On Wednesday, 5 July 2023, starting at 10 a.m., the sixth working meeting of the DuFAULT project was held at the Department of Geophysics of the Faculty of Science and via the MS Teams platform. We discussed results, project obligations, status for the second project period and future plans for the next project period.
The project manager, Josip Stipčević, started the meeting by recalling the activities and project tasks that took place/were completed in the past period. Since the last meeting in January 2023, several fieldwork have been carried out. Marin Sečanj and Damir Ptičar, senior technicians at the the Department of Geophysics, visited and resolved operational problems at almost all seismological stations of the Du-Net network in the period 30 January – 2 February 2023. Josip Stipčević and Helena Latečki installed a seismological station in Maranovići on the island of Mljet (DF06) with a new seismograph purchased within the DuFAULT project on 2 March 2023, and resolved telecommunication problems in May. The DuFAULT project, activities and research results were presented at two international meetings: the AdriaArray Workshop 2023 in Dubrovnik from 2 to 5 April 2023, and the European Geoscience Union General Assembly 2023, held from 23 to 28 April 2023 in Vienna. The PhD student on the project, Helena Latečki, presented her work on 15 February 2023 at a seminar at the Zagreb PhD Café #21 organized by the Croatian Science Foundation and in May she attended a short professional training at the INGV in Bologna in collaboration with Dr. Irene Molinari. In May, the research paper by the main author Sanja Faivre was published, in which Marin Sečanj and Bruno Tomljenović participated in the seismotectonic analysis of the wider Dubrovnik area.
Tena Belinić Topić presented the results of research on the structure of the Earth's crust under the Dinarides, the Adriatic microplate and the southwestern part of the Pannonian basin by analysing ambient noise and Rayleigh and Love waves. Data processing and numerical analysis are in the final phase, and currently work is being done on the verification and interpretation of the obtained results.
Iva Dasović presented the manuscript that was sent for peer review in June, in which the series of earthquakes that began near Berković on April 22, 2022 with an earthquake of local magnitude 6.0 was analyzed. We located 7217 earthquakes and made a spatiotemporal analysis, hypocentres’ location uncertainty analysis and calculated the focal mechanisms of stronger earthquakes. The preliminary intensity field of the main earthquake and the preliminary geological-tectonic interpretation was also presented.
Helena Latečki gave an overview of the current seismic activity in the researched area within the framework of the project, as well as an overview of the status and quality of work of the seismic stations of the Du-Net network. Furthermore, she presented the results of the work done in collaboration with Dr. Irene Molinari from the INGV Institute in Bologna on the simulation of the Central Adriatic Sea earthquake from 2021.
An overview of the work of the geological team was presented by Marin Sečanj: he presented the results of the work in the research paper published in May on the topic of sea level changes in the Adriatic Sea and the Mediterranean, by the main author Sanja Faivre from the Department of Geography at the Faculty of Science. He then described the results of the extensive research on active faults in the wider Dubrovnik area. The work is in the final stage of writing the manuscript and will soon be sent for review.
Finally, the tasks for the next few months have been defined and the conclusion is that the planned activities are progressing well.