Berta Vilacís

GD Geodynamics

The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Berta Vilacís for the poster/PICO entitled:

Tracking dynamic topography through hiatus surfaces (Vilacís,B.; Brown, H.; Carena, S.; Hayek, J. N.; Stotz, I. L.; Bunge, H.-P.; Friedrich, A. M.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Berta Vilacís recently completed her doctorate in geodynamics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). She is part of the UPLIFT Research Training Group, an interdisciplinary and interuniversity programme funded by the German Research Foundation that brings together geophysics, geodesy, geology, geomorphology, mathematics and computer science to investigate and quantify uplift mechanisms of the continental lithosphere.
Her research explores the surface expressions of mantle convection. During her PhD, she developed a novel digital approach to map the continental-scale distribution of sediments to observe and track topographic changes driven by mantle convection (dynamic topography). This work resulted in the global continental hiatus maps, spanning from the present to the Upper Jurassic. They provide a proxy for interregional uplift and subsidence patterns associated with dynamic topography. She uses these maps to test, constrain and further develop analytical and global geodynamic models.
At EGU 2025, she presented the latest hiatus maps compilation, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A (Vilacís et al., 2024), highlighting that the hiatus surfaces have wavelengths on the order of 10³ km and change at timescales of geological series (10-20 Myrs). She also showed that they correlate with well known mantle dynamic events, large igneous province eruptions, and sea-level changes.