Wednesday's presentation
by Nestor Cardozo (University of Stavanger, Norway)
"Strain for geologists"
Geologists are fairly accustomed to large, permanent strains. Strain markers and Mohr circles for strain are the bread and butter of the structural geologist. However, geologists are not very familiar with the mathematics of strain: deformation gradient and displacement gradient tensors, strain and deformation tensors, etc. Part of the problem is that we are not used to think of strain as a change of velocity/displacement but rather as a change of shape, perhaps because when the classical structural geology books were written (e.g. Ragan, 1967), displacement/velocity data were not much available. These days, however, we have access to an impressive amount of accurate displacement/velocity data from satellite measurements (e.g. SAR data), GPS networks, Geomatics methods (LiDAR and aerial photography), analogue and mechanical modeling. This talk briefly describes the mathematics of strain from velocity/displacement data, and then introduces a computer program that greatly facilitates the computation of strain from velocity/displacement data. The different strategies used to compute strain from dense or sparse data are discussed and examples are shown for GPS networks, landslides, analogue and mechanical models.
Nestor Cardozo obtained his undergraduate degree from the National University of Colombia and his PhD from Cornell University in 2003 on "Mechanical and kinematic investigations of fault propagation folding and foreland subsidence" advised by Richard Allmendinger and Teresa Jordan. He then moved to Norway where he spent one year in Oslo, several years at CIPR in Bergen and since 2008 he has been associate professor at The University of Stavanger. His work is focused on strain analysis and kinematic modelling of faulting and folding, for which he has written (and published on his website www.ux.uis.no/~nestor/work.html) a number of codes.
Nestor is co-author of the textbook "Structural Geology Algorithms - Vectors and Tensors" published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press.
Time: 13:30-14:15 (time for discussion afterward)
Date: Wednesday 09.12.2015
Venue: AWI Hörsaal, Haus A43, Telegrafenberg, Potsdam