Integrating Rock Deformation Studies with Geophysics, Field Geology and Modeling

The culmination of geological and geophysical observations, combined with laboratory and modeling studies over the last decade, has challenged the simple, canonical view of the brittle upper crust and ductile lower crust and mantle. Our on-going challenges include: 1) upscaling lab-based relations to plate-scale processes (e.g., size-dependence of fracture energy and characteristic frictional slip distance; calibrating lab-derived flow laws with constraints from active and exhumed ductile shear zones); 2) characterizing rheology of short-term lithospheric dynamics (e.g., fundamental studies of transient deformation and application to post-seismic deformation; rheology and evolution of ductile shear zones; interactions of mantle dynamics, surface tectonics, and climate loading; planetary geodynamics); and 3) understanding systems with heterogeneous rheology at different length scales (e.g., rate-and-state friction and asperity-scale plasticity; brittle heterogeneities within a ductile shear zone). Investigating these challenges requires integration among experimentalists, field and structural geologists, seismologists, geodesists, and geodynamicists.

The Gordon Research Seminar on Rock Deformation is a unique forum for graduate students, post-docs, and other scientists with comparable levels of experience and education to present and exchange new data and cutting edge ideas. We invite contributions from a wide range of fields that advance our understanding of rock deformation with implications for large-scale tectonic processes.