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AGU 2013 Presentation: more than slab pull driving the East Pacific Rise?
My visit to San Francisco for the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting was somewhat truncated this year, but I had a stimulating couple of days catching up and talking shop with many friend and...
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Paleomagnetism Lab: Testing the GAD hypothesis
A fundamental assumption of paleomagnetism is that, over geological timescales, the Earth’s magnetic field approximates a geocentric axial dipole – a purely dipolar field (like a bar magnet’s) that is...
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New Paper: Spreading behaviour of the Pacific-Farallon ridge system since 83 Ma
In the Late Cretaceous, 83 million years ago, the Pacific ocean was dominated by the 10,000 km-long spreading ridge between the Pacific and Farallon plates. Since that time, the northern part of this...
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New research on deformation in the Cascadia forearc presented at GSA in...
Last week, I was in Vancouver for the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. There, I presented the first results of my research into the record of deformation on the Cascadia margin...
View ArticleNew Paper: Kinematics and dynamics of the East Pacific Rise linked to a...
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...
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The Appalachians in a sandbox: undergraduate research being presented at GSA...
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...
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Simulating radioactive decay
3.8 billion years! 4 billion years! 4.4 billion years! 4.57 billion years! When discussing the age of the Earth in introductory geology, I think it is important for students to know at least the basic...
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Undergraduate research presented at GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle
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...
View ArticleNew Paper – Signatures of Reductive Magnetic Mineral Diagenesis From Unmixing...
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...
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Adventures in 3D printing
Over the past few months I have been experimenting with possible educational uses of 3D printing1, in two main areas: Terrain models The online TouchTerrain tool makes it easy to generate .STL files...
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AGU 2019 Poster: do analogue sandbox models help students to visualise...
For the first time in a while, I attended the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, to reveal the results of my first foray into education research: Click on the image to download a pdf...
View ArticleCongratulations to Chenjian Fu 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...
View ArticleCongratulations to Lucy Dyer for a successful MS thesis defense!
Congratulations to Lucy Dyer for successful defending her MS thesis, ‘Identifying marine magnetic anomalies using machine learning‘. Abstract Magnetic reversal boundaries identified from marine...
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Returning to large in-person classes – now with added polls and reflections!
This semester I was teaching a large in-person section of our general education physical geology course, ‘How The Earth Works’, for the first time since Spring 2020. In this class students earn 20% of...
View ArticleNew Paper: an innovative cycle-based learning approach to teaching with...
A new paper by me and education expert Bridget Mulvey grapples with the question: analogue sandbox models are cool, but are they effective teaching tools? Analogue models are a way of demonstrating...
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