GMPV
Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology & Volcanology
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Elliot Carter

Elliot is a postdoc at Trinity College Dublin, working on the geochemistry of the North Atlantic Igneous Province. He recently spent 2 months aboard R/V JOIDES Resolution as part of IODP Expedition 390 and will tell anyone who will listen. You can find him on twitter @elliotjcarter

Elemental etymology – what’s in a name?

June 7, 2023
Photo of a medieval medical manuscript translated from Arabic in the 2nd half of the 13th Century.
Al-Razi's Recueil des traités de médecine translated by Gerard of Cremona, from the second half of the 13th century. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Like many scientists in the GMPV sphere, I work a lot with geochemistry – using chemical elements and their differing behaviours, abundances or isotopes as tools to understand Earth processes. While staring at the periodic table, something that’s always niggled at me is where the names of these come from: why is the stuff we breath called oxygen and the sand on the beach made of silicon? Even more ...[Read More]

EGU23 Friday Highlights

April 28, 2023
Fountain of orange glowing lava above a black volcanic crater, Fagradalsfjall, Iceland, 2021
Fire fountaining during the 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption, Iceland. Image by Jan Oliver Eisermann via Imaggeo https://imaggeo.egu.eu/view/17149/

It’s Friday and after a long week of conferencing you’re now on the home straight, the final day of EGU 2023! The following are some suggestions for that last bit of GMPV content to to bring your conference to the perfect close: Kicking things off first thing in the morning, there’s a big, exciting session on Volcanic processes: tectonics, deformation, geodesy, unrest with a loads of fascinating p ...[Read More]

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog about lava lakes: here’s what happened

March 8, 2023
The lava lake of Halemaʻumaʻu at Kilauea, Hawaii
The lava lake of Halemaʻumaʻu at Kilauea, Hawaiʻi (by Ivan Petrovich Vtorov - own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

If you’ve not been living under a rock you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the AI text generator wowing the internet and striking fear into the heart of exam co-ordinators worldwide. I’ve been meaning to write a blog about lava lakes for a while now, ever since rewatching Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s excellent documentary Into the Inferno. But with deadlines looming and lab work and admin c ...[Read More]

5 things I learnt from 2 months at sea with the International Ocean Discovery Program

July 13, 2022
Photo of sunset behind the drilling vessel JOIDES resolution
Sunset over the South Atlantic behind the research vessel JOIDES Resolution during our transit back to port

This year I was lucky enough to be part of International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 390 – South Atlantic Transect I – aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution which spent two months, from April to June, out in the South Atlantic, drilling into and sampling the upper oceanic crust and sediments. I sailed as a petrologist and was responsible for describing how the basa ...[Read More]