Clara Vernet

SM Seismology

The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Clara Vernet for the poster/PICO entitled:

Shallow crustal imaging with distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) offshore central Chile (Vernet C.; Rivet D.; Trabattoni A.; Baillet M.; van den Ende M.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Clara Vernet is a PhD student at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Université Côte d’Azur, in Geoazur laboratory (France). Her research focuses on advancing seismic imaging with Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) on submarine fiber-optic cables, particularly for understanding tectonic and sedimentary structures offshore Central Chile in the framework of the ERC ABYSS project.

Clara’s current research investigates how scattered wavefield and ambient noise can be used to image crustal structures at sub-kilometer scales. By partitioning the wavefield to isolate surface-wave energy and performing local backprojections of scattered arrivals, she identifies fault zones characterized by strong wavefront scattering and sharp lateral velocity contrasts. In parallel, she uses ambient seismic noise to analyze local reflections and detect frequencydependent resonances associated with sedimentary basins. Her awarded poster demonstrates how the combination of scattered-wave imaging from earthquakes and noisebased methodologies enables high-resolution characterization of submarine faults and sedimentary basins in marine environments.