4th CREEP workshop
The final CREEP workshop took place from the 27th of January to the 1st of February in the picturesque Les Houches, close to the well-known ski town Charmonix and the Mt. Blanc. Apart from being the last chance for everyone to come together and celebrate the end of the CREEP project, the program included short presentations by the ESRs and invited talks. Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to the rheology of the mantle, both lithospheric and convecting. Based on laboratory experiments, numerical and geodynamic models, Lars Hansen (Univ. Oxford), Sébastian Merkel (Univ. Lille), Patrick Cordier (Univ. Lille) and Fanny Garel (Univ. Montpellier) gave insight into achievements and burning issues in mantle rheology and phase transitions.
Wednesday and Thursday set the focus on processes closer to the Earth’s surface – Einat Aharonov (Univ. Jerusalem), Chris Marone (Penn State Univ.), Claudia Trepmann (Univ. München) and Janos Urai (Univ. Aachen) explained fault rheology and dynamics, fluid flow and rheology of rock salt bodies and frictional behaviour of faults (as expressed in earthquakes).
Last but not least, on Friday, Boris Kaus (Univ. Mainz) and Marcel Thielmann (BGI Bayreuth) finished with talks on feedbacks between melt and deformation. Apart from the invited talks, all ESRs presented aspects of their PhD and guests of the workshop presented posters showcasing their state-of-the-art research. For more information, a detailed program and presentations, please follow this link.
Of course, the opportunity to enjoy the region around the Mt. Blanc in winter could not go wasted. In-between sessions, participants met up for skiing, hiking, or exploring the nearby towns, as well as for conversations and drinks in the evening.
Industrial Secondments
- Lucan Mameri is currently dedicated to laboratory thermo-treatment of stainless steel in the scope of his industrial secondment at the APERAM research centre, located in the north of France. APERAM is a global actor in stainless and electrical steel manufacturing.
- Simon Preuss is doing his internship at Tractebel in Brussels. He is collaborating closely with Erwin Frets (in the yellow jacket), who also did a PhD in a MSCA ITN project (Crystal2Plate), coordinated by Andrea Tommasi.
- Nicolo Sgreva spent three weeks during his internship at Rockfield (February 2019), in Swansea, Wales. He performed numerical experiments to estimate effective stresses and strains of dynamic fluids (https://www.rockfieldglobal.com/news/rockfields-intern-pushes-fluid-boundaries).
Left: Lucan is preparing his steel sample for thermal treatment in the GLEEBLE apparatus. Right: Simon during his industrial secondment in Brussels.
Academic Secondments
- Caspar Sinn visited the Rock Physics Group of the University College London (UCL) in March 2019 to complete his academic secondment. During this time, he worked together with Gabriel Meyer (ESR10) and Frans Aben to conduct experiments in their triaxial rock deformation apparatus (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/earth-sciences/facilities/rock-physics-laboratory). By using AE and wave velocity measurements, Caspar’s intention is to track the transition from non-dilatant conditions to the dilatant regime of natural rocksalt samples where microcracking occurs during deformation.
Caspar, Gabriel and Frans during Caspar’s academic secondment in London at the UCL (left image). Caspar preparing the triaxial deformation apparatus to start his experiments on natural rocksalt samples (right image).
Publications
Five new articles have already been published this year. These papers comprise contributions from laboratory, numerical, and analogue experiments on upper mantle rheology (Mameri et al. 2019), glass viscosity (Ding et al. 2019), lower mantle seismic anisotropy (Creasy et al. 2019), seafloor roughness in subduction zones (van Rijsingen et al. 2019), and energetics of subducting plates and mantle convection (Gerard et al. 2019). Check for more details: http://www.creep-itn.eu/publications
Awards
Congratulations to Anne Davaille and Serge Lallemand (ITN-CREEP supervisors) for receiving medals at the EGU 2019. Congrats also to Giacomo Pozzi for the Award at AGU fall meeting.
- Anne Davaille will receive the ‘Medal Augustus Love’, for outstanding contributions to our understanding of convection in the Earth’s mantle and that of other planets (https://www.egu.eu/awards-medals/augustus-love/2019/anne-davaille).
- Serge Lallemand will be awarded with the ‘Medal Stephan Mueller’, for fundamental contributions to our understanding of tectonics processes at convergent plate margins (https://www.egu.eu/awards-medals/stephan-mueller/2019/serge-lallemand).
- Giacomo Pozzi received the ‘Outstanding Student Presentation Award’ on December 2018 at the AGU for his poster “Viscous flow of nano-granular materials lubricates faults during earthquake propagation“ (http://www.creep-itn.eu/congratulation-giacomo-pozzi-receive-outstanding-student-presentation-award-agu-fall-meeting-washington).
Coming Defences
Giacomo Pozzi: 26th of April.
Thomas Loriaux: 26th of April.
Next Steps
- Gianluca has defended his thesis at the FAST laboratory (CNRS) in November 2018 and will carry on with his research on colloidal silica suspensions at the Navier laboratory, Paris-Est (http://www.creep-itn.eu/congratulations-gianluca-gerardi-start-postdoc-navier-laboratory-paris-est-numerical-study-mechanical-aging-colloidal-silica-suspensions).
- Elenora finished her thesis at Rome TRE towards the end of last year and is now going to start a postdoc at ENS in Paris on the 1st of May, working on the seismotectonics and geodynamics of the Caribbean.
- Thomas Loriaux recently defended his PhD at the University of Bristol (UK) and will now go to Chile for a research position at the CECs, Centro de Estudios Científicos (Center for Scientific Studies).
Caspar, Lucan and Manuel
