Sent of Behalf of the BGA President - Prof Mike Kendall
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BRITISH GEOPHYSICAL ASSOCIATION BULLERWELL LECTURE - 2013

When: Tuesday 9th April

Where: European Geosciences Union annual assembly in Vienna


The BGA is pleased to announce that this year's Bullerwell Lecture will 
be given by Dr Derek Keir (University of Southampton). Derek's lecture 
is entitled "Magmatism and deformation during continental breakup" and 
will focus on the processes of continental break-up using the African 
and Arabian rift systems as examples. The abstract is included below.

We hope that you will be able to attend this lecturer and support the 
BGA at this meeting.

Please could you circulate this advertisement to any colleagues, PDRA 
and PhD students who will be attending this meeting and might be 
interested.

The lecture will also be repeated at the BGA Postgraduate Research in 
Progress meeting to be held this year at the University of Cambridge on 
the 5th-6th September. Registration for that meeting will open on the 
1st April, and meeting information can be found at:

htp://bullard.esc.cam.ac.uk/~bga2013/


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Magmatism and deformation during continental breakup

The rifting of continents and the transition to seafloor spreading is 
characterised by extensional faulting and thinning of the lithosphere; 
sometimes the rifting is accompanied by voluminous intrusive and 
extrusive magmatism. In order to understand how these processes develop 
over time to break continents apart, we have traditionally relied on 
interpreting the geological record at the numerous fully developed, 
ancient rifted margins around the world. In these settings, however, it 
is difficult to discriminate between different mechanisms of extension 
and magmatism because the continent–ocean transition is typically buried 
beneath thick layers of volcanic and sedimentary rocks, and the tectonic 
and volcanic activity that characterised breakup has long-since ceased. 
Ongoing continental breakup in the African and Arabian rift systems 
offers a unique opportunity to address these problems because it exposes 
several sectors of tectonically active rift sector development spanning 
the transition from embryonic continental rifting in the south to 
incipient seafloor spreading in the north. Here I synthesise exciting, 
multidisciplinary observational and modelling studies using geophysical, 
geodetic, petrological and numerical techniques that uniquely constrain 
the distribution, time-scales, and interactions between extension and 
magmatism during the progressive breakup of the African Plate. This new 
research has identified the previously unrecognised role of rapid and 
episodic dike emplacement in accommodating a large proportion of 
extension during continental rifting. We are now beginning to realise 
that changes in the dominant mechanism for strain over time (faulting, 
stretching and magma intrusion) impact dramatically on magmatism and 
rift morphology.  The challenge now is to take what we're learned from 
East Africa and apply it to the rifted margins whose geological record 
documents breakup during entire Wilson Cycles.


-- 

Professor C. Peirce
Department of Earth Sciences
Durham University
Durham
DH1 3LE

Tel: 0191 334 2315
Fax: 0191 334 2301
www: http://www.dur.ac.uk/earth.sciences