GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel is a foundation of public law jointly financed by the Federal Republic of Germany (90Â %) and the state of Schleswig-Holstein (10Â %) and is one of the internationally leading institutions in the field of marine sciences. Currently GEOMAR disposes over an annual budget of approx. 80 million Euro and has approx. 1000 employees.
The research unit Marine Electromagnetics (Marine Geodynamics) of the research division Dynamics of the Ocean Floor is offering a PhD Position, starting on August 1st of 2022. The position offers the possibility to attain a doctoral degree in natural sciences.
Job Description / Project Description
This project aims to resolve the deep structure of the seismogenic zone of the northern Cascadia Subduction zone. It is built on the expedition SO294 conducted in the fall of 2022 (CLOCKS: Northern Cascadia: Extent of locked zone, prism deformation, slip-to-toe, and the edge of subduction).
The PhD project focuses on retrieving structural information of the subducting Juan de Fuca and Explorer Plates using active-source 2D seismic body wave tomography to improve the understanding of the geometry of the subduction system. Data from the seismic constraints will be jointly used with co-acquired magneto-telluric (MT) data for delineating the up- and down-dip extent of the locked zone off central northern Cascadia.
The successful applicant will use body waves from primary and secondary arrivals to invert for velocity models of the Cascadia subduction zone on the Juan de Fuca and Explorer plate segments. The stations will be from a network of Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) stations as well as adjacent land stations on Vancouver Island. The arrival times will be from airgun shots registered by the OBS and land stations. Using velocities from the tomography study will allow extracting information of the distribution and nature of the down-going oceanic crust and possibly upper mantle.
Data from the seismic experiment will be complemented by earthquake seismic data acquired on land stations distributed across Vancouver Island and a set of long-term OBS offshore. The successful application will combine data from the new long-term study of the project CLOCKS for velocity analyses, including results from two previous deployment experiments conducted in the region.
Shear wave arrivals and models will contribute to the degree of serpentinization (i.e. ‘hydration’) of mantle rocks. Refracted waves travelling just below the crust-mantle boundary allow determining the velocity of the uppermost mantle and yield information on the thermal history of the upper mantle and thus history of the separation of the Explorer Plate from the Juan de Fuca Plate along the Nootka Transform fault. In the last phase, the PhD work aims at the integration of the findings with other geophysical data to improve Earth models.
The research unit Marine Geodynamics offers a supportive atmosphere for our PhD and PostDocs, many of which are engaged in interdisciplinary, international projects. This position is embedded in the interdisciplinary framework of the CLOCKS project involving research collaboration with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC-Pacific), the Japan agency for marine science and technology (JAMSTEC), and Ocean Networks Canada (ONC). It further benefits from collaboration with the University of Kiel und the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Required Qualifications:
- Masters of Geophysics, Physics, Mathematics or related discipline.
- Experience in seismic/seismological data processing or inversion techniques
- Skills in one or more programming languages (Python, Perl, Matlab or similar).
- Fluency in spoken and written English
Additional qualifications:
- Skills in using Unix/Linux systems
- Previous experience in marine scientific expeditions
- Skills in using ArcGIS (QQIS) or GMT for spatial data analyses and visualization
- Skills in seismic data processing and basic interpretation (e.g. using Kingdom Suite)
The position is available for a funding period of 3 years. The salary depends on qualification and could be up to the class E13 TVöD-Bund of the German tariff for public employees. This is a part-time position according to 75 % of a full-time equivalent. The position cannot be split.
GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel seeks to increase the proportion of female scientists and explicitly encourages qualified female academics to apply. GEOMAR is an equal opportunity employer and encourages scientists with disabilities to apply. Qualified disabled applicants will receive preference in the application process.
Please send your application for this post not later than May 31, 2022 via Emailin a single pdf-file using the keyword “PhD CLOCKS” in the subject line to the following address: bewerbung@geomar.de.
As soon as the selection procedure has finished, all application papers will be destroyed according to data protection regulation.
For further information regarding the position and research unit please contact Dr. Michael Riedel (mriedel@geomar.de; Tel: +49 (0)431 600 2331).
Please do not contact us by phone about the present state of procedures. However, we will answer all your questions if you send us an e-mail to bewerbung@geomar.de. In doing so, please refer to the keyword.
For more information, please follow this link.