Some topics I am interested about:
Seismic Events in Antarctica
Prior to the last twenty years, observations and studies of seismic events in Antarctica were few and were often constrained by only a small number of seismic stations, with nearest stations located at distances exceeding hundreds of kilometres. More recently, multiple temporary seismic networks of various scales have been deployed in multiple regions within the Antarctic continent. I applied Deep Learning techniques to 21 years of continuous data from Antarctica to detect seismic events in the southernmost continent. The seismic catalog contains 60,006 events with magnitudes (Mw) between −1.0 to 4.5. This catalog is the starting point for other researchers that want to explore diverse seismogenic processes (volcanic, cryospheric, or tectonic) across the continent.
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Induced Seismicity
Earthquakes can be induced by different anthropogenic industrial activities, like mining, waste water-disposal, reservoir impoundment, enhanced geothermal systems, and hydraulic fracturing (HF). There has been an increase in the attention by the general public as earthquakes with relatively large magnitudes (M ≥ 3.0) started to occur near HF wells in western Canada, China, and the United Kingdom. Moreover, the M 3+ induced earthquakes are generally happening in areas with low recorded background seismicity before the start of HF activity suggesting a causal link between HF and the reported seismic events. I am interested in understanding the relationships between industrial parameters during mining or hydraulic fracturing and the seismicity (or aseismic slip) generated.
Intraplate Seismicity in Canada
Montreal is one of the cities with the highest seismic hazard in Canada (1st is Vancouver) and is located in a region of intraplate seismicity. Large earthquakes do not occur often in Eastern Canada, but historically a few large events happened, including a M 5.8 (in 1732) that generated a significant damage to the city of Montreal. I want to generate new earthquake catalogs in this region using machine learning techniques to understand better the seismicity in this region. I am also interested in generating earthquake scenarios and its associated risks and hazard for the city of Montreal. Figure below shows all earthquakes detected by the Natural Resources Canada in eastern Canada from 1990 until 2020 (in intervals of 5 years) and cities with large populations.
Earthquake Locations and Seismic Networks
Earthquake location is one of the longstanding problems in seismology. The first algorithm to locate an event was proposed more than a hundred years ago (1912) but even with more recent algorithms, earthquake location is still problematic given the dependency on a large number of parameters, including (but not limited to) number of phases, seismic network distribution, velocity model, and pick uncertainties. I am interested on developing tools/algorithms to observe the improvement of earthquake locations (and its respective uncertainties) with the evolution of seismic networks. Figure below shows the vertical error for "synthetic" earthquakes in France for the seismic stations available in 2010 and 2018.
Other topics, I have work in the past or I am interested:
- Dynamic Triggering
- Seismic Ambient Noise
