Thread: Postdoctoral position in seismic imaging

Institution: Observatoire Midi Pyrenees, Toulouse, FRANCE
Open Until: 2018-03-30

Passive crustal imaging with the large-N and large-T Maupasacq deployment - Comparison to active seismic imaging


The successful candidate will join our research group at the Observatoire Midi Pyrenees working on high resolution imaging of the lithosphere with full waveform inversion approaches. This postdoc is funded by OROGEN (http://www.orogen-project.com), a very ambitious research project which aims at better understanding the formation and evolution of mountain belts.

The main objective of the postdoc project is to obtain finely resolved tomographic images of the western Pyrenees, a key region to constrain and understand the orogenic processes that have shaped this mountain belt. To do so, the postdoctoral candidate will extend our full wavefom inversion method towards high frequencies (f > 1 Hz) in order to exploit the data of the Maupasacq experiment. This pioneering acquisition involved about 500 sensors deployed during 6 months. The new tomographic images are expected to bring crucial new insights into the nature of the very anomalous structures beneath the Mauleon basin. This region is also densely covered by controled source studies and well-logs. We will thus have the rather unique opportunity to compare the tomographic images obtained with passive full waveform inversion approaches to those obtained with active source imaging approaches.

Keywords: seismic tomography, 3-D wave propagation modeling, waveform inversion, spectral-element method

Start date: As soon as possible

Duration: 2 years

Postdoc advisory team: S. Chevrot (CNRS GET, Toulouse).

The host institution and the laboratory: Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées is the biggest observatory in France, covering a wide range of disciplines in Earth and Universe Sciences. It is a component of the university Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier. The GET is the laboratory of Earth and environmental sciences within the Observatoire Midi Pyrenees. It has 165 permanent employees. The Geophysics team develops a multidisciplinary research related to forward modeling and inversion of gravimetric and seismological data.