Wed 4th December @ noon, Rm 312.222

Abstract:

Mountain belts have always intrigued human beings and were first looked with defiance as the home of the gods. They appeared as gigantic and resisting the assaults of the natural elements even though it was already understood in Ancient Greece that erosion could potentially play a major role in their destruction. More recently, it was realized that mountain belts are not so resistant and that they instead hide a hot and tender heart at the source of their decline. Indeed, the exhumed roots of orogenic belts is made of migmatites and granites, former partially molten rocks and magmas, respectively, that display a geological record attesting for an intimate link between partial melting, orogenic evolution and crustal differentiation from the rise of mountain belts to their collapse.

This lecture, will present the evolution of ideas regarding the orogenic cycle and discuss the significance of examples taken through the Alpine belt s.l. from the Western Alps to the Aegean domain, through the Tibetan plateau. It will also propose some perspectives for future research on the deep roots of mountain belts.

Short bio:

Olivier VANDERHAEGHE is a field geologist with additional expertise in structural geology, petrology, geochemistry, geochronology, tectonics, and geodynamics. He is currently Professor at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse 3 and Adjunct Director of the Géosciences Environnement Toulouse (GET) laboratory. He obtained his Master Degree in 1991 at the Université de Montpellier and completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1997. Olivier VANDERHAEGHE has also spent 2 years (1991-1993) in French Guiana as a geologist of the French Survey (BRGM) trying to decrypt the geology of the basement beneath the luxurious rain forest and 2 years (1997-1999) in Halifax as a postdoctoral fellow in the Geodynamics group at Dalhousie University trying to bridge geology and geodynamics. He was then appointed on an Associate Professor position at the Université de Lorraine in 1999 before moving to Toulouse. His research started with the structural analysis of migmatites, which opened new avenues to the understanding, first of the tectonic evolution of orogenic belts, and then on the mechanisms of crustal growth and differentiation with applications to mineral systems.