Removal of lithospheric material (lower crust and mantle) via foundering, including dripping as Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities and peeling back/delamination, is inferred to have affected many of Earth’s orogens and other continental regions. However, foundering events have been difficult to detect unambiguously in natural systems despite their potential to strongly modulate topography, magmatism, and tectonic deformation. Our understanding of lithospheric foundering events will benefit from inter-disciplinary approaches that constrain the lithospheric structure, thermal state, and deformation of regions hypothesized to be affected by foundering and reconcile observations with geodynamical models of the process. In this session, we invite work drawing on tectonics, geophysics, igneous petrology, and other disciplines to better understand the causes and consequences of lithospheric foundering and its detection in natural systems. We encourage submissions that are cross-disciplinary and make use of complementary datasets including numerical modeling results, field observations, and geophysical data.

• S - Seismology