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.
 
 

• This is a link to my manuscript, submitted to Tectonics in June, 2001, and published in January 2003.