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Larry Syu-Heng Lai, Ph.D.
I’m a field geologist passionate about the Earth’s surface and shallow-crust geological processes that drive landscape evolution and sediment dynamics in mountainous regions (erosional “source”) and form clastic stratigraphy in sedimentary basins (depositional “sink”). When I’m not immersed in research, I enjoy hiking, playing basketball, and snowboarding.
Me on the main drainage divide of Taiwan
Everything I am studying in a nutshell!
I am currently working at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, where I collaborate with Dr. Jacob Covault, Dr. Zoltán Sylvester, and other researchers in the Quantitative Clastics Laboratory. My ongoing projects involve investigating deep-water depositional processes, signals of slope instability, and the stratigraphy of turbidites and mass-transport deposits in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the Gulf of Mexico, and potentially eastern Taiwan (soon). Additionally, I am examining the implications of these studies for source-to-sink sediment dynamics and paleoseismology reconstruction.
I continue my collaborations with scholars from my previous position at the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, where I work with Dr. Alison Duvall and the Cascadia COPEs Hub team on landslide-related geomorphology. This part of my research focuses on landslide history and post-landslide landform recovery in the Pacific Northwest, as well as examining how river sediment influences landscape evolution in landslide-prone terrains, such as the mountains of Taiwan and New Zealand.
Expertise
Expertise
Sedimentology
& Stratigraphy
Sedimentology
& Stratigraphy
A study to understand the origin, transport, and deposition of sediments, and their spatio-temporal patterns and variations. It helps us to understand the net result of ancient surface processes, depict paleo-geography, and offer future predictions.
Sedimentary Basin
Analysis
Sedimentary Basin
Analysis
A synthetic geological study to understand the developement of sedimentary basins and related near-surface crustal dynamics. It provides the basis for geo-history research, geological resource exploration, and regional tectonic activities.
Tectonic
Geomorphology
Tectonic
Geomorphology
The study to understand the interplay between surface processes, climate change, and tectonic activities. It combines merits of field observation and numerical modeling to investigate the controls of landscape evolution in tectonically active regions.
Other Research Skills/Tools
Other Research Skills/Tools
Field Mapping & Observation
Field geological mapping and observations provide both quantitative and qualitative constraints of the real world and offer direct insights to the geospatial problems and relative chronology of the geohistory.
Rock Paleomagnetism
Magnetic properties and mineralogy of rocks and sediments, which provide archives of paleomagnetic polarity changes, depositional time, and particle alignment due to tectonic and sedimentological processes.
Calcareous Nannofossil
Calcareous Nannoplankton are tiny (2.5-30 μm) oceanic phytoplankton that emerge around late Triassic. Their skeletons are not only significant contributors of rock-forming processes but also valuable biostratigraphic age markers.
Topographic Analysis
Measurements and analyses of the geomorphic metrics using digital elevation models and other remote-sensing data. The measures of landform patterns provide information about governing surface processes and background allogenic controls (tectonic uplift, bedrock properties, climate changes) in this place.
Landscape Evolution Modeling
Computational simulation of landscape evolution at the surface of a rising terrain. The primary tool I adapt is Landlab, the open-source Python tool that allows investigating the sediment-modulated erosion processes and the long-term trend of topographic adjustments in response to variabilities of tectonics and climate.
Source-to-Sink Forward Stratigraphic Modeling
Source-to-Sink Forward Stratigraphic Modeling
Computational simulation can be used to study the development of deep-time sedimentary basins and their physical stratigraphic architecture. I am collaborating with my colleagues to adapt an open-source tool called goSPL, which integrates models for erosion in the source terrain and autogenic sedimentation in the sink. I am particularly interested in using this framework to track the variation of sediment flux and particle size throughout the entire source-to-sink system and understand how stratigraphic patterns form accordingly. The results of this research can inform field geological studies in deciphering signals of geohistory from sedimentary rocks.
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