Luca Dal Zilio

TS Tectonics and Structural Geology

The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Luca Dal Zilio for the poster/PICO entitled:

Bimodal seismicity in the Himalaya controlled by fault friction and geometry (Dal Zilio, L.; van Dinther, Y.; Gerya, T. V.; Avouac, J.-P.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Luca Dal Zilio is a PhD student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), under the supervision of Prof. Taras Gerya and Dr. Ylona van Dinther. The PhD project, which title is “Modeling mountain building across scales: From tectonics to earthquakes” is funded by the SNSF Alp-Array SINERGIA. Luca obtained his master’s degree at University of Padua (Italy), with the specialization in tectonics and numerical modelling. His PhD project focuses on earthquake cycles in collisional orogens. By combining theoretical, computational and observational approaches, he aims to better constrain the seismic behavior in orogenic mountain belts. The outcomes can then be used to improve the assessment of earthquake hazard in large urban areas close to mountain belts. The poster presented at EGU 2018 explores the conditions that could explain the bimodal seismicity (Mw 7 vs. Mw 8+ earthquakes) of large Himalayan earthquakes. His numerical experiments establish the dependence of earthquake rupture pattern on fault frictional properties and non-planar geometry of the Himalayan megathrust due to variations in stress distribution.
In 2019, he will start as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology.