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]
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]
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]
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]
In this blog I’m going to talk a bit about one of my favourite rocks – the strangest rock you’ve probably never heard of – listvenite. Listvenite (sometimes spelt listwanite or listwaenite) is the product of a chemical reaction between peridotite and carbon dioxide, and it is truly strange! I first came across listvenites working on the Semail Ophiolite, Oman, during my PhD. The Semail Ophiolite i ...[Read More]
During this past October, a team of researchers took part in a “hackathon” organised by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to generate data and new ideas to increase diversity in geoscience. This was an extremely hectic, sometimes stressful but fun and illuminating experience which ultimately culminated in a pilot funding bid (which we learned this week has been successful!). Our i ...[Read More]
The mantle makes up the bulk of Earth, extending from near the surface to the edge of the core 2900 km down. It constitutes 84% of Earth’s volume and has roughly 6 times the mass of Mars! Despite its impressive bulk, the mantle is almost everywhere covered by several km of crust. As a result we don’t have a lot of pieces of it that we can look at, hold or study. Those we have (e.g. xenoliths ...[Read More]