Professor Alexander Densmore

Durham University

Alex is interested in the way in which mountains are built through tectonic activity, and in the erosional processes that tear them back down again. Alex’s interest in this work came from growing up on the tectonically-active west coast of North America. He received a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and held lectureships at Trinity College Dublin and ETH Zurich before joining Durham University in 2006. Alex’s current research projects include aspects of tectonic geomorphology in the western USA and southwestern China; efforts to understand sediment routing systems both in the field (northern India) and through numerical modelling; and work on the role of mass wasting – particularly landslides and debris flows – in shaping mountain belts like the Swiss Alps.