Timothy A. Middleton

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Junior Research Fellow at University of Oxford

Suffering in the ecological realm exhibits structural parallels with diagnoses of human trauma. Viewing ecological suffering as traumatic allows for recent work in trauma theology to be applied in an ecological context. This article focusses specifically on the breakdown of communication that characterises traumatic events. In the ecological case,...

According to Roger Poole, theological interpreters of Søren Kierkegaard’s indirect communication privilege content over form, whereas deconstructive interpreters privilege form over content. Here, I offer a reading of Johannes Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments to illustrate how, in this case, the theology/deconstruction and form/content binaries b...

Full text available from: https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/temple-tracts/temple-continental/

Differences between seismic and geodetic strain rates can highlight regions of potential seismic hazard. In China, many of the most devastating historical and recent earthquakes have occurred around the margins of the Ordos Plateau.We construct an earthquake catalogue for the region that covers the 700 yr period from 1315 to 2015, and is thought to...

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the concomitant debates amongst eighteenth century intellectuals set the stage for the modern project of theodicy-the task of reconciling the existence and goodness of God with the reality of evil. Yet the validity of the enterprise was questioned, by writers such as Voltaire and Kant, right from the beginning. Wit...

Discrepancies between geological, seismic and geodetic rates of strain can indicate that rates of crustal deformation, and hence seismic hazard, are varying through time. Previous studies in the northern Shanxi Grabens, at the northeastern corner of the Ordos Plateau in northern China, have found extension rates of anywhere between 0 and 6 mm/a at...

Analysis of the locus, style and rates of faulting is fundamental to understanding the kinematics of continental deformation. The Ordos Plateau lies to the northeast of Tibet, within the India-Eurasia collision zone. Previous studies have suggested that it behaves rigidly and rotates anticlockwise within a large-scale zone of ENE-WSW left-lateral s...

The Lepsy fault of the northern Tien Shan, SE Kazakhstan, extends E-W 120 km from the high mountains of the Dzhungarian Ala-tau, a sub-range of the northern Tien Shan, into the low-lying Kazakh platform. It is an example of an active structure that connects a more rapidly deforming mountain region with an apparently stable continental region (SCR),...

We know of very few continental, normal-faulting earthquakes with magnitude greater than 7.0 in the instrumental period. There are, however, more examples from both the historic and prehistoric records. One such earthquake is the supposedly magnitude 8.0 1739 event, which occurred in the Yinchuan Graben in northern China. Here, we use high-resoluti...

The Yinchuan Graben lies on the western margin of the Ordos Plateau, bounded to the west by the Helanshan and to the east by the Yellow River (which flows around three sides of the Ordos). There are four, major, sub-parallel, normal faults in the graben, namely (from west to east): the East Helanshan Fault, the Luhuatai Fault, the Yinchuan-Pingluo...

A large continental normal-faulting earthquake occurred in the Yinchuan Graben in northern China on 3 January 1739. This event is of significant interest for two reasons. First, it has been suggested on the basis of historical records of shaking that this was a magnitude 8.0 event. If this is true, the 1739 earthquake would be one of the largest co...

A large, normal-faulting earthquake occurred on 3rd January 1739 on the eastern flank of the Helan Mountains. These mountains border the Yinchuan Graben, a major structural feature on the north-western side of the Ordos Plateau in northern China. Surface ruptures from this event extend discontinuously for a total of 88 kilometers with a maximum ver...

The Ordos Plateau forms a piece of non-deforming continental lithosphere in northeastern China. Despite being thousands of kilometres from the nearest plate boundary, numerous devastating earthquakes have been recorded around the margins of the plateau over the past 2000 years. Continental deformation in this part of Asia is believed to be caused b...

We investigate the mechanical properties of the oceanic lithosphere using earthquake focal mechanisms from subduction zone outer rises. We study regions where faulting oblique to the pre-existing mid-ocean ridge fabric implies the formation of new faults. The nodal-plane dips of dip-slip earthquakes on these faults are dominantly in the range 30–60...

We have assembled a catalogue of well-constrained focal mechanisms for earthquakes that occurred on continental dip-slip faults that have experienced only small displacements during their current phase of activity. Nodal planes for both reverse- and normal-faulting events are seen to vary between ˜30° and ˜60°, and are concentrated towards the cent...