Séminaire ISTerre

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Monitoring faults toward their critical state

jeudi 13 février 2020 - 11h00

Piero Poli - ISTerre
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The last (2016) seismic sequence in Italy, responsible for 298 fatalities and important economic loss, remind us how urgent it is to improve our knowledge about earthquake physics to advance earthquake forecasting. While direct observations during laboratory earthquakes permit us to derive exhaustive physical models describing the behaviour of rocks and to forecast incoming lab-earthquakes, the complex physics governing the nucleation/preparation of earthquakes remain poorly understood in real Earth, and so does our ability to forecast earthquakes. I posit that this ‘ignorance’ emerges from our limited ability to unravel information about fault physics from geophysical data. I will present some preliminary analysis and results of an integrated research aimed at monitoring the spatiotemporal evolution of elastic properties on real faults using seismological and geodetic data. The integrated monitoring approach is applied to study how faults respond to known stress perturbations (as seasonal loadings). I will particularly focus on periods preceding significant earthquakes to assess how elastic properties and deformation evolve while a fault is approaching a critical (near rupture) state. The study area is Italy (mainly L’Aquila earthquake), given its excellent geodetic and seismological instrumentation and the deep knowledge about faults geometry. This research is starting to provide new insights about the complex physics of faults at critical state, necessary to understand the real earthquake preparation phase.

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Equipe organisatrice : Grands Séminaires ISTerre

Amphithéâtre Killian, Maison des Géosciences, 38400 Saint Martin d'Hères