Piero Poli obtains European funding to study earthquakes

European Research Council (ERC) announced end of july ERC Starting Grants assignment. Representing a total of EUR 600 million, these grants allow more than 400 young excellent researchers in Europe to develop their most impacting and innovative work. Piero Poli, researcher at ISTerre in the team Waves and structures, was distinguished for the project "MONIFAULT: Monitoring real faults towards their critical state".

 
 

The large number of deaths and the significant economic losses associated with earthquakes signal the urgent need to deepen our understanding of earthquakes in order to improve the prediction of these natural phenomena. However, the complex physics governing the nucleation of earthquakes is poorly understood today, as is our ability to predict them. With the MONIFAULT project, a new integrated methodology based on machine learning will be developed to follow the spatio-temporal evolution of the physical properties of real faults. Research conducted under the project will detect new signals and provide new information on the complex physics of real faults at moments close to major earthquakes. This new data is needed to understand how earthquakes occur. The project will also have a major impact on the prediction of observation earthquakes.

The MONIFAULT team consists of researchers from ISTerre, the national laboratory of Los Alamos, University of Southern California, and University of La Sapienza (Roma).