Daniel Pastor-Galán

TS Tectonics and Structural Geology

The 2019 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Daniel Pastor-Galán for his research on the origin of oroclines and the tectonic evolution of Palaeotethys and Panthalassa ocean interface during the Pangea amalgamation.

Daniel Pastor-Galán is awarded the 2019 TS Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award. After completing his PhD at Universidad de Salamanca (Spain) in 2012, his research focused on the origin of the Ibero-Armorican Orocline, showing that it formed within a 10 million year interval in the Late Carboniferous–Early Permian. Pastor-Galán deduced the lithospheric response to orocline buckling and its possible detachment from the upper mantle within the context of the amalgamation of Pangea in the Late Palaeozoic. Since then, and until 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), where he continued investigating the curvature of orogenic belts in Iran, Ireland and Iberia and formed part of the team developing the successful online platform Paleomagnetism.org. He moved to Japan after obtaining the prestigious JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) postdoctoral fellowship to study the tectonic evolution of the Palaeotethys and Panthalassa ocean interface during the Pangea amalgamation.

Daniel Pastor-Galán is an outstanding scientist, productive and full of imagination and originality. His present and future work will massively contribute to the development of plate tectonics and global geodynamics.

Publication resulting from the award

Pastor-Galán, D., Gutiérrez-Alonso, G., and Weil, A. B.: The enigmatic curvature of Central Iberia and its puzzling kinematics, Solid Earth, 11, 1247–1273, https://doi.org/10.5194/se-11-1247-2020, 2020.