• Cerro Balmaceda, Chile
  • Cordillera Chica
  • lago toro
  • basecamp
  • Sunrise on Rio Francia
  • Torres del Paine in the distance
  • Cerro Morado, Argentina
  • Seno Ultima Esperanza, Chile
  • cerro castillo

Welcome to the Fosdick Lab in the Department of Earth Sciences at UConn!

Our research investigates ancient and active mountain-building to understand how tectonics, magmatism, erosion, and climate interact to shape Earth’s lithosphere and dynamic landscapes.

 

Access a digital repository of Fosdick Lab publications here

Sedimentary basin response to interactions among tectonics, erosion, and eustasy

Coastal and marine regions are significantly affected by changes in tectonics, climate, and sea level. Collectively, these changes impact erosion rates, sediment supply, and basin subsidence patterns. Our work in the Magallanes-Austral Basin in southern Chile and Argentina has elucidated how tectonic evolution, subsidence mechanics, and exhumational drivers control the spatiotemporal patterns of sedimentation during mountain-building.

NSF Tectonics Award 1550091 Global eustasy or tectonic subsidence? Investigating controls on basin evolution during Cenozoic plate reorganization, Magallanes Basin, Patagonia 

 

Sediment production and routing to orogenic basins

Reconstructing continental-scale sediment production and routing is central to understanding a wide array of Earth Science phenomena including: the evolution of the continents; formation of mineral and hydrocarbon resources; and the relationships between topography and biodiversity. A primary theme of our research is constraining the timing and particle paths in orogenic evolution through coupled detrital geothermochronology and provenance analysis.

NSF CAREER Award 2045695 CAREER: Resolving the detrital thermal signatures and natural biases of sediment recycling and weathering in orogenic systems

American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund New Direction Award 62445-ND8, Fingerprinting the Grenville Though Multiple Cycles of Burial Heating and Sedimentation in the Acadian Foreland Basin

 

Chronology of deformation & erosion along active plate margins

A central goal among geoscientists today is to achieve higher precision of deformation rates across plate boundaries to fully understand seismic hazards and tectonic histories of crustal-scale faults. Our research contributes to this effort by using geothermochronology to quantify long-term erosion rates in tectonically active settings.

SCEC (Southern California Earthquake Center) Award Quaternary fault slip behavior of the mission creek fault of the southern San Andreas Fault Zone, CA: Part II – Constraining Sedimentary Provenance and Fault Displacements of Pleistocene Alluvial Fans

NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship Award 1049605 Assessing patterns of deformation across the Precordillera thrust-belt of northwestern Argentina