Alessia Maggi

Biography

Alessia Maggi is professor of seismology at the Strasbourg Institute for Earth and Environment (ITES), a joint research unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Strasbourg. Her research covers the full breadth of seismology, from imaging Earth's internal structure to characterising the sources of seismic waves.

She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) in 2002, followed by postdoctoral research in seismic tomography at the University of Strasbourg (2002–2004) and at the California Institute of Technology (2005). She joined the University of Strasbourg in 2006 as junior observatory scientist and has held her current chair as full professor since 2013. She was named Knight of the French Order of Academic Palms in 2021.

From 2006 to 2014, Alessia Maggi served as head of the French seismological observatories in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, overseeing five permanent stations across Antarctica (Dumont d'Urville, Concordia) and the French sub-Antarctic territories (Crozet, Kerguelen, Amsterdam). This role gave her an unusually deep knowledge of polar logistics and long-term geophysical monitoring. During a recent sabbatical, she developed expertise in distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) - a transformative fibre-optic technology for seismic imaging - through collaborations with leading groups in Grenoble, Leeds, Paris, and Nice.

The USIAS fellowship marks a transition that has been building for over a decade: from solid Earth seismology - imaging Earth's internal structure and characterising the sources and mechanisms of earthquakes - to polar ice research, bringing seismological methods to bear on one of the most urgent questions in climate science: how Antarctic ice deforms, and what this means for future sea level rise.

Fellowship 2026

Dates - 01/10/2026-30/09/2028

Project summary

DEEP LISTENING: FIBRE-OPTIC SEISMOLOGY IN THE ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET

The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single source of uncertainty in projections of future sea level rise. Improving those projections requires understanding, at a physical level, how ice deforms - but the deep interior of Antarctica's ice sheets has not yet been directly observed with the sensitivity needed to capture that deformation in real time. This project brings a new observational tool to bear on that problem, deploying it for the first time in a deep Antarctic borehole that preserves 800,000 years of continuous climate history.

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) converts a standard fibre-optic cable into thousands of continuous seismic sensors along its entire length. Deployed in a borehole, a single cable provides an unprecedented picture of ice structure and dynamics from surface to bedrock. A landmark study published in Science in 2025 - to which the Strasbourg team contributed - revealed unexpected cascades of brittle fracturing deep within the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, a deformation mechanism entirely absent from current ice-sheet models and a strong candidate for explaining the persistent gap between modelled and observed ice mass loss.

The USIAS project deploys this technology for the first time in a deep Antarctic borehole: the EPICA borehole at Dome C, East Antarctica, which preserves an 800,000-year continuous climate record. A three-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable, combined with a surface seismic array, will address four questions: how ice crystals align and deform in the deepest, oldest ice; what lies at the unsampled ice-bedrock interface; whether the slow-moving interior ice produces the same brittle fracturing events seen in fast-flowing ice streams; and how the surface snow layer compacts under Antarctica's extreme cold and minimal accumulation.

The results will constrain ice-sheet models where they are most uncertain, establish proof-of-concept for deep borehole DAS in Antarctica, and open a methodological pathway to future deep drilling sites including Beyond EPICA and Australia's million-year ice core project.