Laurent Jolivet

The 2021 Arthur Holmes Medal & Honorary Membership is awarded to Laurent Jolivet for exceptional contributions to our understanding of deformational processes of the continental lithosphere at convergent margins.

Laurent Jolivet is a world-leading structural geologist and metamorphic petrologist who has made exceptional contributions to tectonics and geodynamics, and notably to our understanding of subduction, exhumation, and back-arc extension. He has studied several orogens around the world, mainly in the Alpine–Tethyan domain, from Iran and Vietnam to the Mediterranean, but also in Japan and the Caledonides. His approach is based on extensive field mapping at continental scale, laboratory studies linking metamorphism and pressure-temperature-time path with deformation, and moving across scales from microscopic to orogenic. His geological maps are unique, illustrating distribution and kinematics of major shear zones and mylonites and reconstructing the transport of rocks at different levels of the lithosphere at continental scale.

Laurent Jolivet has also made important contributions to our understanding of the kinematics of back-arc extension from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. He produced fundamental work in the Aegean, where he described extensional lithospheric deformation and core-complex formation in the Cyclades, documenting the relationships between extensional deformations, exhumation, and magmatism. Jolivet captures the complexity of the continental lithosphere rheology in the field, showing strain localization of deformation at different levels and depths. Above all, Jolivet has a deep understanding of geology in the broadest terms.

Laurent Jolivet has made exceptional contributions to our understanding of deformational processes of the continental lithosphere at convergent margins and warrants recognition from the EGU community with the 2021 EGU Arthur Holmes Medal and Honorary Membership.