Author name: Ved Lekic

When we publish papers, we hope they can get read, cited, or even built upon. It’s rare that a paper gets argued with in print and at length, which is probably a sign that the paper was worth writing! A couple of years ago, Henri Samuel, at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, […]

There are something like a hundred million unexploded landmines and pieces of ordnance in the ground worldwide, most of them small, shallow, and made of enough metal to have a magnetic signature. But reliably finding them with a magnetometer is far from easy. Heidi Myers, a former Ph.D. student co-advised by myself and Prof. Dan

On Earth, a straightforward way of measuring the thickness of the crust beneath a seismometer is to look for converted waves — a P wave that turns into an S wave at the crust-mantle boundary. The method is simple, reliable, and used everywhere. On the Moon it has never really worked for P-to-S conversions. Apollo

Sitting at the very base of the mantle, directly beneath Hawai’i, is a patch of rock where seismic waves slow down dramatically. Structures like this — ultralow-velocity zones, or ULVZs — are found in many places along the core-mantle boundary, but the ones beneath major hot spots are exceptionally large, and their origin has been

Bayesian sampling methods have entered the geophysical toolkit due to their versatility and power at quantifying uncertainty. Our lab has spent a decade contributing to them: transdimensional deconvolution of receiver functions, self-parameterizing inversions of surface waves, Bayesian tomography of North America and the inner core, etc. Regardless of the specific application, these methods return not

Three papers led by Jingchuan Wang (formerly a postdoc at Maryland, currently at Caltech) appeared in 2025 — one in JGR: Planets, one in Geophysical Research Letters, one in Earth and Space Science. They describe fieldwork at sites hundreds of miles apart and they read, at first glance, like three separate projects. But, all three

Eight years ago, the day after a magnitude 4.2 earthquake struck east of Dover, Delaware, graduate students from this lab were in the field installing seismometers alongside collaborators from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Delaware Geological Survey, the U.S. Geological Survey, Lehigh University, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. That deployment has now produced its

Mars has a liquid iron alloy core at its center. Using seismic data gathered by the InSight mission, we have made the first observations of seismic waves traveling through Mars’ core. We use the travel times of core-transiting seismic waves, relative to ones which remain in the mantle, to constrain properties of the core and