Frances Cooper and Byron Adams join the LGC

A belated welcome to Dr Frances Cooper and Dr Byron Adams, who joined the LGC team in 2023!

Frances is a geologist whose research seeks to understand the mechanics of large-scale continental deformation, the evolution of mountain belts, and the interplay between tectonics and climate. Her work has spanned active normal faulting in the Gulf of Corinth, Greece, the exhumation of deeply buried rocks in Nevada USA, and the role of crustal extension in building the eastern Himalayas in Bhutan. In recent years, she has worked closely with the mining industry to understand how tectonics, magmatism, volcanism, and landscape evolution combine to control the formation, enrichment, and preservation of porphyry copper deposits, particularly in the Central Andes and the southwest USA.

Byron is a tectonic geomorphologist who studies how rocks, rivers, and hillslopes respond to climatic, tectonic, and volcanic forcings. He takes a quantitative and multidisciplinary approach to examine the complex and competing influences of climate (e.g. rainfall and glaciation), tectonics (e.g. faulting and uplift), and surface processes (e.g. river incision, and volcanic deposition) on the evolution of landscapes. Through a combination of field work and quantitative techniques including topographic analysis, thermochronology, cosmogenic radionuclide dating, remote sensing, and numerical modelling, his research addresses fundamental questions such as whether climate can influence tectonics or how Earth’s surface will continue to evolve in post-glacial conditions.