Active ice-covered volcanoes present considerable danger to society due to their explosive, ash-rich nature and the potential to generate destructive glacial outburst floods. However, the ability to monitor their activity is complicated by the difficulty in discriminating volcanic and glacial earthquakes as they can appear identical in the seismic record. My recent work in Chile and Alaska has demonstrated how newly developed waveform correlation approaches could help distinguish between glacial and volcanic seismicity. The multi-disciplinary SIGMA project will apply these methods to an exceptional seismic dataset in Iceland while developing a new automatic classification software. The work plan includes creating a new micro-seismic catalogue in which events will be characterised as glacial or volcanic using statistical analysis tools. Furthermore, glacial events will be used to calculate subglacial hydraulic properties, an important requirement for modelling future glacier behaviour. The 3 targets areas across the Vatnajökull ice cap include some of the most active volcanic and glacial regions in Iceland. Under the supervision of Dr Magnússon and Prof. Aðalgeirsdóttir at the University of Iceland, and Dr Jónsdottír during a secondment at the Icelandic Meteorological Office, I will receive exceptional training in research and transferable skills that will allow me to fulfill my future career goal of becoming a leader in geophysical monitoring of volcanoes and other natural hazards. Being based at the University of Iceland will mean joining a world-leading research institute in geosciences with opportunities to develop internal and international multidisciplinary collaborations. Ultimately, the project will help future activity assessments at the most active volcanoes in Iceland and in turn, reduce their risk to local populations and infrastructure, while contributing towards the long-term EU target of ensuring a more resilient society against natural hazards.

The EILisCh project will focus on linguistic variation and change in Icelandic syntax and it will be the most ambitious attempt so far to model, understand, and explain Individual Lifespan Change in linguistic behavior, drawing on recent advances in sociolinguistics, quantitative syntactic theory, clinicial linguistics, as well as resources recently made available by Language Technology. The project will harness these ingredients and the experience of the PI and the infrastructure present in his Language and Technology lab in order to facilitate a new kind of a large scale project that will yield substantial progress towards important empirical, theoretical, and methodological goals, as well as benefits for society. I will track hundreds of Members of Parliament via their speeches over their entire political career and interview dozens of current and former MPs to establish an even deeper profile of how they use language. Carrying this research out in Iceland is important because of the unusually easy access that researchers have to public figures in this small language community. The kind of precise modelling that I describe in this proposal is only possible in a project that builds on substantial pre-existing Language Resources and takes place in a setting where extensive knowledge of the linguistic data and the required technological tools is present. My Language and Technology lab at the University of Iceland is the right place to do this and the experience I have gathered in several previous projects will be essential for my team’s success. However, the scale of this enterprise is beyond the means of national funding agencies in Iceland; thus I turn to the ERC, so that together we can redefine the state of the art in the study of Individual Lifespan Change.