Latest news

Published on January 19, 2026

A team of geologists from ISTerren has reconstructed the long and complex history of the Pelvoux Massif in the Western Alps, revealing events that span more than 300 million years.
The story begins during the Variscan orogeny, when ancient mountain-building forces shaped the basement rocks and created deep faults. During the Jurassic and Cretaceous, these rocks were stretched and heated as the nearby oceans opened, reaching temperatures of up to 350°C.
Later, in the Late Cretaceous, (…)

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Published on December 22, 2025

An international research team from the IODP program has uncovered new insights into the exceptional behavior of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake (Mw 9.1), which struck northeastern Japan and generated a massive tsunami, devastating coastal communities and notably the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The study, published on 18 December 2025 in the journal Science, is based on the results of the IODP Expedition 405 JTRACK and on the collection of samples and geophysical data in the (…)

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Published on December 22, 2025

A recent ISTerre-led study demonstrates how high-frequency seismic tremor can be used to detect and locate water-filled reservoirs inside glaciers, a key issue for assessing glacier-related natural hazards. The research focuses on Tête Rousse Glacier, a small polythermal glacier in the Mont-Blanc massif (French Alps), historically known for the catastrophic outburst flood of 1892. Despite decades of monitoring and repeated drainage of a central cavity, recent geophysical surveys suggested (…)

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Published on December 08, 2025

This study focuses on predicting how surface topography amplifies ground motion near earthquake sources, where seismic waves reach the surface at varying angles of incidence. The work relies on results from 3D numerical simulations carried out over a homogeneous topographic model.
The research was conducted in several stages. First, neural networks were used to identify key parameters describing the geometry of the terrain relative to the seismic source, those that effectively control (…)

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Published on December 01, 2025

The Levant, a region crossed by a complex fault network over 1,200 km long, has experienced numerous destructive earthquakes throughout history. To better understand seismic risk, researchers have developed an innovative model that accounts for the interconnection between different faults, unlike traditional approaches that treat them as isolated.
Thanks to the SHERIFS algorithm, the energy accumulated within the fault system is redistributed across all physically possible ruptures, (…)

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Published on November 26, 2025

Published in PNAS, a study involving scientists from the Institute of Earth Sciences (ISTerre-OSUG, CNRS / IRD / UGA / Univ. Savoie Mont-Blanc / Univ. Gustave Eiffel) explores the hypothesis that the Earth’s primitive magnetic field may have originated in the subterranean magma ocean that surrounded the core at the base of the mantle. Using high-resolution numerical simulations carried out on French supercomputers, the researchers show that the electrical conductivity of such an ocean would (…)

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Published on November 26, 2025

Researchers from ISTerre contributed to a chapter in Modern Volcano Monitoring titled “Monitoring Volcano Deformation Based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Data.” The chapter presents SAR imagery as a powerful tool to detect and measure ground deformation on active volcanoes, explaining how displacement maps are generated from time-separated radar images.
Two main techniques are presented : InSAR (Interferometric SAR), which uses phase differences to create interferograms revealing (…)

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Published on November 24, 2025

Researchers at ISTerre have investigated the transformations of serpentinites in subduction zones, focusing on dehydration processes and the mobility of magnesium within these mantle rocks. The analyzed samples come from the Zermatt-Saas unit in the Alps, where high-pressure and high-temperature conditions allow the observation of metamorphic mineral formation and water release.
Microstructural and chemical analyses reveal that brucite and antigorite transform into olivine while (…)

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Published on November 17, 2025

A team of geochemists, geobiologists, and microbiologists from ISTerre (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes), IPGP and Iceland University explored microbial life buried hundreds, even thousands, of meters within the basaltic rocks of Iceland, at the heart of its geothermal aquifers. These extreme environments, where temperatures sometimes exceed 100 °C, host an astonishing microbial diversity whose role remains largely unknown.
Using analyses based on environmental DNA sequencing, the (…)

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Published on November 03, 2025

A major breakthrough now makes it possible to explore the upper crust with unprecedented precision. Researchers from ISTerre have applied a high-resolution, multi-parameter visco-acoustic full waveform inversion (FWI) to a dense ocean-bottom sensor network deployed in the North Sea.
This study presents a 3D high-resolution characterization of the upper crust using FWI applied to dense seismic data. The subsurface is parameterized by P-wave velocity, density, quality factor, and VTI (…)

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