I describe work on two aspects of magnetic field evolution relevant for the “recycling” scenario for making millisecond radio pulsars. First, many of the theoretical ideas for bringing about accretion-induced field decay rely on dissipation of currents in the neutron star crust. I discuss field evolution in the crust due to the Hall effect, and outline when it dominates Ohmic decay. This emphas...

The hydrological characteristics of biological soil crusts (BSCs) are not well understood. In particular the relationship between runoff and BSC surfaces at relatively large (>1 m(2)) scales is ambiguous. Further, there is a dearth of information on small scale (mm to cm) hydrological characterization of crust types which severely limits any interpretation of trends at larger scales. Site diffe...

[1] The geometry and properties of the interface of the Cocos plate beneath central Mexico are determined from the receiver functions (RFs) utilizing data from the Meso America Subduction Experiment (MASE). The RF image shows that the subducting oceanic crust is shallowly dipping to the north at 15° for 80 km from Acapulco and then horizontally underplates the continental crust for approximatel...

The very low water content of the granulitic unit of Holsnøy, in the Bergen Arcs, Norway, caused its partial metastable preservation throughout Caledonian burial end exhumation, leading to the observed mixture of completely eclogitized and uneclogitized rocks. Large-scale eclogite-facies fracturing enabled fluid penetration into the granulite and subsequent eclogitization, and resulted in a ver...

In the southern Tibetan plateau, which is considered to be the ongoing India–Eurasia continental collision zone, tracing of the Indian crustal front beneath Tibet is still controversial. We conducted deep subsurface electrical modeling in southern Tibet and discuss the geometry of the front of the Indian crust. Three areas along the Yarlung-Zangbo river zone for which previous magnetotelluric (...

Figure 1. Schematic cross sections through (A) Galicia Margin west of Iberian Peninsula (Boillot et al., 1995) and (B) Jurassic margin of Apulian continent toward Alpine Tethys (Manatschal and Bernoulli, 1999). Inset in B displays present location of margin in Swiss Alps and paleoposition of section in Jurassic time. Abbreviations in A: lcc—lower continental crust; man— mantle; S—S-reflector; s...

The surface of Venus is so hot that the lower crust may be weak enough to allow decoupling of mantle and crust. An analytic model of such decoupling assumes that the shallow mande forms the top boundary layers of large scale mantle convection cells. Crustal flow is driven by the motion of the marie and by topographically induced pressure gradients. The model predicts that the lowest lowlands ar...

Mountains on rapidly rotating neutron stars efficiently radiate gravitational waves. The maximum possible size of these mountains depends on the breaking strain of the neutron star crust. With multimillion ion molecular dynamics simulations of Coulomb solids representing the crust, we show that the breaking strain of pure single crystals is very large and that impurities, defects, and grain bou...

The age distribution of the crust is a fundamental parameter in modeling continental evolution and the rate of crustal accretion through Earth’s history, but this is usually estimated from surface exposures. The exposed Yangtze craton in eastern China consists mainly of Proterozoic rocks with rare Archean outcrops. However, the U-Pb ages and Hf isotope systematics of xenocrystic zircons brought...

Introduction: Many new meteorites representing rare achondrite groups are being recovered from both hot and cold deserts. A significant fraction of these meteorites are both coarse-grained in texture and small in size, making accurate determinations of bulk rock compositions rather challenging. We successfully obtained elemental analyses of several angrites using ~1 mm 2 rasters of polished sec...