Flagship Research Projects

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Last Updated: 25 September 2023

Earthquakes are spectacular natural disasters, as exemplified by the 2004 Sumatra and 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquakes. Predicting earthquakes remains one of the biggest societal challenges in natural science. This research project will attempt answering the following question: How predictable are earthquakes? We propose a multidisciplinary approach articulated around three main axes: (i) the deterministic predictability of earthquakes in simple, homogeneous faults, studied by reproducing and understanding earthquake phenomena in the laboratory, (ii) the deterministic predictability of earthquakes in complex, heterogeneous faults, studied by laboratory experiments producing multiple earthquake cycles on faults with controlled heterogeneities and (iii) the statistical predictability of earthquakes, studied by forecasting the spatial distribution of experimental seismicity using machine learning.

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Last Updated: 27 September 2023

Over the past 50 years, earthquakes cost US$ 800 billions – mostly developed countries – and 1.3 million human lives – mostly in developing countries. While these figures show no sign of inflection, risk awareness continues to apply the classic approach where knowledge owned by scientists is translated “downward” to the public and decision-makers. Could a reverse, “bottom-up” approach where citizens collect and share information on earthquakes, be an alternate model?

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Last Updated: 02 June 2021

The Alpine chain has historically been one of the main natural laboratories to study orogenesis due to its outstanding outcrop conditions. Despite countless investigations, the deep structures imaged by geophysical methods and related tectonic processes remain controversial, due to the high complexity of the chain but also from the lack of high-resolution structural information at depth. To fill this gap, the European AlpArray consortium deployed 628 broadband stations, spaced less than 52 km apart, across the whole chain, and 30 ocean-bottom seismometers in the Ligurian basin, hence providing a unique opportunity for a step change in the 3D imaging of the Alpine lithosphere and asthenosphere. The LisAlps project proposes to apply Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) on the teleseismic data recorded during AlpArray to build:
(1) a new reference high-resolution multi-parametric (1500x700 km) model of the alpine lithosphere and asthenosphere down to 700km depth from the entire network and a catalogue of ~300 teleseismic earthquakes (periods: 5s-20s);
(2) a high-resolution model of the lithosphere in the western Alps around the structurally-complex Ligurian knot.

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