Professor Adriano Gualandi will deliver the ESE Departmental Seminar on Thursday the 30th of November 2023: “Data-driven slow earthquake dynamics”.
Join us in room G41 – RSM Building – on Thursday 30th of November 2023 at 12h15.
Abstract
Earthquakes are a destructive natural phenomenon with high societal costs and impact. A better understanding and characterisation of their underlying governing equations can help to better estimate the hazard associated with them.
Slow slip events (SSEs) show many similarities with regular earthquakes but are characterised by a much shorter recurrence
time (months/years instead of decades/millennia), offering us the possibility to study multiple cycles. Being able to model their dynamics can answer questions concerning the complexity of the frictional failure phenomenon at natural scale and its
predictability. Studying slow earthquakes in nature and in the lab, I will show how a system of Stochastic Differential Equations can help us better characterise the seismic cycle, offering an alternative way to the classical two end members (purely deterministic or purely stochastic) used to describe seismicity. Blending the deterministic and stochastic approaches shows that friction is highly sensitive to small perturbations, suggesting that the macroscopic dynamics is influenced by small scale interactions. The so-called fast degrees of freedom active at the small spatio-temporal scales can be taken into account via a stochastic framework, while the underlying lowdimensional deterministic dynamics is used as a support to describe the evolution of the system.
About the speaker
Adriano Gualandi is an Assistant Professor in Geophysics at the Department of Earth Sciences and an Official Fellow of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. He is also a visiting researcher at the Italian National Earthquake Observatory section of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV). Prior to his current role in Cambridge, he was a researcher at the INGV in Rome (Italy), a visiting researcher at the École Polytechnique in Paris (France), a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (CA, USA), and a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (CA, USA). He studied at the University of Bologna, where he received his PhD in Geophysics with a fellowship from INGV, and where he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics, with a specialisation in Earth Physics. His research mainly focuses on the study of nonlinear dynamical systems, friction, earthquakes and geodesy. He uses satellite and remote sensing data as well as local networks data to better understand current surface motions and the seismic cycle