Brown Bag: Tim Stern

Convective removal, or foundering, of mantle lithosphere is a process predicted to occur on both geophysical and geochemical grounds. Finding evidence of foundering  in the geological record, or present day tectonics, is difficult. Four global localities (Sierra Nevada, Carpathians, western New Zealand and the Transantarctic Mountains) are proposed as sites for active foundering. A generic,  dimensionless, edge-driven instability model is presented to test this proposition.

Tim Stern, AGU Fellow, Institute of Geophysics, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand