News

• Field trip to the Menderes Massif, Turkey (03/2013)

  
  
  

• Tour of LACMA Rocks (09/2012)

  • Michael Heizer: Actual Size Gallery Walkthrough at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• Nature Geoscience study on slab-keel interactions published (08/2012)

  • Miller, M. S. and Becker, T. W.: Mantle flow deflected by interactions between subducted slabs and cratonic keels. Nature Geosc., doi:10.1038/ngeo1553, 2012. (PDF)
  • USC news release (covered by PhysOrg, EurekaAlert, TerraDaily, Science Daily, etc.). Reporting on Huffington Post, MSNBC, Discovery News, International Business Times, Yahoo news.

• Older news items

• Two most recent publications (see all publications)

  	73	Miller, M. S., Allam, A. A., Becker, T. W. and Di Leo, J., and Wookey, J.: Constraints on the geodynamic evolution of the westernmost Mediterranean and northwestern Africa from shear wave splitting analysis. In press at Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 2013.	PDF
  	72	Platt, J. P. and Becker, T. W.: Kinematics of rotating panels of E-W faults in the San Andreas system: what can we tell from geodesy? In press at Geophys. J. Int., 2013.	PDF

• Undergrad and grad (Ph.D.) research opportunities

  We are always looking for motivated students with a keen interest and solid background in the Earth sciences, physics, engineering, or computer science. I like to work with students who think and work independently and challenge and extend my expertise and interests.
  • If you are an undergraduate, please
    • contact me if you are interested in thesis work in Geodynamics;
    • see a presentation on Earth Science Majors and Minors at USC if you haven't declared a major;
    • consider our department's undergraduate opportunities and SCEC internships.
  • If you are interested in graduate (PhD) study, note that USC offers a rewarding academic environment amongst a diverse group of students and faculty. If you
    • wonder what we do, check out our research, and the current USC Geodynamics Group;
    • have general questions about graduate (doctorate, PhD) study at USC, and how the application process works, please see my PhD in the US FAQ before contacting me;
    • wonder what our department is about, check out the USC's Earth Science department (which also hosts a lists of formal PhD admission requirements and procedures for graduate students), and our Geosystems research pages;
    • are interested in working with me as a PhD student, please send me an email.
  • If you are a foreign student looking for a summer research internship, I will typically not be able to hire you, sorry.
  
  
  

• Older news items

  • PICASSO project seismic station survice run (05/2012)

  • Ethiopia field trip (03/2012)

  • USC Geodynamics Earth Science Computing Environment released (03/2012)

  • Geodesy field work in Baja California (02/2012)

  • Lisa Alpert passes her PhD defense (01/2012)

  • New western United States upper mantle seismic tomography plotting interface (11/2011)

  • Discover magazine features mantle circulation visualization (08/2011)

  • G-Cubed 2010 impact factor up to 3.4, now ranking 10th out of all Geochemistry/Geophysics journals (06/2011)

    As of the 2011 ISI report, AGU's Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G3) impact factor went up to 3.368 for 2010, from 2.626 in 2009. G3 is now ranked #10, up from #13, out of 77 Geochemistry and Geophysics journals.

  • Thomas Goebel wins a Best Student Presentation Award at SSA 2011 (05/2011)

    USC Geodynamics grad student Thomas Goebel won a Best student presentation award, at the Annual Meeting of the Seismological Society of America, Memphis, TN, in April 2011 on his poster on
    
    
    • Goebel, T. H. W., Becker, T. W., Schorlemmer, D., Stanchits, S. Rybacki, E., Dresen.G: Connecting Acoustic Emission Event Locations, Aftershock Density and b-values before and after Stick-Slips to Changes in Topography of Rough Fracture Surfaces during Frictional Sliding Experiments. Meeting of the Seismological Society of America Abtsract, Memphis TN, 2011.
    Also see
    • Goebel, T. H. W., Becker, T. W., Schorlemmer, D., Stanchits, S., Sammis, C., Rybacki, E., and Dresen, G.: Identifying fault heterogeneity through mapping spatial anomalies in acoustic emission statistics. In press J. Geophys. Res., 117, B03310, doi:10.1029/2011JB008763, 2012. (PDF)

  • PICASSO project seismic station survice run (05/2011)

  • Science perspective on Stadler et al. (2010) published (08/2010)

    • Becker, T. W.: Fine-Scale Modeling of Global Plate Tectonics. Science, 29, 1020 - 1021, 2010. (PDF) News coverage on MSNBS

  • USC ranked 23rd in US (News and World Report, 08/2010)

    USC was ranked as the 23rd best university overall in the US in 2010, ahead of UCLA (25th), and just behind UC Berkeley (22nd). The USC Geophysics PhD program was ranked 9th earlier (04/2010).

