Harsha S. Bhat


I am Harsha S. Bhat, a senior CNRS Research Scientist (Directeur de Recherche) working at the Laboratoire de Géologie in Ecole Normale Supérieure and a Professor at Laboratoire de Mécanique Solides, Ecole Polytechnique.

I work mainly at the interface between Earthquake Physics and Solid Mechanics making occasional excursions into Rock Mechanics, Tectonics and Seismology.

I obtained my B. E. in Civil Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India followed by a Ph. D. from Harvard University and then I did postdoctoral work at Caltech and the University of Southern California.


NEW
New paper on tectonic origin of volcanism
Far-field Africa-Eurasia compression can localize deformational heating near the Moho, offering a tectonic origin for Massif Central and Eifel volcanism.
NEW
New paper explaining Lesser Antilles topography
Plate buckling and deformational heating during subduction initiation produce a Moho-level thermal anomaly explaining Lesser Antilles topography and arc location.
NEW
New paper submitted on Intraplate eartquake swarms
A High-Resolution Earthquake Catalog Reveals Coupled Fault Interactions and Multiple Controls on Seismicity Migration in an Intraplate Earthquake Swarm
New paper submitted on Tidal sensitivity of tremors
Tidal sensitivity in a mixed fast and slow earthquake system in northeastern Japan
Welcome to the group Mingqi!
Minqi Liu will start his postdoc with Jean-Arthur Olive and myself in May 2026. We are very happy to have you Mingqi!
Two new papers accepted on Digital Twin of a fault zone and Tsunami modeling
Check out the papers by Almakari et al. (2026) and Melkior et al. (2026) in my Publications page.
New paper submitted on 3D geometrical complexities and slip dynamics
Slow and fast earthquakes emerge due to fault geometrical complexity.
Solid earth tides and tremors
Fault resonance as a mechanism to explain solid earth tides and tremors. Congrats Yishuo on your first paper as a Phd student!
Congrats Pierre and Kurama
Congrats Pierre Romanet and Kurama Okubo for strating their new jobs as permanent researchers at Cerema, France and NIED, Japan, respectively!
Congrats Kurama!
Kurama bags another award as the EGU Outstanding Early Career Scientist and starts as a permanent researcher at NIED, Japan!
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