Benjamin Maunder
GD Geodynamics
The 2014 Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) Award is awarded to Benjamin Maunder for the poster/PICO entitled:
Fluid Release and the Deformation of Subducting Crust (Maunder, B.; van Hunen, J.; Magni, V.; Bouilhol, P.)
Click here to download the poster/PICO file.
Benjamin Maunder is currently a PhD student at Durham University, UK, supervised by Dr. Jeroen van Hunen. For his PhD, he is using a forward modelling approach to investigate the possible mechanisms by which early continental crust may have formed, during the Archean. His EGU 2014 poster presented the preliminary results of his first study, which focuses on the deformation of subducting crust. The aim of this study is to constrain the conditions required for significant deformation and evaluate whether the delamination of subducting crust is a viable continental crust forming mechanism. Early results suggest that subducting crust could potentially deform via two different mechanisms: a thin layer scale “cold-plume-like” mode, and a whole crustal scale mode, the latter only occurring during the subduction of very young (~10Ma) slabs.