Dr. Paul Starr co-authors new paper on the exhumation of subducted rocks in the Western Alps

High-pressure (HP) metamorphic rocks exhumed from within subduction zones provide key insights into tectonic and geochemical processes that occur during subduction. However, the processes for exhuming these rocks from deep within subduction zones is poorly understood and crucial to evaluating these rocks as proxies for the palaeo-subduction interface. In a newly published paper in the journal Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology (Smye et al., 2021), co-authored by Dr. Paul Starr, subducted samples from the Voltri Ophiolite (northern Italy) are used to suggest that HP metamorphic rocks were detached from the subducting plate, partially exhumed and stored at blueschist facies conditions for >10Myr before final exhumation occurred upon the cessation of subduction. This paper forms part of a large NSF-funded international collaboration involving Paul Starr and others at Boston College.