A Synthesis of the Physical State of the Mantle Wedge in Costa Rica-Nicaragua and Izu-Bonin-Mariana

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-2). It will support a new investigator with a MARGINS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Ikuko Wada to model the physical properties of mantle wedges using data from two MARGINS focus sites, i.e., Izu-Bonin-Marianas and Costa Rica-Nicaragua. She will be supervised by two experienced geoscientists, Mark Behn and Alison Shaw (sponsoring PIs only), both at WHOI. Wada?s doctoral research presents an excellent background for the proposed work in which she has already made a significant contribution by demonstrating that the maximum depth of decoupling between the subducting slab and the overriding mantle controls, the mantle wedge flow pattern and the thermal structure of the forearc-arc region and that this depth is typically 70-80 km depths for most subduction zones. She will use an array of constraints, including seismic, heat flow and geochemical data, for the modeling effort.Broader impacts include the support of a young female investigator and insights gained from this work will be useful broadly to the MARGINS community.