Professor Joanna Morgan's research includes understanding the passage of magma through the Earth’s crust and the conditions that lead to a volcanic eruption, and investigating what controls different types of seismic behaviour (large earthquakes, slow slip events and aseismic creep) at subduction zones. 

"We use High Performance Computing in many ways, for example to run inversions to obtain high-resolution geophysical images of the subsurface, or to perform numerical simulations of impact ejecta travelling around the Earth."

Chicxulub impact crater

Prof Morgan is also working to constrain the environmental effects of the Chicxulub impact, using High Performance Computing to quantify the release of climate-active gases by the Chicxulub impact. As described in Geophysical Research Letters, Prof Morgan and colleagues re-examined “one of the mechanisms that allow an impact to have a global effect – the release of climate-active gases from terrestrial sedimentary rocks after the high-velocity impact.”

Prof Morgan and colleagues’ high resolution images of the Chicxulub impact crater were used to locate the drill site in IODP-ICDP Expedition 364.

Read more about Professor Morgan’s work:

• The formation of peak rings in large impact craters, in Science
• Modeling the formation of the K–Pg boundary layer, Icarus https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2009.01.021

 

Joanna Morgan is Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth Science & Engineering, and a module leader for the Applied Computational Science and Engineering MSc.