McGill Structural Geology



Jamie Kirkpatrick



Welcome to my website! My students and I study the deformation of the Earth, in particular faults and shear zones that form as tectonic plates move past each other. We use a combination of field data, microstructural observations, and experimental work to investigate the mechanical response of rocks to applied stresses and the processes that affect rocks during deformation. These pages give an overview of current and ongoing research. Feel free to contact me at the details below for more information.​



Field area at Black sands beach, Marin headlands, san francisco, california



3-D orientations of slickenlines on a fault surface measured with terrestrial laser scanner



Field Area in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, California



Scanning electron microscope secondary electron image of wear debris formed during a tribology experiment



Thin section photomicrograph of a mylonite showing muscovite-rich shear bands



photo of the La Quinta Fault, California (Left) and 3d model created with Agisoft's photoscan pro (Right)



News



Undergraduate Awards



Congratulations to Dana Šilerová (fault roughness) and Arvid Gonzales (Canadian Cordillera mantle xenoliths) for receiving McGill Faculty of science SURA awards to conduct summer research.



Conference presentations​



AGU Fall Meeting (San Francisco), December 2020:

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Recent Updates



Caroline's work on the frictional strength of the Cascadia megathrust published!


New paper out in Nature Geoscience shows how seismic asperities and fault roughness are created and modified by normal faults within the subducting slab offshore Costa Rica.


Check out the new free field guide to the San Francisco Bay Area hosted in Google Earth here.


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Jamie Kirkpatrick



james.kirkpatrick@mcgill.ca
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, FDA Rm 340, 3450 University St, Montreal, H3A 0E8