The VIPS Blog Team interviewed Dr. Steffi Burchardt from Uppsala University and Dr. Sam Poppe from the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences about the upcoming 7th LASI (Laccoliths, Sills, Dikes) conference.
The theme of this year’s conference is “The Physical Geology of Subvolcanic Systems” and will take place in Hveragerði, Iceland from 9-11 of September.
Conference genesis
LASI became a conference in 2002 from the mind of Dr. Christoph Breitkreuz. Arriving at a new position in Freiberg, he realized that he was surrounded by intrusions and wanted to know more about them. To do this, he welcomed a diverse group of experts who worked with and published on intrusions to Germany to observe, discuss, and debate the surrounding intrusions. Though it was very rainy and maybe not the best for making observations, LASI was born. Steffi adds, “The main father is retired, and it’s nice that it lives on like this and goes to a new place that has iconic intrusions. The main meaning is to bring people together to the field, so they get exposed to the same impressions, but then are invited to discuss together.”
LASI VII
This year, LASI is to be held in Iceland. “Obviously, we have an ongoing rifting episode going on there with fissure eruptions, so you see the products of plumbing systems at work. So that is something that we couldn’t have planned better. In 2019, the last time LASI was held in Argentina, people were already saying ‘the next one should be in Iceland!’ The rifting episode really only started in 2021, so nobody knew that it would be that exciting,” Steffi says.
She adds, “I have worked in Iceland for 20 years, since I was a master’s student, and I have actually not focused on the active part so much. I have always worked on intrusions in places that people hardly know about. They are amazingly well exposed. The cool thing is you can see intrusions that are then the perfect analog for what is going on in the active part. But you can touch them, and you can see what it looks like inside an active volcano. And there’s no tectonic overprint. They’re just like a window into an active volcano.”
LASI’s foundation is built on an emphasis of field observation and discussion, and this year’s conference is no different. The mid-conference field trip will capitalize on this exciting setting to foster dialogue among participants. “It’s going to the place where the action happens. So, it’s very timely to take people to the Reykjanes Peninsula and tectonic/magmatism interactions that are unique to Iceland,” Sam says.
“This means that on one day the participants will be able to cross-section from the deeper plumbing system all the way up to the products at the surface, which would be absolutely amazing, of course,” Steffi adds.
Field trips
What is novel to LASI VII is the number of post-conference field trips. “Whereas in previous meetings, there was one trip where the whole group went on, we’re giving participants a chance to choose between several trips in the hope that this will lead the most apt people to the most apt outcrops and discussions. You have such a broad range of aspects to it that some of them might become less discussed than others, if you bring a bigger group to just one trip. So by splitting it up a bit, we hope for even more intensive discussions,” Sam explains.
Steffi adds “Hopefully we’re doing something good with the legacy, of course. We want to continue everything that has always been good about LASI. We have put a lot of thought into how to make this a very inclusive event for everyone. We really want to bring a diverse community there and make it possible to attend on the same terms for everyone.”
The organizers have aimed to extend the themes of the conference into the field trips where participants will be able to look at world class examples of a number of different settings. Plumbing Systems Fueling High Temperature Geothermal Systems will take a group to examine exposures of a pluton and its surrounding high temperature geothermal system as an analogue to active systems.
Moving to the southeast of Iceland, this trip will look at how plutons look in place and how they interact and deform surrounding rocks. “There is an example of a granitic pluton that fed an eruption, and you can see what type of deformation it caused in the overlying rocks, and we can link the eruption to the emplacement of batches of new silicic magma,” Steffi elaborates.
A third field trip is more of a road trip and will bring you to the active southern part of Iceland in a session called “Roots of Rift Zones”. This setting aims to explore how the Reykjanes Peninsula would look at depth.
One of the best exposed laccoliths in the world is called Sandfell. For those up for a more strenuous hike, this site will enable participants to examine how intrusions can fault, tilt and deform surrounding rock.
Sign up!
When asked if they had any closing remarks, Steffi emphasized “Sign up!” They also explained how vital meaningful intellectual exchange is with fellow researchers. The need for this type of personal interaction is the reason for the lack of Zoom option.
“If I go back through my last 15 years, the three most mindset-changing moments I had during meetings, during conferences, were all standing in front of an outcrop or, you know, sitting on top of a rock, staring at some outcrop with a smaller group of people on these smaller kind of workshops, conferences,” Sam reflects.
“I think it’s the same here. The meat and the potatoes is exactly in the fact that there’s not going to be too many people there. The attendees are going to be much more accessible than at a conference with 20,000 people there. That’s what LASI is also going for. I’m sure in one year’s time when I will be thinking back on LASI 7, it’s gonna be flashes of those moments in front of an outcrop, where a conversation leads to an “aha moment” that might spur 5 or 10 more years of research for myself.”
Registration for LASI VII is open now and closes 8 June. Additional information on the programme of the conference can be found here.
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