#neotectonics

[isostatic-uplift]

I got into grad school!  HUZZAH!

Look out San Andreas fault, I’m about to dig some real big holes next to you.

[isostatic-uplift]

The larger project that my senior thesis is part of, using only the thousand most common words:

The ground moves along places where it is broken.  Those places are called faults.  Sometimes faults get stuck and then move very fast, and that makes the ground shake. When faults move, they move other things (like long land forms where water goes) into different places than they were before.  When we know how far land forms have moved and how old the land forms are, we can figure out how fast the fault has been moving.  Some faults look like they are moving faster right now than they usually do and some look like they are moving more slowly.  Maybe faults sometimes do move more slowly for a while because other faults near them are moving faster instead. There are a few ways to figure out if this happens.  Some people look in the ground to see how often the ground moves.  We look at how long land forms are or where they are now instead of where they used to be and then see how old they are.  Knowing how long it took for the land forms to go that far along the fault tells us how fast, on the whole, the fault has been going since the land form first appeared.  Then we can see if that is different than how fast it goes at other times, and know if there is a problem in our understanding of how and why faults move.

[geopathology]

Deltas in the Gulf of Corinth

The Gulf of Corinth is actively rifting, with the footwalls of large normal faults on the southern shore being uplifted by almost 1km in the last 2 million years or so(you can see some pretty spectacular striated fault scarps in the field). The combination of new and steep topography to be eroded, and a big linear hole in the ground to be filled, means that small deltas are building out into the Gulf pretty much all along its length. The variation in their size is due to differences in catchment area - the smaller deltas only being fed from the closest slopes, whereas the larger ones cut all the way through the mountains, probably in the gaps between different fault segments, and thus are supplied with much more sediment. Understanding this interaction between faulting and sedimentation patterns is of great interest to petroleum geologists (arguably, this is what the North Sea looked like in the Triassic).

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