Description du sujet de thèse

Rivers shape the Earth's surface by transporting sediment, a process that can become hazardous in mountain catchments. In these regions, floods can mobilize large amounts of material, yet measuring such events remains a major challenge. This gap is critical because global warming is expected to intensify extreme rainfall and flooding. Understanding the processes behind destructive events, such as catastrophic Storm Alex in southeast France (2020) is essential. These processes include the formation of flood waves and sediment pulses, which exert strong erosive power.
Seismic monitoring offers powerful tools for detecting and quantifying erosion processes remotely and continuously, with high temporal resolution and over a broad range of distances. Fluvial processes such as bedload transport and turbulence generate elastic deformations of the Earth's surface, producing measurable seismic signals. This principle forms the foundation of environmental seismology, an emerging field focused on interpreting seismic signals generated by surface processes.
This interdisciplinary PhD project aims to integrate hydraulic measurements, physical models and advanced seismic methods (including array processing, machine learning, and potentially distributed acoustic sensing) to develop novel approaches for monitoring unsteady and non-uniform flood flows across multiple spatial and temporal scales. By adopting a multi-scale perspective, the project aims to significantly improve our ability to observe and quantify flood-related hazards. The main study area will be the Alpes-Maritimes region in southeastern France, where multiple seismic datasets are already available. The PhD candidate will also have opportunities to participate in field campaigns and data collection.
This project is part of the ERC-funded project UNREST – UNveiling dynamics of Rapid Erosion through advanced Seismic Techniques, led by Dr. Malgorzata Chmiel.

Requirements:
Candidates with a master level in geophysics, physics, applied mathematics, or computer science will be considered. Expertise in high-level programming language like MATLAB or Python is essential.

Contexte de travail

The candidate will carry out their activity within the Géoazur laboratory of the University of the Côte d'Azur, CNRS, located in the Sophia-Antipolis Technology Park. The Géoazur laboratory is a multidisciplinary research unit made up of geophysicists, geologists and astronomers federating around major scientific issues: telluric hazards (seismic, gravity and tsunamigenic) and the associated risks, the dynamics of the lithosphere and the Earth imagery, geodesy-metrology of the Earth and the near Universe. The laboratory comprises approximately 170 researchers and teacher-researchers and is structured into 6 thematic teams. The successful candidate will join the Earthquakes - Hazards and Risks ("Séismes - Aléas et Risques") team of the laboratory.

Supervisory Team:
The project is supervised by Malgorzata Chmiel (Géoazur, CNRS) and Jean-Paul Ampuero (Géoazur, IRD). The PhD student will work in close collaboration with Margot Chapuis (UMR Espace, UCA), and Morgan Abily (Géoazur, UCA).