GEMOC ARC National Key Centre
Dr Anthony Dosseto
CLICK HERE TO SEE A GEOLOGIST IN ACTION IN THE JUNGLE OF PUERTO RICO
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Research
Continental erosion : timescale for soil profile development and sediment transfer. Landscape evolution.
What is the time required to produce soils? How fast are sediments transported through a river basin? How does erosion respond to external forcings such as climate variability or human perturbation?
I use the uranium-series isotopic composition of soils, river sediments and waters to address these questions. See the "Research" section for more details.
"Battlefields" are in Australia, Puerto Rico or the Amazon.
Landslide, the toilet-flush version of erosion!
Arc magmatism: arc magma genesis, transfer and evolution of arc magmas, transfer of material from subducting plates
My current research focuses on the timescale for magma differentiation. How long does it take to produce rhyolites or other silicic magmas? How does it work?
Modeling of the 238U - 230Th - 226Ra composition of volcanic rocks provide some answers. U-series isotopes can be used, for instance, to quantify the proportion of evolved and fresh magmas required to produce studied lavas or the effect of wallrock assimilation on the inferred timescale of differentiation.
Subduction zone. The oceanic lithosphere (slab) is subducted into the mantle, with heat and pressure, looses its fluid, which lower the solidus of the overlying mantle and induce melting (click to enlarge)
Education
Born in 1976 in Marseille (France) and genuine product of the sun of Provence, I spent my 2 first years at the University Aix-Marseille III where I obtained a B.Sci. in Earth Sciences. I then moved to rainy Paris and got a Master in Earth Sciences (specialty: Geochemistry) at University Paris 7. I did honors followed by a PhD (obtained in Nov 2003) in the Laboratoire de Geochimie et Cosmochimie at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) (France). The title of my thesis is : 'Study of the subduction-related magmatism and continental erosion by U-series: constraints on the processes and their time scales'. You can download it here. It was supervised by Profs Bernard Bourdon and Claude J. Allegre.
After 5 years of postdoc at the GEMOC Centre, Dept of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), working with Prof Simon Turner, I am now a Lecturer at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong.