Bathymetry of the ultraslow Southwest Indian Ridge at 9-16°E. Magma is focused to narrow seamounts like Joseph Mayes Seamount in the foreground.   Undergraduate student Dusty Aeiker takes a photo of the Loomurwak tuff ring, with Oldoinyo Lengai (the world's only active carbonatite volcano) in the background. Both the tuff ring and the sratovolcano are manifestations of the magmatism in the East African Rift. The Loomurwak tuff ring carries fragments of the deep mantle beneath this region.

The tectonics faculty and students work in numerous locations around the world (and on other planets!) and also undertake physical and computational experiments to better understand the development of the lithosphere. Here are some of our current projects.

• Brasilia Belt, Brazil (Brown)
• Bushveld Complex, South Africa (Penniston-Dorland, Brown)
• Central Appalachians (Martin)
• Central Himalaya (Martin)
• Central Indian Basin (Montesi)
• Chelungpu Fault (Zhu)
• East Pacific Rise (Zhu)
• Fosdick Mountains, Antarctica (Brown, Korhonen, Saito)
• Galapagos Triple Junction (Montesi)
• Juan de Fuca Ridge (Zhu)
• Mozambique Fold Belt, Tanzania (Rudnick)
• Nankai Subduction Zone, Southwest Japan (Zhu)
• North Anatolian Fault, Turkey (Montesi)
• North China Craton (Rudnick)
• Northern Appalachians (Brown, Penniston-Dorland, Piccoli)
• Shear zones – Computational Modeling (Montesi)
• Sierra Nevada (Penniston-Dorland)
• Southeast Arizona (Martin)
• Southern Brittany, France (Brown)
• Southwest Indian Ridge (Montesi)
• Wrinkle Ridges on Mars and Venus (Montesi)
• Boundary Elements Method-based multiparticle simulator – Computational Modeling (Hier-Majumder)
• Chemical signature of magma percolating by viscous, porous flow – Computational Modeling (Hier-Majumder)
• Efficiency of storage and mass transfer by melts in the deep interior of the Earth and other planets – Computational Modeling (Hier-Majumder)

Melt retention by strong grain boundary tension. A pulse of buoyant magma ascending through a viscous matrix with high grain boundary tension (left) loses melt to the matrix during ascent. In the absence of strong tension on grain boundaries (right) the pulse travels as an undisturbed solitary wave.