Hello there! My name is Manuel Asnar, and these days I spend most of my time working towards a PhD in rock physics at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ. You would be forgiven for just saying “GFZ”.
I’m personally interested in investigating the damage and seemingly spontaneous recovery of rocks and other similarly behaving materials, a behavior sometimes called non-classical, non-linear elasticity. I do this by applying techniques borrowed from ambient noise seismology to continuously monitor velocity changes on rock samples as I subject them to varying levels of strain, but also when I don’t.
I do most of my work under the supervision of Christoph Sens-Schönfelder, Audrey Bonnelye, Georg Dresen and Marco Bohnhoff.
My PhD is part of the EU Horizon 2020 Seismological Parameters and INstrumentation (SPIN) project, which trains a cohort of PhD students all across Europe and aims to deepen our understanding of the potential presented by new seismic instrumentation tools.
I consider myself as someone who is fairly aware of the current state of the climate and our environment in general. Although my day-to-day motivation and degree of activism varies depending on my current state of mind, I haven't flown since 2019. This has however only been made possible thanks to the extensive amounts of travel money I had at my disposal for conferences, a very flexible schedule, and a lenient supervisor, all of which can be fairly uncommon even by Western European standards.
Here is a link to the IPCC AR6 Summary for Policymakers for getting up to date quickly on the physics of the whole thing. For other more or less entertaning takes on the subject, I invite you to check out basically anything made by the inspiring Amy Westervelt, the hilarious Rollie Williams at Climate Town, and academic voices such as Peter Kalmus, Gianluca Grimalda, Julia Steinberger, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Friederike Otto, and many others.
I have always had a weakness for old school, slightly outdated, corny academic webpages, even more so when they include completely off-topic sections about whatever floats the author's boat, and I certainly intend on doing my part to keep this tradition alive. Below are a few interesting specimens from which I have drawn inspiration for my personal page.
Albert Tarantola | Sébastien Neukirch | Thomas Guilmeau | Jean-Charles Gilbert | Bigtoys | adactioI am very into food, although not a fantastic cook myself. Chinese and Italian cuisines are probably my
favorites at the moment, but I would love to delve deeper into Indian cooking.
I regularly play or have played handball, rugby union and touch rugby, and generally have a thing for
team sports
I read a fair bit of Japanese manga as well with Gantz, Vinland Saga and One Piece being some of my
favorites
I am also into language learning (and learning how to learn languages). Currently doing my best to reach
a grade schooler level in Japanese before 2030.
I come from the stunning Basque Country, which overlaps modern-day France and Spain on the Atlantic
coast (not to be confused with Catalunya!)