Short biography

I have long been interested in melanges: non-bedded rock units characterized by blocks of diverse sizes and composition encased in a fine-grained, typically mud-rich matrix. Many exposed ancient accretionary wedges formed at convergent plate margins include melange, most of which represent muddy debris flows or olistostromes. In earlier research projects, several graduate students and UW colleagues and I investigated how diverse rock units and terranes in the northwest Cordillera were accreted and displaced in Cretaceous to early Tertiary time. We hypothesize that some of these tectonic elements have been displaced in late Mesozoic and early Cenozoic time thousands of kilometers northward along the west coast of North America. From 2002-2008, I was a co-PI on a collaborative project, funded by a five-year grant from the Continental Dynamics Program at NSF, called RETREAT: an interdisciplinary study of syn-convergence extension in the northern Apennines in Italy. Other projects: A UW colleague and graduate student and Italian colleagues recently investigated the origin of blocks of gypsum in upper Miocene Messinian sediments in Sicily and a graduate student and I studied Tertiary contraction and extension in the Dinarides. In 1999, I wrote a paper considering whether field geologists can infer the character of slip—for example, fast, m/sec slip producing an earthquake—from study of faults in the field. This question has generated a lot of research and interest in our community and was the theme of a topical session at the 2013 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.