Prof. David Yuen [University of Minnesota, USA]

Title: The Impact of the Iron Spin Transition on Mantle Convection

Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM, Monday, June 13, 2016

Place: Auditorium Room 410, Building 6, HPSTAR (Shanghai)

Host: Dr. Ho-Kwang Mao

Abstract:

Over ten years ago the French group made deep incursions into unraveling more thoroughly the high-spin transition of Fe++ in periclase structure from laboratory studies. This study has sparked a whole round of investigations around the world both from experiments and computational efforts. The dynamical implications of this transition will be discussed in this lecture. This spin transition offers an alternative to chemically stratified models. We will show that this transition can explain stagnant slabs in the mid mantle and also the role of super-plumes in mantle dynamics.

Biography of the Speaker:

Prof. David Yuen graduated in 1969 from Caltech in chemistry. He then received a master in physical chemistry from UC Berkeley and a PHD in geophysics and geophysics in 1978 with a minor in applied mathematics from UCLA Following a two year NATO and NSF postdoctoral fellowships, he went to Arizona State University as assistant professor in geology. In 1985 he moved two times, first to Dept. of Geological Sciences at university of Colorado at Boulder in January as associate professor, then in September to University of Minnesota, as associate professor in geophysics and Fellow of Minnesota Supercomputer Institute. Since 2012, he has been spending 3 to 4 months each year at the School of Environmental Studies at 中国地质大学武汉 as a 长江 professor. He works mainly in computational geodynamics with interests also spanning to visualization and now Big Data大数据. He has published around 550 papers and edited six books in geophysics and high-performance computing. His h-index is 61 according to Thomas-Reuters.