"Campus mondial de la mer" community congratulates Marc-André Gutscher for his ERC grant

Marc-André Gutscher, Geologist-geophysicist, "Laboratoire Géosciences Océan", obtains an ERC grant for FOCUS project.

Information from ERC website:

"Using underwater communication cables in earthquake warning systems
70% of the earth’s surface is covered by water and difficult to monitor with modern seismological instruments, making it hard to obtain data from submarine fault lines that would help anticipate earthquakes. But a solution may be at hand, using the fiber-optic communication cable networks that crisscross our seafloor. The FOCUS project, led by Marc-André Gutscher at the CNRS, IUEM Plouzané, would lay the groundwork for a revolutionary secondary use of these underwater cables: monitoring deformation caused by active faults on the seafloor. The project will for the first time apply a technique commonly used for structural health monitoring of large-scale engineering structures (bridges, dams, pipelines): laser reflectometry, specifically Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry (BOTDR), to the study of submarine faults. The project's primary offshore test site is in Sicily, and may be expanded to other existing networks in earthquake hazard zones such as Japan and Cascadia, or to the Mediterranean region.
 

Project: Fiber Optic Cable Use for Seafloor studies of earthquake hazard and deformation (FOCUS)
Researcher: Marc-André Gutscher
Host Institution: CNRS, France
ERC Funding: € 3.49 million for five years"