The East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR)  wishes to inform those who may be interested of a GEO@EAIFR webinar. This seminar will take place on May 21, 2025 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: Dr. Shijie Zhong, Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, The University of Colorado

Title: On the structure and dynamics of terrestrial planets: from Tharsis Rise on Mars to mare basalts on the Moon and supercontinent cycles on Earth.

When: May 21, 2025 at 3:00 pm (Kigali time).

Register in advance for this meeting by clicking here.

All are very welcome.

Abstract: Terrestrial planetary bodies in the Solar System display large-scale structures on the surface and in the mantle. For example, seismic imaging shows that the Earth's mantle at the present is characterized by two major seismically slow anomalies in the lower mantle below the Africa and Pacific surrounded by seismically fast anomalies that resemble to subduction history (i.e., spherical harmonic degree-2). Through the Earth's geological history, supercontinent (e.g., Pangea and Rodinia) cycles control the large-scale tectonic and volcanic activities. Mars shows a vast difference in surface elevation between the south and north hemispheres, likely resulting from the difference in crustal thickness (i.e., the crustal dichotomy). Additionally, the volcanism on Mars for the last 4 billion years has been mainly centered in the Tharsis region near the equator occupying ~25% of the Martian surface. The hemispherically asymmetric structure is called degree-1 structure. The Moon also displays the degree-1 structure in that the nearside differs markedly from the farside in volcanism, crustal thickness, surface elevation and chemical composition. In this talk, we will present mantle dynamic models that may shed light on how such large-scale structures may form.

Biography:  Dr. Shijie Zhong is a Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado. He has been on the faculty there since 2000. He received his B.S. degree in Geophysics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1985, a M.S. degree in Geophysics from the Institute of Geophysics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1988, and a Ph.D. degree in Geophysics and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan in 1994. He had been a post-doctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology from 1994 to 1997 and a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2000. His research interests include the dynamics of planetary interiors and Earth's dynamic response to surface (volcanic and glacial) loading and tidal loading.