Latest news

Published on October 03, 2019

Public institutions with more than 250 employees are required to carry out a GHG inventory and propose actions to reduce their emissions. This applies to ISTerre’s tutelles, namely CNRS, IGA, IRD and IFSSTAR. At the laboratory level, we wanted to have a precise idea of our emissions, and to have a decision-making tool to reduce our impact.
In practice, the work was carried out in 4 months by an M1 internship in economics (Maxence Morel), thanks to the collaboration of many colleagues for (…)

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Published on July 18, 2019

Ile des Bermudes An international team of scientists, led by geochemists from the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), presented evidence of an early and unexpected start of crustal recycling in the deep mantle.
Global recycling of oceanic crust from the surface of Earth down to the deep mantle and then back to the surface is one of the major features of the plate tectonic regime, which makes our planet unique in the Solar system. Just when this (…)

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Published on June 13, 2019

The formation of minerals from aqueous solutions is a widespread natural phenomenon that controls mass transfers within the lithosphere, impacting elemental cycling –mostly through interactions with living organisms. Crystallization phenomena have also a high industrial relevance, e.g., for the development of new anti-scaling agents or the synthesis of biomimetic materials.
The process of mineral formation usually involves two consecutive steps –nucleation and growth- that are controlled (…)

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Published on May 28, 2019

Lavas of Bermuda island likely present the first sample of the melt from the Earth mantle transition zone. A study involving the Institut des Sciences de la Terre / OSUG. The island of Bermuda is the surficial expression of a 1,500-km-long topographic swell, which rises 1 km above a 110–140-Myr-old oceanic crust of Atlantic Ocean. Like many ocean volcanic islands, Bermuda has been historically explained as being derived from a mantle plume- the jet of hot mantle material rising from the (…)

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Published on April 16, 2019

On March 28th, the European Research Council (ERC) published the list of its Advanced Grants awardees 2019. Among the 222 projects selected (out of 2,052 submitted) — including 31 based in France and 10 in the Earth and Environmental Sciences — is the project COOLER (Climatic Controls on Erosion Rates and Relief of Mountain Belts) proposed by Peter van der Beek, professor at the ISTerre / OSUG. It has been suggested that slow and continuous global cooling beginning in the Cenozoic era (the (…)

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Published on March 07, 2019

Will the murmurs of the sea ice allow us to better predict its evolution at the North Pole?
The sea ice is disappearing with global warming, and if the trend is clear over the last few decades, scientists are still wondering about the speed of this disappearance, which seems much faster than models predict.
To better assess the quality of polar ice (its thickness, degree of fracturing), a team of ISTerre scientists led by Ludovic Moreau is leading a reconnaissance and test expedition in (…)

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Published on March 05, 2019

The newspaper Le Monde offers a popularization video (in french only) on the Earth’s magnetic poles, especially the magnetic North, which has been moving since the 19th century and is now approaching Siberia at a speed of 55 km per year.
The ISTerre Geodynamo team was called upon to produce this video, since it includes Henri-Claude Nataf, CNRS research director, and animations from the numerical simulations of the core carried out by Nathanaël Schaeffer, CNRS researcher.

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Published on March 04, 2019

The 9th Biennale of the Permanent Accelerometric Network (RAP) brought together 76 participants from the scientific community of hazard and seismic risk in France in November 2018 in Lourdes. The event was organized with the support of the MTES, RESIF, the DDT of the Hautes-Pyrénées and the city of Lourdes.
On this occasion, the 1st edition of the RAP award was launched, which will now be awarded every 2 years by a 5-member commission. It rewards a remarkable contribution in engineering (…)

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Published on February 14, 2019

Landslides generate seismic waves, as previous measurements from seismometers placed near unstable slopes have shown. However, the analysis of these waves remains a challenge, partly due to the diversity of seismic signals and nomenclatures adopted. Researchers from various laboratories have compiled and analysed observations of several landslides around the world using the mobile park SISMOB of RESIF, in order to propose the first general classification of these sources and their seismic (…)

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Published on January 28, 2019

Hugo Sanchez-Reyes, received the prestigious Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA) for his presentation "An evolutive linear kinematic source inversion" at AGU 2018 Fall Meeting.
The goal of his PhD thesis is to develop a Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) technique combined with the adjoint-state method, often used for imaging the Earth structure, to generate high-resolution kinematic models of earthquake sources in three dimensions (3-D). He is also interested in HPC, inversion (…)

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