Project description
Unearthing the physics of earthquakes and faults
High-intensity earthquakes can leave a trail of destruction, causing death and millions of euros in property damage. Considerable efforts have been made into predicting when they might strike, however to date, geophysical precursors – phenomena preceding earthquakes – have not yet been detected before a damaging earthquake. Addressing this, the EU-funded FaultScan project aims to create a new, noise-based, high resolution, seismic monitoring approach to probe the core of real seismic faults enabling the detection of systematic earthquake precursors. The project will focus on the San Jacinto Fault, believed to pose one of the largest seismic risks in California.
Objective
The recent September 2017, magnitude 7.1 central Mexico earthquake that caused 370 casualties reminds us that earthquakes are among the most dramatic natural disasters worldwide. Causal physical processes are not instantaneous and laboratory and numerical experiments predict that earthquakes should be preceded by a detectable slow preparation phase. Despite considerable efforts, however, robust geophysical precursors have not yet been observed before damaging earthquakes.
My FaultScan project will revolutionize our ability to directly observe transient deformation within the core of active faults and provide unprecedented accuracy in the detection of earthquake precursors. My ambition is to develop a new, noise-based, high resolution, seismic monitoring approach. I intend to grasp the opportunity of a recent step change in seismic instrumentation and data processing capabilities to achieve a dream for seismologists: reproduce repeatable, daily, virtual seismic sources that can probe the core of active faults at seismogenic depths using only passive seismic records.
I plan to target the San Jacinto Fault (a branch of the San Andreas Fault system) that is currently believed to pose one of the largest seismic risks in California. It is an ideal fault for this project because it is very active, already extensively studied and easily accessible for the pilot field data acquisition work.
This project is in collaboration with the Univ. of South. California, the Univ. of Cal. San Diego and specialists in earthquake mechanics and will include earthquake preparation processes and seismic modeling that will guide us for our long-term (3 years), breakthrough, passive seismic experiment and further data analysis and interpretation.
I strongly believe that this project has a very high potential for providing fundamental results on the physics of earthquakes and faults and that it will have a major impact on earthquake prediction worldwide in the near future.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeologyseismology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographynatural disasters
- social sciencessociologygovernancecrisis managementseismic risk management
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencedata processing
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
38058 Grenoble
France