Project - Crack the Rock

ERC Project
Duration : 1 Oct. 2024 - 30 Sept. 2029.
Contact at ISTerre : Eric Larose


The fast and violent fracturing mode of rocks when forces exceed their mechanical strength is being challenged by observations of outcrop erosion, where cracks can gradually develop below the material’s strength limit, leading to a progressive failure known as subcritical cracking.



Weather conditions, such as temperature changes, rain and frost, are a major source of cyclic stress and slow cumulative damage for rocks. However, there are few quantitative field observations to confirm the mechanisms behind the cracking of cliffs. As a result, it is currently impossible to predict rockfalls or to quantify the relationship between daily or seasonal meteorological forces and the production of cracks in rocks.

The main objective of the ERC Crack the Rock is to quantify, map and monitor stress changes, fracture production and debris production to determine the factors that influence cracking and rockfalls. This study will be carried out locally and in the short time scale (hours to months) to establish a crack production model. An experimental tool based on acoustic imaging on natural rock, environmental seismology, meteorology and geology will be deployed on three cliffs in different climatic and geological contexts. The results obtained will help to understand the general climatic characteristics influencing rock cracking on a global scale. A further objective is to predict the impact of climate change on rock erosion by applying climate scenarios to the model of crack fracturing and rockfalls.

The ultimate aim is to identify the geographical and geological conditions likely to increase or decrease the production of fractures and rockfalls over the coming decades.



This work will pave the way for predicting rockfalls and, further, the impact of climate change on rock erosion.




Team Members


Eric Larose

Research Director

Eric Larose is a research director at the CNRS and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Crack the Rock project. With a background in acoustics and seismology, he has made pioneering contributions to ambient seismic noise imaging and monitoring techniques, laying the foundations for environmental seismology. He is currently investigating natural hazards, including rockfalls, slope failure, and snow avalanches, and is deeply fascinated by mountainous environments.
Dr Larose is also heavily involved in science outreach, having appeared in numerous TV and radio interviews and documentary films. He is the founder of the Mountains and Sciences film festival.

Ludovic Moreau

Geophysicist

Ludovic Moreau is a geophysicist at ISTerre. His main focus concerns methodological developments for environmental seismology, and in particular for the characterization of the mechanical properties of sea ice with approaches based on seismic noise interferometry. He is also involved in applications at the ultrasonic scales to characterize heterogeneous materials with nondestructive testing approaches.









Laurent Baillet

Professor

Laurent Baillet received his PhD degree from the doctoral school MEGA of the INSA of Lyon in 1994. Since 2005, he has been a full professor at the University of Grenoble. He is a member of the team “Failles” in the Laboratory Institute of Earth Science. His areas of research include finite element formulation in large deformation frictional contact problems, dynamic rupture in frictional interface, rockfall avalanches, and monitoring of landslides.









Romain Rousseau

PhD Student

Romain is a doctoral student working on the ERC Crack the Rock project. His research involves setting up an active acoustic experiment on a cliff to produce high-resolution images, allowing the observation of how weather conditions influence rock damage dynamics.
















Alex Rolland

Engineer

Alex works on the project as an instrumentation and data acquisition engineer. He is responsible for designing and implementing the acoustics data acquisition system, hardware, and software. This means choosing the right batteries and solar panels for power supply, building cases to hold the system on the cliff and keep it operating outdoors, programming the data emission and acquisition, and finally making sure we get some nice signals to analyze.

Agnes Helmstetter
Researcher

Agnès Helmstetter is a CNRS researcher at ISTerre since 2005.
She is working on seismic monitoring of earthquakes, mass movements, and glaciers, analyzing seismic signals in order to detect, classify, and locate these events.








Noélie Bontemps

Resarcher

Noélie defended her PhD in 2019 at ISTerre, where she studied the combined effect of earthquakes and precipitation on landslide triggering. She then worked for two years as a project manager for European research projects (PACIFIC, Faultscan, F-Image, SEISAZE). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ISTerre with the CNRS on the Crack the Rock project, focusing on the impact of meteorological factors on rock fracturing using modeling and seismic data.

David Amitrano

Professor

David is full Professor in geomechanics at ISTerre as researcher and Polytech-Grenoble as teacher.
He is an expert on modelling of progressive damage in brittle materials as rock and concrete. He is also involved in researches related to failure of natural objects like landlsides et rock-falls.
He is in charge of the Cliff’s Observatory of Chartreuse, which hosts field experiments related to the monitoring, detection, and understanding of rockfalls, including some from the Crack the Rocks project.


Scientific Collaboration


Imme Wienk

PhD Student

Imme is a PhD student working on monitoring landslides with environmental seismology. Her research combines seismic noise interferometry, surface deformation measurements, and hydrometeorological data to understand how mechanical properties of landslides evolve over time. She aims to link changes in seismic velocities and waveform decorrelation to environmental factors, lithology, and slope destabilization processes.










Juliane Starke

PhD Student

Juliane is a PhD student within the EnvSeis doctoral network. Her goal is to better understand rock erosion by monitoring ultrasonic and seismic velocity changes, which relate to environmentally induced (subcritical) stress changes in the rock. To detect these changes, she uses the resonance frequencies of unstable rock compartments and in-situ ultrasonic testing.














Jakub Kokowsi

Seismologist

Jakub Kokowski is a seismologist working on the PAPROG project, which focuses on glacial and periglacial hazards. In 2024, he completed his PhD in mining-induced seismicity at the Institute of Geophysics in Kraków, Poland. He applies this expertise to the seismic monitoring of rockfalls and serac falls in the Mont Blanc massif. He develops data-processing software for event detection, classification, localization, and size estimation. His research further includes seismic-noise analysis aimed at understanding subglacial water flow dynamics. He also leverages his extensive mountaineering experience to conduct fieldwork in challenging alpine terrain, including data acquisition and the deployment of new seismic stations.

Jerome Weiss

Senior Research Scientist
Jérôme Weiss is Senior Research Scientist (Directeur de Recherche) at the Institut des Sciences de la Terre (ISTerre) of CNRS and University of Grenoble Alpes. He graduated with a MEng as well as a MSc in geophysics at the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine in France, and then completed his PhD in Materials Science at the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 1992. He is working on damage, fracture, friction and plasticity, from material science to geophysics. He published about 130 peer-reviewed papers in international journals, one book on sea ice mechanics, and received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2021.



In Pictures






To learn more : Revealing the mechanics of sub-critical rock cracking of mountains cliffs from environmental forcings by imaging stress cycles from dense acoustic arrays











Funded by the European Union (ERC CTR, grant number 101142154). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.