From Tokyo to Mount Fuji: a Franco-Japanese week at the crossroads of Earth sciences and music

PGP-ERI: a long-standing scientific collaboration

From 9 to 11 November, the Institut de physique du globe de Paris and the Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) of the University of Tokyo will meet in Japan for the 9th edition of the IPGP-ERI workshop.

This meeting is part of a collaboration that began more than twenty years ago: an agreement between the two institutes was signed in 2001, and workshops have since been organised alternately in Paris and Tokyo. These regular exchanges have supported numerous researcher and student mobility opportunities and now result in around twenty joint scientific publications each year.

Three main themes will structure this new edition: artificial intelligence, innovative instrumentation and new methodologies; the interior of the Earth and planets; and natural hazards. The sessions will notably be led by scientists from IPGP and ERI, with the aim of fostering new collaborations between the two communities.

When music tells “the private life of volcanoes”

This scientific week will also take on a musical dimension on Tuesday 10 November in Tokyo, with the concert “The Private Life of Volcanoes”, conceived as a meeting point between research, artistic creation and science outreach.

Presented at the Ongaku-no-Tomo Hall, the programme will bring together a work by Beethoven and two compositions by Nobuaki Fuji, head of the Seismology team at IPGP: Seismology: The Music of the Earth, composed in 2024 around the research of IPGP seismologist Jean-Paul Montagner, and a new piece : La vie privée des volcans (2026, création) — composed by Nobuaki Fuji, a collaborative work drawing on the volcanological insights of Fidel Costa, to whom it is dedicated.

This latter piece focuses not on the spectacular manifestations of an eruption, but on what takes place at depth before it occurs: in other words, on the volcano’s “private life”. Music, scientific figures, images and research data will thus be brought together to offer the public a different way of approaching volcanic processes.

The concert will be performed by PhiloGaïa Tokyo, conducted by Kenya Masakado, with scientific mediation by Yosuke Aoki from the Earthquake Research Institute of the University of Tokyo. It is funded by the MuseSeLFiE project of the Institut universitaire de France and IPGP, with support from ERI. Admission is free.

https://seismobassoon.github.io/fr/news/2026-11-10-la-vie-privee-des-volcans/

CLEEDI 2026 at the foot of Mount Fuji

Following these events, CLEEDI 2026 Japan – CoLlaborative Exploration of Earth’s Deep Interior will take place from 12 to 17 November, mainly in Yamanakako, at the foot of Mount Fuji, before a concluding session in Tokyo.

Created in 2021 and usually organised in the Pyrenees, CLEEDI brings together an international community of geoscientists with a specific ambition: to bring observations, data and theoretical models closer together in order to better understand the interior and surface of the Earth and other terrestrial bodies. For this exceptional edition in Japan, discussions will focus more specifically on volcanoes and subduction zones.

CLEEDI deliberately favours a collaborative format: few formal presentations, but numerous small-group discussions, exchanges of data and codes, as well as sessions designed to test new ideas and foster future joint projects. A final session will be held on 17 November at the Earthquake Research Institute of the University of Tokyo.

Through these various events, this week in Japan will highlight several dimensions of IPGP’s international collaborations: sharing knowledge, bringing disciplines together, developing new scientific projects and experimenting with new ways of communicating Earth sciences.