Volcanic Vibrations: Sara Klaasen on her path to Australia
Spotlight on ASAIN member Sara Klaasen, a recent recipient of the SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship to continue her work in Australia. Already finished with her PhD and defence, she is planning her move over to Australia; though we aren't yet allowed to call her "Doctor"!
Join Sara and other Australia-bound recipients of the Postdoc.Mobility grant program for presentations and networking in Bern on the 18th of November: https://luma.com/iyw21ld0
I am grateful to be part of this Swiss-Australian network collaboration, even though I am originally neither Swiss nor Australian. I have worked at ETH in Zürich for the last few years, and I will move to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra early 2026.
I am from the Netherlands, where I completed my Bachelor’s as well. Afterwards, it was time for me to look abroad and I moved to ETH Zurich for the Master’s in Earth Sciences, majoring in geophysics. Even though I originally only planned to stay in Switzerland for the duration of the Master’s, Switzerland has a way of keeping you. I continued my initial research during the Master’s with a PhD, during which I investigated the potential of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for volcano monitoring.
Sara stands on the glaciated flanks of the Grímsvötn volcano, in Iceland.
The use of fibre-optic cables in the field of geophysical data exploration has increased rapidly over the last 2 decades. By sending a laser pulse into the fibre and recording the light that gets scattered back to the laser, we can detect small phase changes in the detected pulses. These phase changes are caused by the slight shortening or elongating of the fibre when it is deformed due to external influences, such as an earthquake or a person walking near the fibre. The result is a dense network of deformation measurements. Instead of working with a handful measurement devices, we can get seismic measurements on the metre-scale along a single fibre-optic cable that can extend up to tens of kilometres.
While in Switzerland, I have applied this technology to various volcanoes, e.g., the stratovolcano Mount Meager in Canada, the subglacial volcano Grímsvötn in Iceland, the submarine volcano Kolumbo near Santorini, and the ongoing volcanic eruptions on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland. The incredibly dense data lends itself well to the detection of very small events that existing, sparser networks would miss.
Sara hard at work splicing optic fibres in an improvised lab, on the glacier in the back of a Jeep.
While in Australia, I will apply this same technique to study the slab structure of the Alpine Fault in the South Island of New Zealand, and investigate the magma chamber of the Taupo Volcano in the North Island. Specifically, I will use the seismic recordings of local earthquakes to generate detailed models of the subsurface structures.
I look forward to the next step in my academic career: Australia!
Fieldwork experiment examples: