Main Supervisor: Bruno Pace (Ud’A)
Co-Supervisor: Alessandro Verdecchia (RUB), Laura Peruzza (OGS), Francesco Visini (INGV)

Location:Università degli Studi di Chieti-Pescara (Italy) – www.unich.it

Duration of the PhD: 3 years

The doctoral candidate will be enrolled in a PhD program at the Università degli Studi di Chieti-Pescara

Objectives: The doctoral candidate project will investigate the recurrence times, their variability and probability of occurrences of moderate-to-large magnitude earthquakes in a fault-based 3D model, including coseismic Coulomb stress changes, and time-dependent fluid migration and viscoelasticity. The 3D fault model will mimic complex networks of active faults (e.g. central Apennines or lower Rhine graben). The objective is to build a workflow, computational resources and realistic benchmarks that can be tuned to include alternative inputs. These will simulate synthetic catalogues of earthquake ruptures, including multi-fault ruptures, useful to study how inputs affect the resulting space-time evolution of earthquake series and their epistemic uncertainties. The available earthquake catalogues (instrumental, historical and paleoseismological catalogues) will be used to rank the modelled space-time earthquake series.

Expected Results:

1. Synthetic catalogues of earthquake ruptures;
2. Sensitivity analysis on input variability and uncertainties.

Planned secondments: RUHR (6 months, A. Verdecchia, M13-18, modelling coseismic Coulomb stress changes, fluid migration and viscoelasticity); OGS (4 months, L. Peruzza, M35-38, sensitivity analysis on input variability and uncertainties).