Product Code Database
Jon Mosar is a geologist and academic serving as a Professor of Tectonics and Geodynamics in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His work spans tectonics, structural geology and plate tectonics, emphasizing geological processes of faulting, Orogeny wedge mechanics, and fault-related folding. It is based on exploration geophysics, analog and numerical modeling, and mapping of Earth's geological structures.
Mosar was a member of the Scientific Council of the European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology (ECGS) from 2002 to 2011, serving as its President from 2008 to 2011. From 2009 to 2023, he served on the Geological Commission of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, as Vice President from 2017 to 2023, and has been its President since 2024.
Mosar has been featured in media outlets, such as World Radio Switzerland, Radio Luxembourg, Radio Suisse Romande, Télévision Suisse Romande, Radio Télévision Suisse, Migros Magazine, Le Matin and La Liberté. In 2003, he was portrayed in a book on 100 Luxembourgers Around The World.
Mosar presented a structural model for the Scandinavian North Atlantic passive margin, highlighting the asymmetric crustal extension between Greenland and Norway, and the changing geometry of major normal faults during rifting from the Permo-Carboniferous to the present. In a study that was named the Best Scientific Paper of the Geological Survey of Norway, he reconstructed the Cretaceous–Early Tertiary North Atlantic using palaeomagnetic, hotspot, and magnetic anomaly data, identifying significant true polar wander between 125 and 95 Ma due to mantle instabilities. Testing Late Carboniferous–Early Tertiary apparent polar wander paths for North America and Europe, he introduced a new Greenland fit between Europe and North America to better align with geological data and minimize discrepancies in North Atlantic reconstructions. Furthermore, he investigated the Tertiary development of the Norwegian continental margin, highlighting the impact of spreading rates, the Iceland hotspot, and structural differences on inversion features in the Vøring and Faeroes Basins.
In the European Alps, Mosar studied the detached klippen belt of the Préalpes, an area that escaped the intense deformation of other zones of the Briançonnais domain, in Switzerland and France, to propose a new tectonic model based on a detailed structural analyses. Reviewing the significance of the Briançonnais microcontinental domain in the frame of the Alpine collision, he contributed to reveal subduction–obduction processes in the Adria-Europe plate tectonic convergence, with the Briançonnais incorporated into the accretionary prism by the Middle Eocene after a long history of oceanic subduction. To clarify the geological evolution of the western Alps and its surrounding regions, he presented a detailed transect of the western Swiss Alps and compared it with plate tectonic models of the western Tethys. Using analogue modeling to explore the impact of surface processes on the orogenic evolution of the northwestern Alpine orogenic wedge, he illuminated the role of erosion, sedimentation, and wedge mechanics in the development of the foreland basin and thrust belt.
Mosar's research has concentrated on exploring the tectonics and structural evolution of the detached Alpine foreland fold-and-thrust belt. In collaboration with his research team, he conducted studies that have investigated the kinematic development and deep structure of the Swiss and French Molasse Basin as well as the Jura Mountains. He has emphasized the interplay between tectonic processes within the mechanical wedge of the detached foreland and crustal- or lithospheric-scale processes linked to the rifting and flexuring of the underlying basement. Together with his research team, he has illustrated and highlighted the role of inherited faults and associated paleotopography. Additionally, the paleostress and present-day stress fields in the Alpine foreland fold-and-thrust belt have been central to his studies.
|
|
