Prof Alex Copley

My work focuses on observing and understanding the deformation and evolution of the Earth's crust and upper mantle, spanning earthquakes and ductile deformation, covering length-scales from individual crystals to entire deformation belts, and timescales from seconds to billions of years. I use a combination of field observations, seismology, geodesy, remote sensing, metamorphic and igneous petrology, and numerical modelling.

I am particularly interested in understanding the controls on the locations and characteristics of earthquakes, constraining the sizes and origins of the forces driving tectonics, and investigating the material properties of the crust and upper mantle. Between them, these quantities play a first-order role in controlling important features of the world around us, such as the distribution of earthquake hazard, and the sizes, shapes, and evolution through time of mountain ranges and depressions. I take a global view of this topic, and work in a wide range of areas in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and South America.

The societal impacts of my work are focussed on building resilience to earthquake hazards, in collaboration with local stakeholders in the regions I work, and with global organisations. I am also involved in understanding the large-scale tectonic controls on critical mineral distributions.