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Dr.
Douwe J.J. van Hinsbergen
Latest
Papers: Zachariasse, W.J., van Hinsbergen, D.J.J. and Fortuin, A., 2011, Formation and fragmentation of a late Miocene supradetachment basin in central Crete: implications for exhumation mechanisms of high-pressure rocks in the Aegean forearc, Basin Research 23, 678-701 Research interest: I currently work
as Researcher at the University of Oslo, working with Trond Torsvik, and construct
plate tectonic restorations of mountain belts at subduction zones. In
particular I reconstruct the Tethyan Realm, which was a large,
triangular ocean with multiple small continental blocks, that during
the last 150 or 200 million years or so closed between Africa, Arabia,
India and Australia in the south, and Eurasia in the north. Its closure
led to the formation of the Alpine-Himalayan mountain belt and (part
of) the Indonesian archipelago, stretching from the Pyrenees in the
west, to Papua New Guinnee in the east.
This mountain
belt consists of geological elements (folded and thrusted rock slices)
that were scraped off when the Tethyan lithosphere subducted below
Eurasia. I try to place all the geological elements we find in this
enormous mountain belt back into their original, pre-subduction
position (based on geological techniques from e.g. structural geology
and paleomagnetism), and then link these reconstructions to mantle
structure that we know from seismic tomography, to locate the
subducted, disappeared lithosphere in the mantle. This way we can make
4D plate reconstructions, and reconstruct not only the surface, but
also the mantle structure through time. In particular,
this work is carried out in the following regions: Mediterranean The Mediterranean
region is one of the most geologically complex regions in the world,
with currently narrow subduction zones (e.g. in the Betic-Rif, the
Alps, the Apennines, the Dinarids, the Carpathians, the Aegean and the
Cyprus segments) that subduct in practically every thinkable direction.
The reconstruction of this region is therefore complex, but very
important, because all these subduction zones anchor Europe firmly to
the mantle. And because Europa, or rather Eurasia, is connected to all
other plates, we can here define the position of all plates to the
mantle in a slab-based mantle reference frame
(see Nature Geoscience paper of Douwe
van der Meer et al). My work has been
focused so far in Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey,
Ukraine and Spain
and will continue the next years to cover the entire system. This work
includes PhD projects under my co-supervision of Côme Lefebvre, Maud Meijers, Ayten Koç and Ahmet Peynircioğlu. India-Asia
collision I carried out a
post-doc at the University of Leicester with Dickson Cunningham, UK, in
2004-2006, working in the Gobi Altai region in southern Mongolia, which
is a strike-slip belt that formed in the Neogene as a far-field
expression of the India-Asia collision. After that project, I was
invited by my friend and colleague Guillaume-Dupont-Nivet to combine my
paleomagnetic data from Mongolia with his results from Tibet, to start
working on a paleomagnetic study constraining the distribution of
deformation in Asia and India as a result of this collision. This
collaboration has proven to be very fruitful, and current research is
focusing on a complete reconstruction of the collision from
paleomagnetic, structural and seismic tomographic constraints, also
collaborating with Wim Spakman, Paul Kapp, Pete Lippert and Pavel
Doubrovine. Timor
and the Banda Arc Since the spring
of 2010, I participate in a collaborative project funded by the NSF
that will focus on the accretionary history of the island of Timor in
SE Indonesia, during arc-continent collision between the Australian
continent and the oceanic Banda plate. This work will likely expand
into a detailed geological reconstruction of the Banda Arc, and occurs
in collaboration with Nadine McQuarrie and Garrett Tate (both Princeton)
and Ron Harris (Brigham Young). Caribbean Since 2007, I
have worked in the Caribbean region, reconstructing the arc-continent
collision of Cuba and the triple-junction processes at the
North-American – Caribbean – Pacific plate junction by doing
paleomagnetic research in the Chortis Block of Honduras, in
collaboration with Manuel Iturralde-Vinent, Antonio Garcia-Casco, Rob Rogers
and
Roberto Molina-Garza. |