Position Title
Professor and Department Chair
- Earth and Planetary Sciences
As a structural geologist and geomorphologist, Dr. Mike Oskin specializes in active crustal deformation and its relationships to surface processes and topography. His research program addresses three themes:
- Deformation rates and their relationship to earthquakes.
- Constraining the forces and processes that govern continental deformation.
- Predicting topographic responses to the growth of geologic structures.
These themes build toward a common framework for understanding active crustal deformation and its expression in landscapes. The first two research themes differ largely by time scale, with the first focused on short-term deformation processes over one or more earthquake cycles, and the second concerned with longer-term accumulated deformation and time-averaged processes. The third theme includes the development of new tools to quantify deformation from topography. Mike also pursue the inverse problem of quantifying surface processes from geomorphic responses to crustal deformation.