Zachary Eilon
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Earth's longest mountain chain is almost entirely underwater: a ~50,000-km volcanic ridge system where tectonic plates pull apart and hot rock rises from below to form new seafloor. Roughly 65% of the planet's plate material is made at these mid-ocean ridges, yet because they sit beneath miles of water, the deep structure underneath them is still poorly known.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
seismology
mid-ocean ridge
ocean-bottom seismometer
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test predicted signatures of dynamic upwelling beneath mid-ocean ridges using surface- and body-wave tomography from roughly 80 ocean-bottom seismometers deployed across the Pacific-Cocos and Cocos-Nazca spreading centers.
- Image melt and dehydration structures at spreading ridges, and test whether they persist as fabrics and discontinuities in mature ocean plate, using seismic attenuation and scattered-wave measurements.
- Map the three-dimensional organization of mantle flow beneath the Galápagos triple junction using seismic anisotropy, the direction-dependent wave speeds that record how mantle minerals are aligned by flow.
- Exploit the contrast in spreading rate and ridge migration between the two ridges, including a propagating spreading center, to gauge which parameters most control ridge dynamics and plate maturation.
- Characterize frequency-dependent energy dissipation in the upper mantle beneath the western U.S., Iceland, and Alaska by combining seismic data with geodetic records of loading from deglaciation, groundwater cycles, and lake drainage.
- Determine how the transient-creep behavior measured across seismic to convective timescales changes inferences of steady-state mantle viscosity from geodesy and of thermal state from seismic tomography.
More about the research
A related puzzle concerns the mantle itself, the layer of solid rock below the crust that nonetheless flows over long timescales: how stiff or how easily deformed it appears depends on how fast it is being pushed, and that frequency dependence is not well understood. Two projects address these gaps, one by imaging the rock beneath spreading ridges with seafloor instruments, the other by measuring how mantle rock responds to pushes ranging from seconds-long seismic waves to millennia-long ice-sheet melting.
Why it matters
Knowing how the mantle deforms at different timescales feeds directly into forecasts of sea-level rise as ice sheets melt, since the solid Earth rebounds beneath them, and into interpreting ground deformation measured by satellites. The seafloor imaging adds data used for geohazard assessment and for global images of Earth's interior. Both projects offer undergraduates and graduate students research through seagoing expeditions, coursework, and training workshops.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: New imaging of mid-ocean ridge systems at the Galápagos triple junction
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: Towards a new framework for interpreting mantle deformation: integrating theory, experiments, and observations spanning seismic to convective timescales
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Closest labs
Colleen Dalton
Brown University, RI·Earth & Environmental Science
Map how much melt is stored beneath Yellowstone, the Cascades Arc and the Altiplano-Puna Volcanic Complex, and whether it sits in horizontal layers or vertical columns, using radial anisotropy from 25–75 s teleseismic surface waves.
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.
Brandon Shuck
Louisiana State University, LA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how the thickness, composition and basement roughness of oceanic crust changed over the first ~50 million years of Atlantic seafloor spreading, using multichannel seismic and ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) profiles.
The school
University of California-Santa Barbara: 17 labs on PI Pages, $303M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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