Collaborative Research: Completion of the MORVEL global plate motion models

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract This project will complete the MORVEL models for present day plate motion. MORVEL is a successor to NUVE<-1 and NUVEL-1A. The MORVEL data consists almost entirely of spreading rates from marine magnetic anomalies and transform-fault azimuths from marine bathymetric data, and are a significant improvement on prior data sets. Two models will be constructed, one that averages motion over the shortest geological interval possible for a given plate boundary, and a second that uniformly averages motion over the past 3.16 Ma.