Institute: Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP)
Title: Post-doctoral
Country/Region: France
Period: 2016/02/21 - 2016/12/20
Theme: The use of coral microatolls in the Ryukyus arc to document relative sea level changes related to the megathrust and the climate
Host: Kenji SATAKE
Introduction: "My research is focused on paleoseismological studies in coastal areas. I mainly use corals as paleogeodetic instruments. More specifically, coral microatolls are used as natural tide gauges to reconstruct the relative sea-level changes over several centuries. Their use allow to document vertical deformations related to subduction processes as well as climatic sea-level changes at interannual and secular scales. This research topic leads me to study the Lesser Antilles subduction zone and the January 12 2010 Haiti earthquake during my PhD at IPGP in Paris. In the Lesser Antilles, our study on coral microatolls notably provided evidences of significant coupling on the megathrust interface, in contradiction with short-term geodetic studies. The research conducted on coral microatolls in Haiti brought original results on coral microatolls’ natural variability in the Caribbean, and on their reliability for measuring very slow relative sea-level changes.

My stay at ERI will be dedicated to perform a first study on coral microatolls along the Ryukyus trench - the work on other markers as notches, beachrock, reef platform will complete the coral record - in the hope to gain informations on the subduction process through several seismic cycles. That would help to a better characterization of the coupling variability in time and space along the Ryukyus trench."