Who am I?

Hello there! My name is Manuel Asnar, and these days I spend most of my time working towards a PhD degree 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 and Georg Dresen.

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.