The Turkish Geological Society has selected Ulas Avsar's paper as the best geology paper of last year. The paper is called "Earthquake-induced soft-sediment deformation and seismically amplified erosion rates recorded in varved sediments of Köyceğiz Lake (SW Turkey)" and was published in Journal of Geophysical Research last year. His co-authors are Sigurjón Jónsson, Özgur Avsar and Sabine Schmidt. In the study, Ulas has compared soft-sediment deformation in a sedimentary sequence of the Köyceğiz Lake with occurrences of historical and instrumental earthquakes. The fact the sequence has varves, makes the age-step model very accurate. He then estimated the peak-ground accellaration (PGA) values of these events to determine how much PGA is needed to induce soft-sediment deformation in the lake. The results indicate that more than 20 cm/s
2 are needed to do so. He also looked at catchment responses due to shaking (e.g. because of landslides) and found that higher PGA values are needed to trigger such chanes, or >70 cm/s
2.
The award, called the Golden Hammer award, was given to Ulas Avsar at a ceremony on 10 April.
