Winter 2023
Fridays at 12:00 PM
E&MS A340
January 13, 2023
Speaker: Diogo Louro Lourenco, ETH Zurich
Title: The thermo-chemical evolution of terrestrial planets: from magma ocean to present-day tectonics
Abstract: It is well accepted that the Earth and most rocky bodies in the Solar System went over a magma ocean stage during and immediately after their accretion. Based on this, it is generally assumed that magma oceans are common and widespread throughout the Universe, and that they exist throughout all the accretion stage of different bodies. However, how frequent magma oceans are, and how deep do they extend, is not well constrained. I’ll present results that aim to understand the factors that control the formation of magma oceans, and the conditions that lead to deep magma oceans. Understanding these questions is of extreme importance, as a magma ocean sets up the conditions for future mantle dynamics and tectonic activity, the composition of the atmosphere, and the possibility for the existence of oceans, and life.
Next, I will present results that aim at understanding the Earth’s viscosity structure and heat-producing elements concentrations. Finally, I will focus on the solid-state evolution and dynamics of rocky planets. A tectonic regime is the surface expression of interior dynamics in a planet. With the help of numerical models, different tectonic regimes have been proposed. Over time, a tectonic regime shapes the surface of a planet, including its surface topography. Using the numerical models we can compute the topographies associated with different tectonic regimes including spatial and temporal measures of variations. We compute statistics for the topography formed by different tectonic regimes in numerical models and compare with statistics of observed topography of different terrestrial planets, with the aim of linking a planet to a tectonic regime at present-day.
January 20, 2023
Speaker: Shujuan Mao, Stanford
Title: Space-Time Monitoring of Groundwater Fluctuations with Passive Seismic Interferometry
January 27, 2023 - Remote
Speaker: Siteng Fan, Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace
Title: Thermal tides in the Martian atmosphere
February 3, 2023
Speaker: Harry Lisabeth, LBL
Title: The effect of stress on the physical properties of fractured rocks
February 10, 2023
Speaker: Anton Ermakov, UC Berkeley
Title: Ganymede’s internal structure with Bayesian inference using Juno and Galileo data
February 17, 2023
Speaker: Laura Schaefer, Stanford
Title: Mantle redox effect on atmosphere composition: from Earth and Mars to sub-Neptunes
February 23, 2023 - Special Seminar
Speaker: Malcom White, MIT
Title: Anatomy of a fault zone: Space-time-magnitude patterns of microseismicity in the San Jacinto Fault Zone, Southern California
March 10, 2023
Speaker: Sourav Kumar, UC Berkeley
Title: Long-term and continuous evaluation of hydro-geochemical changes in response to the earthquakes in Northeast India
March 17, 2023
Speaker: Donna Shillington, Northern Arizona Uniuversity
Title: Upper and lower plate controls on megathrust slip behavior in the Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone
