Mathilde Cannat is a French geologist known for her research on the formation of oceanic crust and the tectonic and magmatic changes of mid-ocean ridges.
[1] Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoc at Durham University and then she joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1986.
[3] In 2014, Cannat was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union who cited her "for fundamental contributions to understanding the accretion of the oceanic lithosphere and crust".
[8][9][10] This idea differed from the processes described for fast-spreading mid-ocean ridges[11] and, in a 2018 interview, she described this as her greatest achievement.
[3] Cannat's research can rely on in situ observations, and she has made seventeen deep-sea dives aboard the Nautile.