CRACK THE ROCK project awarded ERC Advanced Grant 2023

At the beginning of April, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the results of the "ERC Advanced Grant 2023" call for established researchers. INSU is the host institution for 4 grants, including 1 to ISTerre awarded to Eric Larose for his project CRACK THE ROCK. Congratulations !

In 2024, the ERC will be funding 255 researchers with "Advanced" fellowships, worth a total of 652 million euros, as part of the Horizon Europe program. These grants enable scientists, recognized in their field at national and international level, to carry out innovative, high-risk projects that open up new avenues in their discipline or in other fields. Aimed at established researchers, these grants are at a higher level of experience than the "Starting" (up to 1.5 million euros and aimed at European project leaders who obtained their doctorate 2 to 7 years ago) and "Consolidator" (up to 2 million euros and 7 to 12 years after the doctorate) grants. Each project lasts 5 years and has a maximum budget of 2.5 million euros.

CRACK THE ROCK project

Find out how rocks are progressively damaged by environmental stresses, and how climate change could affect cliff erosion and the associated natural hazards. In practical terms, the project will involve answering the following questions : what variations in stress are induced in rock by meteorological and climatic variations ? How do hourly, daily and seasonal stress cycles damage rock through progressive "fatigue", also known as "subcritical damage" ? How can the development of rock fracturing lead to landslides and rockfalls ? How can these hazards be better predicted ?

Eric Larose, lauréat de l’ERC Advanced Grant 2023

Eric Larose is a geophysicist at the Institut des Sciences de la Terre in Grenoble, and Director of Research at the CNRS. A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (physics), he completed a thesis at the interface between acoustics (Lab Ondes Acoustiques, ESPCI) and seismology (LGIT Grenoble). After a Post Doc at the University of Illinois at Urrbana Champaign, in theoretical mechanics, he was recruited by the CNRS in 2006 with a project to study how waves propagate in complex materials, and more specifically how this propagation can be used to image and monitor the subsurface.
Since then, he has made a major contribution to the emergence of a new disciplinary field : environmental seismology, which exploits seismic background noise to measure mechanical variations in the subsoil induced by changes in the external environment (rain, frost, snow...). This has led him to discover a technique for better predicting landslides, or monitoring the evolution of permafrost in the high mountains.

Deeply involved in scientific communication and culture, he is also co-director of several documentaries, and founding president of the "Rencontres Montagnes & Sciences" festival.


Updated on 31 May 2024