EGU Meeting,Vienna, Austria, April 2014 & CGU Meeting, Banff, Canada, May 2014
Our talk on congested subduction zones for the EGU session on subduction. The slides are available as a pdf file here: Talks/EGU-2014/ConjestedSubduction-MoresiEtAl.pdf (movies - browse this site for links / examples). This talk covers the interaction of buoyant material with subduction zones and draws out the differences between large lumps colliding (ribbons) with smaller collisions such as plateaux.
The first part of the session was focused on methods and how assumptions in models influence outcomes. My take on this is that it is possible to ask questions which can be answered independent of contingencies in the setup / simplifications. Other features of different models change according to different assumptions and these need to be examined more carefully (and maybe these are the more interesting questions). Collisions of anomolous lithosphere with subduction was an important theme of the talks - lots of new ideas !
At the CGU meeting, we added some interpretation of the NW US margin in the context of our model (Thanks to Leland O’Driscoll for help on this). The “Great Alaskan Terrane Wreck” paper by Johnston was one of the inspirations for the models we ran for the SE Australia accretion study and, even though we don’t have a specific model for the NW US margin, we wanted to start up the discussion. The slides for this talk are found here: Talks/CGU-Banff-2014/ConjestedSubduction-MoresiEtAl.pdf