Romania is a country that has boundaries with the East European Plate (EEP), Moesian microplate (MoP), and
Intracarpathian microplate (IaP) which seem to meet into the Vrancea area (South-Eastern part of the country),
whose active seismicity has been considered to be due to the presence of
a continental unstable transform-transform-compression triple-junction. From: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003EAEJA.....5534B
(The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System)
About the Romanian Volcanos
The Romanian volcanoes are active at a convergent plate margin. The map below (from A. Szakracs,I. Seghedi, 1995http://adatbank.transindex.ro/vendeg/htmlk/pdf6015.pdf) shows the volcanic cones and the associated deposits in Calimani-Gurghiu-Hargita mountains.
Camilla,
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to see an area that has 3 transform plates all intersecting. I imagine that area would be incredibly unstable, and could lead to some serious activity. It would be very interesting to see what would happen if all 3 had a dramatic shift at the same time, or if 2 shifting would impact the 3rd. Hopefully the results would not cause too much damage!
Thanks for your comment, David! The Vrancea area has been pretty active when it comes to seismic activity. During the past 7 -10 years there has been a series of earthquakes which fortunately did not make the international news that much, as they were not catastrophes. And Romania was riveted by a horrible earthquake in 1977 which resulted in so much loss of human life. I sure hope that we as future geophysicists and geoscientists (maybe a little bit of wishing thinking here on my part at this point) will be able to better predict earthquakes in the future and save precious lives.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting and informative blog, with all information arranged in a well- researched concise and attractive format with maps, other blog links and scientific publishing. I have no idea about Romania so this is awesome.
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