K.D. Nelson Lecture Series – Russell Pysklywec

The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the K.D. Nelson Lecture Series featuring speaker Russell Pysklywec. His talk is titled: Explaining the puzzling tectonic damage of drifting microcontinents by a subduction pulley. 

Petrologic evidence from the Western Alps and eastern Anatolia indicates that microcontinental terranes can undergo significant extensional deformation during their drift to the subduction zone. This extension is puzzling since it occurs on the drifting ocean plate *prior* to collision of the microcontinents with the plate boundary when tectonic deformation normally occurs. Numerical models suggest that a feasible explanation may be a type of subduction pulley, whereby the pull of the sinking oceanic slab is transmitted to the horizontal oceanic lithosphere at the subduction trench, with active tectonic damage focused on the drifting terrane.