Abers has a primary interest in understanding processes that drive deformation and material cycling within the earth, mostly at active plate boundaries. Subduction zones have been a main interest, the sites of the planet's largest earthquakes, most devastating volcanic eruptions, and the places where the growth of continental crust takes place. Many of his major projects have been deployments of dense arrays of broadband seismographs to image structure in places such as Alaska, Central America, Papua New Guinea, and the Pacific Northwest. These dense arrays allow unprecedented imaging of features as small as layering within subducted crust to beyond 100 km depth, and provide insight into the manner in which high-pressure metamorphism takes place, the deep plumbing beneath arc volcanoes, and the nature of the megathrust faults that host magnitude 9 earthquakes. Active projects around Mt St Helens, Washington and along the Alaska margin address these projects. In addition, he has applied many of the methods of analyzing earthquake source properties and their relationship to fluid generation both to understand intermediate-depth earthquakes within subducting plates, and to understand crustal earthquakes potentially induced by anthropogenic activities.
