The IAVCEI Scientific Assembly, originally scheduled for two years ago, is finally here! Next week I'll be in Rotorua, New Zealand with many of the world's premier volcanologists and Earth scientists. I'll be presenting a poster Tuesday afternoon (in person) and Wednesday afternoon (virtually), New Zealand time, on some work I've been doing imaging the crustal structure around Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state.
A recent study I was involved in is now published. With this study we looked at the patterns of mantle flow inferred by shear wave splitting measurements in relation to the slab structure imaged in my previous tomography study. The segmentation of the mantle flow domains is remarkable and correlates well with predictable slab dynamics.
This year's American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting is an in-person/virtual hybrid. I will be in New Orleans, presenting a poster on synthetic modeling of seismic wave propagation through magma chambers. You can find me on Monday afternoon or a digital version of the poster in the meeting's online portal. Please also visit the hybrid oral and poster sessions I am chairing on Monday on geophysical constraints of magma storage in the crust for what are sure to be fantastic discussions.
Starting this month I am an Exploration Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. I will be closely with Drs. Christy Till and Ed Garnero on seismic imaging and interpretation in volcanic arcs, or whatever else strikes our fancy.
This week I am attending SSA's annual meeting, which is fully virtual. I am presenting my Mount Cleveland imaging work on Tuesday (20 April) in a great session on utilization of community seismic experiments in Alaska.
A new paper that I was involved with came out today in the Journal of Geophysical Research. This work was done primarily by my colleagues in Brazil, using a dense network of seismometers to seismically image the lithosphere in southeastern Brazil and Paraguay. Using teleseismic tomography we were able to delineate the complex arrangement of cratonic blocks that the region is built with.
An upcoming workshop on seismic tomography hosted by the Seismological Society of America had to be postponed due to COVID-19. In the meantime, an excellent workshop series is being held virtually. Today, I had the opportunity to present a talk about our Ps-P crustal tomography technique. The talk is now available to view online for SSA members.
Version 1.0.0 of the RFTomo code, the first version of our Ps-P crustal tomography technique, is now available on my Github account. RFTomo is used to perform crustal S wave tomography using Moho-generated Ps-P delay times as travel time input. We published this technique in November 2020 with application to Cleveland Volcano in the central Aleutian arc. Please feel free to download and use the code. I am happy to help with code setup and usage and would love to hear feedback or about issues with the code.
The accompanying S wave tomography paper for our big compilation tomography in South America is now available in typeset. My colleague, Emily RodrĂguez, put a lot of hard work into this paper, which turned out to be the most impressive S wave model for the mantle beneath South America we have. It has taught us a lot about the interaction between the slab and plumes in the Nazca subduction zone.
The American Geophysical Union annual Fall Meeting begins today and it is fully online. This year I'm presenting talks about our tomography work in South America and my recent imaging work at Cleveland - if you're registered you can now find these pre-recorded talks on the AGU meeting website. You should also check out presentations from my coauthors on anisotropy in the Nazca slab and a possible massive caldera system in the central Aleutians.
I was featured in Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory's most recent "Postdoc Spotlight", a series of interviews with EPL's postdocs. In this interview, I talk a bit about tomography, volcanoes, and my recent publication about Mount Cleveland volcano. You can find the interview here as well as the spotlights on other Carnegie fellows here. I encourage you to read about everyone else and their great work as well!
Today my paper on Mount Cleveland volcano was published in Geophysical Research Letters. With this study I built on the recent work of my coauthors to develop a new technique for imaging volcanoes with relatively little seismic data. We learned a lot about the magmatic system feeding Cleveland, but this study is also an important first step in our ongoing efforts to improve imaging capacity at remote arc volcanoes.
Another paper that I was involved with was published this week in Geophysical Research Letters. The paper includes a detailed study using our tomography model of South America to isolate the sources of anisotropy in the subduction zone.
After a long haul through the copyediting process, our South America tomography paper is finally typeset. This paper involved an enormous effort in the compilation and processing of seismic data from all across South America to be put into a single model for the mantle velocity structure beneath the continent. I'm really excited about this paper and what our new model can do to advance research into the tectonic and geodynamic evolution of South America.
After seven weeks of quarantining, we have some good news! Our paper on slab tears developed at the 2017 CIDER workshop is finally published. This paper is the result of a large interdisciplinary collaboration and in particular, some really cool analogue subduction models by the lead author. Glad to see the hard work pay off.
AGU is back in San Francisco this year. I'm looking forward to a busy week!
I'll be at the 8th International Symposium on Andean Geodynamics (ISAG) in Quito, Ecuador from 23-27 September to give a talk on our new Nazca slab model and discuss Andean Geodynamics!
Beginning in August, 2019, I am a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. I will be working closely with Dr. Lara Wagner and the seismology group on a number of new, exciting projects!
Welcome! I hope you enjoy the new design. This is the place to keep up-to-date on all the new happenings with my exciting science!