Maria Beatrice Magnani
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My research focuses mainly on the study of continental lithosphere formation and evolution through active source seismic investigation, both on land and marine. Unlike the oceanic crust, the continental crust does not have a common mode of origin, as it is an assemblage of diverse compositional elements with different thermal and tectonic histories. In spite of the large amount of investigations, there are still open questions on the growth and the evolution of the continents, on the processes through which original assembly elements (island arcs, small continents, oceanic plateaus etc.) become a continent. It is not clear how basaltic “ingredients” amalgamate and grow into an andesitic/dioritic continent. Whether each of these initial units preserves their original internal structure and reflectivity pattern or whether these are lost in the amalgamation process.
During the past years my colleagues and I have been studying the tectonic evolution of several continental areas, including the Apennines (project CROP03), the Rocky Mountains (CD-ROM project) and the SE Caribbean plate boundary (BOLIVAR project), through the analysis of different data sets including reflection and refraction data both acquired as part of the projects and provided by the industry. More recently I begun working on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an enigmatic portion of the North American mid continent characterized by a surprising seismic activity.
After many years of seismic acquisition at the continental scale, I recently started applying the reflection and refraction methods to the imaging of much shallower targets, (10 - 500m depth), mostly for environmental (Ogden, Utah), hydrologic (Memphis, Tennessee) and neotectonic purposes (Mississippi Embayment).
Contact me for graduate research opportunities!