Research: Graduate Student Profile

 

Snapshots...

Byrdie Renik
Seismology, Geology, and Tectonophysics, LDEO

M.A., Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, 2005.
B.A., Environmental Science, Columbia University, 2001.

"I find the environment at Lamont-Doherty to be a constant buzz of lively and critical discussion on topics from throughout the earth sciences, in which I have the opportunity to engage directly with faculty and researchers at the tops of their fields.  I feel that I’m getting exactly the education I need to become an independent scientist."

Extensional Tectonics

My research is centered on the mechanisms by which the continental crust extends.  Normal faults dipping at low angles are thought to play an important role in accommodating that extension, but they present a longstanding paradox.  While field documentation abounds, conventional interpretations of those data conflict with rock mechanical theory, and the modern earthquake record provides little or no clear-cut evidence for activity on such faults.

The low-angle normal fault paradigm has drawn particular support from the central Basin and Range Province.  In the Death Valley area of California and adjacent Nevada, arguments for low-angle normal faulting derive partly from palinspastic reconstructions suggesting that Cenozoic extension has been unusually large.  My dissertation will reassess the evidence for that extreme extension, and attempt to place new constraints on reconstructions using a combination of field observations and thermochronology.

Advisors: Nick Christie-Blick , Mark Anders , and Peter Kelemen.