Postdoctoral Research Associate

The Role

We invite applications for a two-year postdoctoral researcher, to work with Prof Jeroen van Hunen on the topic of “Geodynamic modelling of the Virgin Islands as a proxy for early Earth geodynamics”. The successful candidate will become an employee of Durham University. They will join the UKRI NERC-funded project VIPER (Virgin Islands: Petrogenesis of early Earth-like Rocks). The post involves collaboration with partners at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. In particular, a close working relationship with an Edinburgh-based PDRA and PhD student will be important.

The VIPER project: Plate tectonics on the modern Earth forms new oceanic crust at mid-ocean ridges and destroys it in subduction zones, where cycles of magmatism, erosion, deposition, and mountain-building events generate new continental crust. The Earth’s continents began to grow and stabilise 4 billion years ago and, although we have a clear understanding of how plate tectonics forms continental crust on the present-day Earth, we still do not know which tectonic processes formed the oldest continental crust on the early Earth. Here we propose to undertake the first integrated petrological, geochemical, and geodynamic investigation of rocks in the Caribbean Virgin Islands which we consider to be a modern analogue of the early Earth. Our results will be applied to the primitive Earth in a bid to identify the tectonic setting(s) in which the first continental crust formed. The identification of these early Earth processes is critical to our understanding of how our planet began its evolutionary path towards forming the modern mantle, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The VIPER project (Virgin Islands: Petrogenesis of early Earth-like Rocks) aims to further understand these early Earth processes through geodynamic modelling and petrological analyses.

The postdoctoral project

The successful candidate will use geodynamic modelling to assess the tectonic feasibility of a range of proposed geodynamic scenarios to explain the tectonic and petrological observations (e.g., P-T ranges) of the Virgin Islands as a proxy for early Earth dynamics. This will involve both subduction zone and intraplate settings. In particular, the following parameters will be investigated: (1) mantle and crustal rheological properties, (2) potential source rock compositions of any melting processes taking place, and (3) ambient mantle temperature and lithospheric thickness. Potential implications for the Earth’s earliest crust formation will be explored in a set of numerical models with thermal and compositional settings that are appropriate for the early Earth. Calculations will be carried out with the flexible, and highly versati le geodynamical software tool ASPECT (aspect.geodynamics.org).

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