Professor Anthony Watts’ research uses geological and geophysical techniques to study the Earth’s crust and upper mantle beneath the world’s ocean basins and their margins. Seismic, sonar, gravity and magnetic data acquired onboard research ships help constrain the geological processes that are occurring on the ocean floor as well as the structure and evolution of its most prominent topographic features such as ocean islands and seamounts, mid-ocean ridges and deep-sea trenches.
Current research is focused on the passive margins offshore northeast Brazil, Morocco and Portugal and active margins between New Zealand and Tonga where we are determining the deep seismic structure of the crust and upper mantle and its implications for geological processes such as sediment loading and unloading, submarine volcanism, tectonic erosion and subduction.