbon emissions economy. Containment risk evaluation includes analysing natural seismicity patterns in the North Sea, where several Mt-scale CO2 storage projects are being developed. Within the framework of the ACT project SHARP Storage, an extensive unique earthquake bulletin was compiled using seismicity data from all relevant data centres. The bulletin is stored using the IASPEI Seismic Format (ISF). Preliminary processing included duplicate removal and explosion identification. In total, 15,230 events were recorded between years 1382 and 2022, of which 5,408 were identified as likely or potential explosions. For the remaining events, waveforms are currently being collected as a basis for further analysis, including event relocation and magnitude homogenisation. The magnitude of completeness of this data set varies both spatially and temporally. The most seismically active regions in the study area are the Viking and Central grabens. Coastal areas are populated with more events than the central part of the North Sea due to the denser distribution of seismic stations onshore allowing for the detection of smaller (M〈3) magnitude events. Moment tensor inversion, shear-wave splitting measurements, and stress drop analysis will be compared to and complement a review of borehole stress measurements to better gauge the present-day stress field. This is crucial for the understanding of the reservoir and caprock response to large-scale CO2 injection over time.