Folarin Kolawole
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
New boundaries between tectonic plates form where an existing plate is pulled apart at weak spots. Old scars in the ocean floor, such as fracture zones, may act as those weak spots and steer where and how a new boundary develops.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
plate tectonics
rifting
oceanic fracture zones
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether fault motion along the reactivating Davie Fracture Zone varies along its length because of inherited bends and offsets, or stays uniform through local rotations of the stress field.
- Build an improved earthquake catalog for the Mozambique Channel from temporary, permanent and historical seismic stations, including those in Madagascar, using machine learning approaches.
- Calculate earthquake source mechanisms, which show how each fault slipped, and use them to determine the present-day stress field along the fracture zone.
- Produce an updated map of active faults along the entire Davie Fracture Zone and identify high seismic hazard zones, including faults that could trigger tsunamis.
More about the research
Understanding this process also matters for safety, because faults slipping offshore can cause earthquakes and trigger tsunamis.
Why it matters
Faults reactivating offshore in the Mozambique Channel may produce damaging earthquakes and tsunamis that threaten coastal communities in Mozambique and Madagascar. The new earthquake catalog, active fault database and hazard maps could help refine regional seismic hazard models and guide hazard planning.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shaikh Arifuzzaman
University of Nevada-Las Vegas, NV·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop an artificial intelligence framework that maps and interprets active fault networks by integrating multiple data sources, and that characterizes fault-system dynamics across regions with contrasting tectonic settings.
Lucy Flesch
Purdue University, IN·Earth & Environmental Science
Build a regionally consistent, multi-plate velocity field for the Arctic by combining GPS measurements with mid-ocean ridge spreading rates that record motion over hundreds of thousands of years.
James Kirkpatrick
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize where permeability and fluid flow are concentrated in the Japan Trench fault zone using temperature and pressure records from subseafloor borehole observatories at IODP Site C0019.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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