Project description
New approaches to assess seismic hazards
Earthquakes involve more than just movement along a fault. The surrounding rocks also deform, affecting how ruptures spread and how strongly ground shakes. Current source imaging methods overlook this plastic deformation, limiting understanding of rupture processes. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the IDEM project will develop an inversion method that accounts for the Earth’s elasto-plastic crust. By combining advanced rupture simulations with reduced order modelling, IDEM will uncover how stress, fault friction and plastic properties interact during earthquakes. The proposed research will improve seismic hazard assessments and deepen our understanding of fault behaviour over time.
Objective
During an earthquake, coseismic deformation is partitioned between slip on the fault surface and distributed plastic deformation in the surrounding volume. Understanding how off-fault plastic processes interact with fault slip is crucial, as they can control whether ruptures reach the surface and how strongly the ground shakes. Yet, current source imaging ignores this plastic component, providing an incomplete and biased picture of the seismic source and limiting our understanding of rupture processes. IDEM aims to fill this gap by developing a new inversion method that explicitly accounts for the Earth’s elasto-plastic crust. I will combine dynamic rupture simulations that include off-fault plasticity with global optimization to retrieve ensembles of preferred solutions. This represents a major challenge, as dynamic rupture simulations are until now prohibitively expensive for use in large-scale global optimization. To overcome this limitation, I will use Reduced Order Modeling (ROM), a powerful but rarely used technique in seismology, which captures the essential behavior of complex models while being fast to evaluate, thereby enabling efficient exploration of parameter space without sacrificing accuracy. The new inversion framework will jointly resolve initial conditions (stress, fault friction, and off-fault plastic properties) as well as resulting slip distributions and plastic deformation. Beyond delivering physics-based and more robust images of earthquake sources, the project will clarify how off-fault processes shape rupture dynamics and interact with fault slip. This, in turn, will shed light on how faults accommodate deformation and improve the interpretation of long-term fault slip rates, thereby contributing to a more accurate assessment of seismic hazard.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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38058 GRENOBLE
France
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