  • Small-scale convection study published in Nature (06/2010)

    Results on the role of small-scale mantle convection on microplate motions and dynamic topography in the Mediterranean were published in Nature. This project is a long-standing collaboration with Claudio Faccenna of Roma TRE. See
    • Faccenna and Becker: Shaping mobile belts by small-scale convection. Nature, 465, 2010. (PDF)
    • the corresponding News and Views article by Wortel and Govers
    • Reporting in Christian Science Monitor, Pour La Science (in French), Spiegel Online, Focus Online, and Bild der Wissenschaft (last three in German)
    • USC News
    • Terra Daily, got a Cool on FARK, Futurity, Science Daily, LiveScience, PhysOrg, ScienceCodex, Eureka Science News, Lab Spaces, E Science News, News Blaze, Sify News, ABC Espana, New Kerala, Science Centric, Thai Indian, News Track India, One India, Mysterium at Blogosfere.

  • San Andreas Fault Zone study hits top spot in G-Cubed downloads (07/2010)

    • Platt, J. P. and Becker, T. W.: Where is the real transform boundary in California? Geochem., Geophys., Geosys., 11(Q06013), doi:10.1029/2010GC003060, 2010. (PDF)
    
    hits the top weekly download spot at G-Cubed (G-Cubed "cover" from 07/2010).

  • Numerical Geodynamics lecture notes online (06/2010)

    A fully contained set of lecture notes and accompanying Matlab exercises on Numerical Geodynamics are now online.
    • Becker, T. W. and Kaus, B. J. P.: Numerical Geodynamics. An introduction to computational methods with focus on solid Earth applications of continuum mechanics. Lecture notes (162 pages). University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2010. (PDF)

  • USC High performance computing center 5th in US (06/2010)

    USC's Linux cluster supercomputing facility HPCC has been ranked 5th in the US in an academic setting in the most recent TOP500 benchmark exercise.

  • USC Geophysics ranked 9th in US News and World Report (04/2010)

    USC's Geophysics graduate program has been ranked ninth in the US in the 2010 version of the US News and World Report, right after Harvard and Princeton, and before the University of Washington.

  • Michael Kaplan awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (04/2010)

    USC Geodyanmics Grad student Michael Kaplan was awarded a prestiguous National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship on April 6, 2010. Congrats Mike!

  • USC undergrad paper hits top spot in G-Cubed downloads (08/2009)

    Former USC Earth science undergrad Brad Foley's paper
    
    
    • Foley, B. and Becker, T. W.: Generation of plate-like behavior and mantle heterogeneity from a spherical, visco-plastic convection model. Geochem., Geophys., Geosys., 10, Q08001, doi:10.1029/2009GC002378, 2009. (PDF)
    
    hits the top weekly download spot at G-Cubed and gets picked as highlighted image in August 2009 (G-Cubed "cover" from 08/2009). Brad is now a PhD student at Yale University.

  • New seafloor age and spherical harmonics animations (05/2008)

  • Becker selected as the 2008 Gauss Lecturer of the German Geophysical Society (04/2008)

  • First release of the Solid Earth Teaching and Research Environment (03/2008)

  • GEOL599 class project results published in PNAS (08/2007)

    USC graduate student Sean Loyd, faculty Frank Corsetti, and myself were among the authors of a study on Cenozoic heat flux and plate tectonics that got published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read the PNAS paper, or news releases by UPI and USC.

  • Becker awarded NSF CAREER grant (01/2007)

  • Most recent PBO GPS velocity solution (always updated)

    The PBO part of the EarthScope program provides GPS crustal velocities. For continuously updated maps of the GPS velocities in the western United States, and crustal thickness plots, see the visuals page.

  • USC Supercomputer Second Fastest in Academic Setting (11/2005)

    In the Nov 2005 Top500 ranking, USC's Linux cluster configuration was ranked the second most powerful academic supercomputer in the US and 24st overall. The Southern California Earthquake Center and USC Geodynamics are among the supporters of the USC HPPC cluster which has now a measured performance of more than 11 teraflops.

  • USC ranked third world-wide in earthquake publications (05/2005)

    ISI has recently evaluated the worldwide distribution of citations of papers dealing with earthquakes from 1993 to 2003. Among the institutions with highly cited authors, USC ranked third in the world, behind the USGS and Caltech. [read more]