Gareth Funning

@gfun.earth

Faculty at UCR! Earthquakes! Fault creep! InSAR! GNSS! Seismology! He/him! Executive Editor at @weareseismica.bsky.social! Yes!

It's that time of year again - the EarthScope ISCE+ course in InSAR processing and analysis is underway! Here (on his short course debut) is Francisco Delgado leading us through a first modeling exercise using InSAR displacements over Okmok Volcano!

View of the OpenScienceLab screen, showing two versions of an interferogram of Okmok Volcano in Alaska. Francisco Delgado (webcam snapshot on the right) is leading the session.

We just got in from running errands, and this chap marches up to me as if demanding nose scritches (happily administered) and then settled in to munch on some of the excess grass outside our house.

Donkey standing in the middle of the street, heading straight towards me Donkey dealing with some excess grass in my front yard

It's that time of year! Please consider submitting to AGU session G024: Transient Deformation and Creep Processes in the Earthquake Cycle! Studies using geodetic, seismic, geologic and/or experimental data are all welcome, as well as numerical and analytical models. agu.confex.com/agu/agu26/pr...

Transient Deformation and Creep Processes in the Earthquake Cycle

Transient deformation and aseismic slip processes play a fundamental role in the earthquake cycle, yet their spatiotemporal characteristics and underlying physics remain incompletely understood. Advan...

agu.confex.com

Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface

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I can report that Woking town centre was surprisingly lively at 4 in the morning, due to some liberal extension of the normal licensing laws and the explosive decompression following one of the most stressful England victories in my lifetime. Also, it's getting light outside.

Composite plot of the two coseismic interferograms (Sentinel-1, from Copernicus) with the USGS epicenters of the two earthquakes and faults from GEM. The shoreline San Sebastián fault lines up with the fringes in the west and is probably the fault responsible.

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Not plotted here but the epicenter is located near the western limit of InSAR fringe, indicating rupture was predominantly towards the east, including Caracas. So rupture directivity, which is like a seismic Doppler effect, likely contributed to stronger ground-shaking effects and damage.

Gareth Funning@gfun.earth · last mo.

It's taken me a while, but here is my first interferogram of the Venezuela earthquakes from Sentinel-1. It's an ascending track to the west of the epicenter, and the pattern of displacements is consistent with slip on a fault that runs close to and parallel to the coast.

Interferogram of the earthquakes in Venezuela. Shows the western extent of the rupture, and that the earthquake was likely on an E-W striking fault.

Another interferogram (Sentinel-1, descending track) covering the bulk of the rupture. The fact that you see essentially (the southern) half of the displacement pattern, indicates that the fault was offshore, or close to it. The noisiness is due to the tropical vegetation in-region.

A noisy interferogram of the 2026 Venezuela earthquakes. The fringe gradient is highest by the coast, and dies away to the south.

It's taken me a while, but here is my first interferogram of the Venezuela earthquakes from Sentinel-1. It's an ascending track to the west of the epicenter, and the pattern of displacements is consistent with slip on a fault that runs close to and parallel to the coast.

Interferogram of the earthquakes in Venezuela. Shows the western extent of the rupture, and that the earthquake was likely on an E-W striking fault.

I am currently in Budapest, where I don't have an earthly about what the talking heads on their World Cup coverage are saying. I don't miss the loudmouthed prat on FOX at all (yeah, you know which one). www.theguardian.com/football/202...

The French aristocrat and the all-American idiot: Henry v Lalas is the World Cup’s most compelling battle

Fox’s broadcast at the tournament has become a story of two contrasting styles. And there is one clear winner

theguardian.com

FRINGE 2026, day 2: Still zombified by jetlag, shotgunning coffee to stay conscious. Also, through some kind of black magic, someone has cut the auditorium in half, which is not doing wonders for my grasp on reality! We're starting with ESA future mission concepts this morning...

The auditorium at Jagellonian University, yesterdayThe auditorium at Jagellonian University today. It is half the size of yesterday!

FRINGE 2026 is go! The premier scientific workshop for InSAR methods, results and science. Apparently they are not sure whether it is the 13th or 14th edition. But I have been coming to them since 2003 (as has Marcus Engdahl who made this slide) and wow I'm old!

Slide showing images and logos for all of the FRINGE workshops since 2003. The interferogram of the Bam earthquake seems to appear on a lot of them.

Saw the first post-Mindanao earthquake Sentinel-1 data were available, and thought fuck it, I'll stay up late and process it. And actually, it's way more coherent than I thought it would be! And there are fringes!

Sentinel-1 interferogram of the 2026 Mindanao earthquake. Pink box shows location of the zoomed in versionZoomed in interferogram of the 2006 Mindanao earthquake. There are fringes in the center part, east of what is Sarangani Bay, I think

Earthquake response: drop to a crouch for a second, then move to computer and spend three minutes refreshing the USGS webpage until a dot shows up on the map. (M3.4, Reche Canyon, near the San Jacinto fault)

Map of the Riverside-Moreno Valley-Redlands area, with the epicenter of the recent M3.4 earthquake marked on as a red dot

It is important to validate InSAR time series results! And to call it out when people oversell the capabilities of the method! (Ideally before Science magazine airs out your dirty laundry in public...)

Paul Voosen@voosen.me · 2mo ago

My latest for @science.org: Radar maps of sinking coastlines produced using InSAR can show dramatically different, even constrasting, results. Before this work makes its way to guiding efforts in the real world, a hard look is needed, researchers say.

First time at the Bowl for 2026! In the cheapest of the cheap seats. Alison Moyet is down there somewhere. (Loved all the Yazoo songs!) Marc Almond and the Human League to follow.

The stage at the Hollywood Bowl with the Hollywood sign behind in the distance