10 November, 2017
Mr. Yuan-Kai Liu, an MS student in the Earth Science and Engineering Program at KAUST and a member of the CDI group, has been selected as one of the recepients of the 2017 Outstanding Student Poster Presentation (OSPP) award for his poster he presented at the European Geoscience Union (EGU) conference in Vienna in April. What makes his achievement even more distinguished, is that Kai was a first-year MS student when he presented his poster, while most of the other recepients are PhD students who are usually close to finishing their PhD studies. The title of the work Kai presented at EGU is "Ring fault activity and deformation at subsidence calderas studied using analogue experiments" and on the poster he presented results of series of analogue experiments he designed and performed with Joel Ruch at KAUST showing how caldera ring faults develop and propagate up towards the surface with increasing subisdence. The experiments show that observed combination of focused and broad deformation at calderas, which has usually been modeled using two different magma chambers at two different depths, may also be explained with a single reservoir and movements on caldera ring faults, which tend to focus deformation. In addition to the results of the analogue modeling, preliminary numerical modeling results were presented, work Kai did with Hannes Vasyura-Bathke at KAUST.