The East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR) and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) wish to inform those who may be interested of a GEO@EAIFR webinar. This seminar will take place on June 22, 2023 and will be broadcast live on ZOOM. It will also be recorded and later posted on the ICTP-EAIFR YouTube channel, where one can find the previous recorded GEO@EAIFR webinars. Below all the details:

Speaker:  Professor Paul Tackley,  Institute of Geophysics, Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich

Title: Self-consistent generation of tectonic plate boundaries in global convection models of Earth and other planets.

When: June 22, 2023 at 16:30 (Kigali time).

Register in advance for this meeting by clicking here.

All are very welcome.

Biography: Paul Tackley studies the structure, dynamics and evolution of Earth and other terrestrial planets and moons as related to convective processes in the mantle, lithospheric dynamics and plate tectonics. He has been Professor of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics in the Institute of Geophysics, Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich since 2005. From 2010-2014 he served as Head of the Institute of Geophysics and from 2013-2016 he was the Study Director of the Department of Earth Sciences. He earned his PhD in Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology in 1994, following which he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles as Assistant Professor (1994-99), Associate Professor (1999-2003) then Full Professor (2003-2005). He was President of the Geodynamics Division of the European Geosciences Union (2017-2021), and was elected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2017) and Academia Europaea (2021). 

Abstract: Understanding how plate boundaries arise as a result of global mantle convection is a challenging topic because the strongly temperature-dependent viscosity of rocks is expected to lead to a stagnant lid - a single plate covering the entire planet, which is a good model for Mars, Mercury and the Moon, but not for Earth. Here, it will be discussed how a relatively simple description of rock weakening can lead to the spontaneous appearance of plate boundaries in Earth-like models, and how the resulting plate tectonics-like behaviour matches various observations such as the “triangular” age-area distribution and the plate size-frequency distribution. However, it is generally thought that Earth did not always have plate tectonics, so the tectonics of early Earth is discussed. Finally, these tectonic concepts are applied to Venus and rocky planets around other stars (exoplanets).