Thomas Lecocq, Seismologist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, will deliver the ESE Departmental Seminar on 18 February.
Join us online on Thursday 18 February by clicking “Livestream” on the seminar page at 12pm.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a wave of lockdown measures enforced by almost every country in the world. This wave of restrictions had a direct impact on the day-to-day activities of humans – the strongest being on general mobility. This led to changes in the atmospheric content of particles and gas, to audibly quieter cities, and to quieter seismic noise. After the first evidence that high-frequency noise had reduced at many places globally, we coordinated a global effort to process and report on this (hopefully) unique occasion of global reduction of high-frequency seismic noise. This work, co-authored by 76 seismologists-at-home, grouped researchers at all stages of their scientific careers, from Master’s students to retired Professors. This collaboration, based on an open exchange of ideas, computer codes, and results, redefines how science can be done in a connected world – even when each individual is isolated.
Biography
Thomas Lecocq is a geologist by training, and became a seismologist while doing his PhD at the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). He has been a permanent member of staff at the ROB since 2011, and Work Leader since 2015.
He is also Maitre de Conférence at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches ‘geophysics 101’ to geologists. In the last 10 years Thomas has advised more than 10 Master’s students and now advises two PhD researchers on seismic noise in Iceland and seismic noise/hazard in Belgian caves.
He is a strong supporter of free and open-source software, developer of MSNoise, a widely used open-source Python Package for working with noise data, and contributor to ObsPy, the seismological toolbox for Python.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of ORFEUS and Belgian representative to the European Seismological Commission.