Romain Jolivet studies active faults and the relative motion of tectonic plates.  His research focuses on the relationship between slow, aseismic slip that occurs “silently” between earthquakes and the rapid slip accompanying earthquakes.  As he describes in the podcast, he uses interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images from radar satellites to examine surface deformation over wide areas at meter-scale resolution.  InSAR images of the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes reveal complicated slip patterns occurring on well-recognized plate boundary faults as well as on hitherto ignored faults.

Romain Jolivet is a Professor of Geoscience at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

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