Congratulations to Lucy Dyer for successful defending her MS thesis, ‘Identifying marine magnetic anomalies using machine learning‘. Abstract Magnetic reversal boundaries identified from marine magnetic surveys are used to date the oceanic lithosphere and are a key source of information for reconstructing oceanic ridge spreading rates and past plate motion. However, the identification process is tedious and time consuming, which results in incomplete and inconsistent reversal identification along ridge systems and between ocean basins. This study investigates the feasibility of using machine learning to automatically…Continue Reading “Congratulations to Lucy Dyer for a successful MS thesis defense!”
Congratulations to Chenjian Fu for successful defending his MS thesis, ‘Global Paleomagnetic Data Analysis: Improved Methods of Reconstructing Plate Motions Using Paleomagnetic Data‘. Abstract Paleomagnetic Apparent Polar Wander Paths (APWPs) are the principal means of describing plate motions through most of Earth history. However, there are limitations to paleomagnetic data such as the poorly-constrained longitudes of paleo-plates and the degrading quality and density of paleomagnetic data with increasing age. Yet comparing the spatio-temporal patterns and trends of APWPs between different tectonic plates is important for…Continue Reading “Congratulations to Chenjian Fu for a successful MS thesis defense!”
One of the key themes in my early research career was trying to understand the magnetic signature of rocks where the primary remanence was not carried by iron oxides like magnetite, but instead iron sulphides, particularly greigite. Studies of sediment cores made it clear that it could form relatively early during diagenesis. But my PhD research in New Zealand showed it could also form very late in diagenesis – sometimes during tectonic events millions of years after the host rock had formed. Frustratingly, the combined…Continue Reading “New Paper – Signatures of Reductive Magnetic Mineral Diagenesis From Unmixing of First‐Order Reversal Curves”
As a follow-up to his presentation at the GSA Northeastern/North-Central meeting in the Spring, KSU undergraduate Joe Wislocki presented more results from analogue modelling of the formation of the Appalachian Pennsylvania salient at the GSA annual meeting in Seattle. ANALOGUE MODELLING OF THE FORMATION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA SALIENT: DO THE APPALACHIANS BEND AROUND AN ANCIENT RIFT? The Pennsylvania salient is an oroclinal bend in the Central Appalachians at around 40ºN, where Appalachian faults and folds are rotated almost 90º clockwise from roughly north-south orientation observed…Continue Reading “Undergraduate research presented at GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle”
A mountain range like the Appalachians is the result of rock along hundreds of kilometres of plate boundary deforming over millions of years. Curiously, if we want to see these processes in action by scaling them down to the dimensions of a tabletop and the timescales of a couple of hours, then the material of choice is sand. Undergraduate Research Assistant Joe Wislocki has been busy the last few months producing mini-mountain ranges in our sandbox model: Joe’s experiments have been focussed on modeling the…Continue Reading “The Appalachians in a sandbox: undergraduate research being presented at GSA North-Central meeting in Pittsburgh”
The East Pacific Rise (EPR) is the fastest spreading part of the global ridge system, and has a couple of other unusual features. Spreading at the ridge is asymmetric, with about 55-60% of the oceanic crust produced over the past 50 million years found on the western side of the ridge (the Nazca plate). This asymmetric spreading has contributed to the other unusual feature: if you plot the position of the EPR in a mantle reference frame, the central part of the ridge has remained…Continue Reading “New Paper: Kinematics and dynamics of the East Pacific Rise linked to a stable, deep-mantle upwelling”