Wed 27th November @ noon, Rm 312.222
Abstract:
The accretion of planets and their thermochemical evolution, the formation of the Moon, cratered landscapes, and the origin of habitable environments and atmospheres, are consequences of hypervelocity collisions of asteroids and comets with planetary bodies including the Earth. Impacts may be considered as one of the most fundamental processes in the solar system and it is a key question whether stochastic impacts of large bodies (giant collision) may have significantly changed the course of the evolution of individual planets or whether the evolution of planets was more or less determined after its formation. The presentation comprises examples of multi-scale numerical modelling, laboratory impact experiments and morphological and geophysical observations on the Moon to disentangle the collision history of the inner solar system and to quantify the role of impacts in the formation and early evolution of the Earth-Moon system.
Short bio:
Kai Wünnemann is Professor for “Impact and Planetary Physics” at Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) and Freie Universität (FU) Berlin. He is the deputy head of the Science Programme “Evolution and Geoprocesses” and head of the section “Impact and Meteorite Research” at MfN.
He has been studying impact processes for more than 20 years by numerical modelling, laboratory experiments, and geophysical exploration to improve our understanding of the collision history of planets and its implications for the evolution of lithospheres and biospheres. He is one of the lead developers of the iSALE software (http://www.isale-code.de) that is used by more than 200 users around the world to simulate impact and shock wave processes on all scales. He used different methodological approaches to study several craters on Earth and planetary surfaces during his PhD thesis at the University of Münster (2001), as postdoc at Imperial College London and University of Arizona (2002-2005), and as senior researcher and head of the Meteorite Impact Research section at the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) in Berlin (since 2006).
