Jonathan Aurnou
Chair and Professor
Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, UCLA
invites you to attend the
Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences
Distinguished Alumni Lecture
“The Mythology of Magma Chambers”
Allen F. Glazner, Ph.D. ’81, Geology
Emeritus Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham Distinguished Professor,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Reception – 5:00 p.m. PT
Lecture – 6:00 p.m. PT
UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM)
in the Portola Building on campus
Self-parking available in Structure 2
Public transit to UCLA
Magma chambers are foundational elements of geology on Earth and rocky bodies in our solar system and beyond. They leak to the surface and produce volcanoes, or vent catastrophically and form calderas, or freeze in place and produce plutons that are the main building blocks of planetary crusts. The iconic image of a volcano connected to a shallow magma chamber has been seared into our minds owing to illustrations in thousands of books and journal articles. Surely there is no reason to question the existence of shallow magma chambers, right? I’m glad you asked. In this talk Allen F. Glazner will go over compelling geological and geophysical data that rule out the traditional view of magma chambers and offer an alternative view of crustal magmatism that is consistent with current data and explains several things that the traditional magma chamber paradigm cannot.
About the speaker: A native Southern Californian, Glazner earned geology degrees from Pomona College and UCLA before embarking on a 38-year career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a distinguished professor emeritus. Much of his recent work has focused on granites in the Sierra Nevada, with emphasis on Yosemite National Park. He has taught geology to astronauts and National Park personnel, and written “Geology Underfoot” books for the public on Yosemite, Southern California, and Death Valley and Eastern California. His textbook “Petrology and Plate Tectonics: An Earth Systems Approach” came out in 2025.