Passive Seismic Probing of Active Faults – FaultProbe

The recent August 2016 central Italy earthquake that caused 298 casualties reminds us that earthquakes are among the most dramatic natural disasters worldwide. Most of the damages due to earthquakes could be avoided by improving our ability to mitigate seismic hazard. Laboratory and numerical experiments predict that earthquakes should be preceded by a detectable slow nucleation phase. In seismology, many attempts were made in the last 50 years to detect these precursors but they failed due to the lack of appropriate devices to accurately probe the core of active seismic faults.
In our group, we developed in the last 10 years a breakthrough method to continuously measure small mechanical changes occurring within the Earth using records of ambient seismic noise. Currently this method lacks of sufficient spatial resolution to carefully look into seismic faults. Within this proposal, I intend to develop a new of noise-based high resolution monitoring approach that has the ambition to change the game of earthquake prediction.
I intend to grasp the opportunity of a recent step change in seismic instrumentation to develop a new high resolution entirely passive seismic monitoring method based on dense seismic arrays deployments and subsequent data processing. I plan to target the Alto Tiberina Fault (ATF), a highly seismically active fault in Northern Apennines, currently monitored within the facility of an Italian observatory (TABOO). The work will start with seismic wave modeling that will help to optimize the parameters of the subsequent deployment of a long-term (2 years) passive seismic experiment with the aim of detecting precursors to frequent earthquakes that occur on the ATF. Because this approach is cheap and easy to deploy, I believe that it will have a major impact by being implemented in many near fault observatories worldwide in the future.