The Université Josef Fourier is a major international centre of excellence in teaching and research and is associated with CNRS. The Laboratoire de Geophysique Interne et Technophysique is part of the Grenoble Observatory, which is a multi-lab IPG institute, structured in the same way as other French IPGs. The Grenoble Observatory investigates astronomy, earth and planetary sciences, including internal and external geophysics. One of the largest European computing facilities is available on site, and collaboration with cognate disciplines (physics, mathematics, statistics, chemistry, humanities (for risk assessment)) has dramatically increased over the past decade. The risk assessment group carries out fundamental research on wave propagation in heterogeneous media and rupture analysis of geological objects including volcanoes, landslides and earthquakes. The response of rock deformation is studied from the lab scale (dislocation, rock cracking) up to major crustal faults. LGIT runs several networks for the multi-disciplinary monitoring of earthquakes and landslides. Experiment facilities include a rock mechanics lab (triaxial loading apparatus, slider-block experiment) and acoustic emission monitoring.

Team Leader: Agnès Helmstetter is a researcher in Geophysics at CNRS-LGIT, Grenoble, since Nov 2005. She is recipient of the Lamont-Doherty and USGS Mendenhall postdoctoral fellowships in 2004. She has published over 20 papers in physics and geophysics since she finished her PhD in 2002. Her main research theme concerns the mechanisms of earthquake triggering, and the scaling of earthquake physical properties with size. She also works on landslides, and on the failure of composite materials, coupling laboratory experiments, data analysis, and numerical modeling.

Additional participants:

Jean-Robert Grasso is a professor in Geophysics at CNRS-LGIT, Grenoble, since 1983. He was also Director of the Piton de la Fournaise Volcano Observatory, Reunion Island between 1992 and 1994, and visiting scholar at Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA, USA in 2002-2003, and USGS Menlo Park CA, USA in 2004-2005. His research interests are the failures and instabilities in natural phenomena: implications for processes and natural hazard assessments; common patterns and peculiarities of earthquake, volcano eruption and landslide dynamics and implication for their predictability; seismic ruptures as damage processes in the lithosphere: from dislocations in ice single crystal, icequakes, volcanic seismicity, induced and triggered seismicity to major intraplate M>7 events. He published more than 60 papers in International Journals.

David Amitrano Associate Professor

Lucile Tatard PhD student