ANR EQTIME 2020-2024

Project Title : Quantifying the temporal and spatial slip variability in the earthquake cycle spanning months to million years timescales.

PI : Lucilla Benedetti CEREGE

Partners: IRSN – Gesociences Montpellier – ISTERRE – OGS – Univ Chieti

Understanding how successive earthquakes accrue on faults to produce tectonic landforms is still poorly understood. The way deformation is accommodated throughout the crust, in response to the far-field plate tectonics force imposes at plate boundaries, strongly affects the seismic cycle and may control earthquake triggering and the spatial pattern of fault ruptures. The Apennines range, host of the 2016 seismic sequence (5 shocks Mw5-6.5 over 9 months), is a unique area where the accumulation and release of slip over multiple seismic cycles, over time scales of 1yr-1 Myr and spatial scales of 1m-100km, can be determined. We will combine frontier methodologies in geochronology, remote sensing, geodesy, geophysics, high-resolution topographical data acquisition, seismic hazard modelling, all developed and/or mastered by our teams, to quantitatively constrain how portions of the seismic cycle scale up over multiple cycles to produce the cumulative escarpments we see in the landscape.