Tibet Research | ![]() |
I began my graduate research with
seismic profiling of the Tibetan crust. In the summer of 1998 I traveled
to Tibet with a large group of earth scientists from a variety of institutions
in the US, Canada, Germany, China, and elsewhere. This was part of
the third phase of an on-going collaboration called INternational DEep
Profiling of Tibet and the Himalaya (INDEPTH), whose goal is to answer
the question "How has India-Asia convergence been accommodated in Tibet
and the Himalayas?" through geologic, magnetotelluric, and seismic profiling.
The Stanford Geophysics Department has been represented by Prof. Simon
Klemperer and graduate students, most recently me. We conducted an
active-source (dynamite) seismic survey along a transect running 400 km
north-south across the central Tibetan plateau. I processed a sub-set
of that data, and produced a P-wave velocity model to a depth of 25 km
below the surface. Using that model and other published results (some
from INDEPTH, and some from previous studies) I developed some new ideas
about the processes involved with the uplift of the Tibetan plateau.
These results are presented in a manuscript that I submitted to Tectonics
in June, 2001.
In the summer of 2001, I
returned to Tibet to help Prof. Martyn Unsworth (University of Alberta)
with magnetotelluric data collection.