The Gordon Research Seminar on Rock Deformation is a unique forum for graduate students, post-docs, and other scientists with comparable levels of experience and education to present and exchange new data and cutting edge ideas.
Mechanisms of rock deformation depend on many factors, including stress state, temperature, pressure, loading rate, composition, and fluid content. Variations in these factors throughout the lithosphere account for the wide range of deformation processes that drive plate tectonics, with implications for natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, volcanoes), economic resources (e.g., ore deposits, hydrocarbons), and the geomorphic signature of Earth’s surface. Building a more unified understanding of rock deformation requires the synthesis of many disparate data sets and analysis techniques that can account for spatial and temporal scales spanning several orders of magnitude. In this seminar, we invite contributions investigating deformation under conditions ranging from Earth’s surface to the upper mantle, at rates ranging from seconds to millions of years, and length scales ranging from atomic to global. In particular, we encourage studies integrating field, laboratory, geodetic, geophysical, and/or modeling techniques to address outstanding questions in the field of rock deformation.
