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Homepage of Douwe van Hinsbergen
New:
Paper in Nature Geoscience! New: Fieldwork photos Namibia 2009
Last
update: Decenber 22, 2009
postal address Bizarre
erosional camel near Kula - western Turkey Research
interest: I currently work as Post-Doc 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 Starting in the spring of 2010, I will 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. |
