Luca C. Malatesta

TS Tectonics and Structural Geology

The 2017 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Luca C. Malatesta for the poster/PICO entitled:

A model to quantify sediment mixing across alluvial piedmonts with cycles of aggradation and incision (Malatesta, L. C.; Berger, Q.; Avouac, J.-P.;)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Luca C. Malatesta is a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz where he investigates eustatic controls on the Oregon shelf and coastal rivers with Noah Finnegan. In 2016, he completed his PhD at the California Institute of Technology working with Jean-Philippe Avouac and Michael P. Lamb. The poster presented here is the final chapter of his thesis ‘Impact of Climate and Tectonics on the Morphodynamics of Alluvial Piedmonts, Implications for Sediment Transfer and the Stratigraphic Record’. It describes a probabilistic model to quantify the degree of alteration or preservation of environmental signals (tectonics or climate) transported along the sediment routing system as they cross alluvial landforms that aggrade and incise. The well constrained Tian Shan north piedmont is used to test and illustrate the model’s capacity.
Website: lucamalatesta.weebly.com