Jordi Julià

About my research interests

Plate Tectonics revolutionized our understanding of how mountains are built and how ocean basins open and close over time, connecting in the way apparently disparate phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Why large sedimentary basins or elevated plateaux form in the interior of continents, and why earthquakes and volcanoes occur away from plate margins, however, is harder to understand. Intraplate phenomena might have unsuspected links with the deep earth, which makes them even more interesting. Sinking lithospheric fragments can create convective downwellings that pull the overlying lithosphere, and hot mantle plumes rising from the bottom of the mantle can heat the lithosphere and cause uplift. Indirect geophsical measurements are our best tool to probe into those depths, and novel constraints from their integrated analysis are our best chance at unraveling the new phenomena that they may hide.

e-mail: jjlcasas@memphis.edu