ERC_CRUSLID.html

ERC CRUSLID

Uncovering the secrets of planetary crust formation

Plate tectonics – the movement of Earth's lithosphere – may have been driven originally by the low density of the planet's continental crust. Studies have revealed that this low density is caused by processes that affected the distribution of material throughout the continents. However, gaps remain in our knowledge regarding the characteristics of the crust on other terrestrial planets and how it formed. In particular, could similar physical processes occur on other planets with no plate tectonics? The EU-funded CRUSLID project aims at determining the present-day nature and structure of the crusts and the physical and geological processes leading to crust formation and evolution on stagnant-lid planets.

The team

Valentin Bonnet Gibet worked on the formation of the Martian crust and the Martian dichotomy as a PhD student and post-doc. He is now a post-doc at the DLR in Berlin.

Alexandra Le Contellec worked on magma ascent below craters in the crust of Venus, Mars and the Moon, she is now a post-doc at the University of Arizona.

Line Colin was a PhD student working on the solidification of the lunar magma ocean. She is now a post-doc in the Géoazur Lab, in Nice.

Swann Rubin is a PhD student working on Mars's and the Moon's seismicity in collaboration with Stephanie Durand and Thomas Bodin.

Madison Borrelli visited our team from ASU for 5 months thanks to a Chateaubriand fellowship. She worked on the spreading of Venus pancake domes as part of her PhD. She is now a post-doc at Georgia Tech.

Kathryn Dodds terminated her post-doc in February. She worked on the formation of the lunar crust from a slushy magma ocean.

Hisashi Okuda is a post-doc working on the convective dynamics of slushy mixtures and on the initiation of stagnant lid growth.

Clément de Sagazan is a new post-doc working on dyke propagation in planetary lithospheres.

News

Congratulations to Line Colin who has defended her PhD with great success on February 26th 2026!

Congratulations to Alexandra Le Contellec who has very successfully defended her PhD on December 5th 2024 (the first day of the beautiful "Fête des Lumières" in Lyon)!

Congratulations to Valentin Bonnet Gibet who has been awarded an Outstanding Student Presentation Award by the SEDI Section at the AGU fall meeting 2023 for his presentation on the "Formation of Differentiated Rocks on Mars in Absence of Plate Tectonics".

Publications

Floor-fractured craters in the Martian Highlands likely result from sill intrusion, look at Alexandra's study in Icarus.

Valentin's last GRL article shows that instabilities in lithosphere and crustal growth could induce crustal asymmetries for one-plate planets of the size of Mars and the Moon but that Mercury's cooling was probably too fast to allow for a pronounced crustal asymmetry.

Thermal overturn of the olivine-pyroxene cumulates could have occurred during lunar magma ocean crystallization in the form of a degree-one: read Line's last article.

Want to know more about the physics of lid and crustal growth? Look at our last review article on this subject.

Differentiation of the deep crust forming the Martian highlands might have occurred in absence of plate tectonics by unstable crust growth: see our new publication in JGR.

Looking for a post-doc?

If you are looking for a post-doc and are interested in magma ocean dynamics, crustal extraction, planetary magmatism and volcanism: read more ...