Collaborative Research: Understanding mineral microscale to tectonic macroscale with experiments and theory

Plate tectonics describes the motion of Earth’s upper-most rocky layers. This process governs most geological activity on Earth, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. This project will focus on understanding how mineral grains in rocks are damaged leading to plate tectonics. When grains are damaged, they accumulate atomic-scale defects in their crystal lattice. The grains then break down into smaller grains, making the rocks weaker. A major challenge is that these processes span vast dimensions, beginning inside mineral grains just a few millionths of a meter across but drives geological activity over millions of meters. To bridge the gap from the microscale to the macroscale, and through intermediate scales where minerals mix to make rocks, we must compare mathematical theory with rock deformation lab experiments. This project ultimately aims to use grain-scale physics to understand how and when plate tectonics first arose on early Earth. The project will benefit society through the professional development of early career scientists in combined theoretical and experimental work. This project will advance the study of mineral grain-scale physics and deformation mechanisms, and their application to the emergence of plate tectonics on Earth. Using both theory and laboratory experiments, the project will develop and apply a framework for upscaling between the microscale of mineral defects and grain evolution, the mesoscale of petrological mixing and interactions between mineral phases, and the macroscale of lithospheric deformation and plate boundary formation. The goal is to apply this framework to major geodynamic questions around the emergence of plate tectonics and initiation of subduction, which is the driver for plate motion and the locus of Earth’s most damaging earthquakes and volcanoes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.