Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology & Volcanology

EGU GMPV ECS Campfires – Thursday March 27th @ 10am CET

GMPV ECS Campfires Team March 18, 2025

The fourth edition of the Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology and Volcanology Campfires of the 2024/2025 season will take place on Thursday March 27th at 10am CET on Zoom. This edition will be a Scientific Campfire, during which three Early Career Scientists will present their work to the community. Our speakers for this edition are: Javiera Ruz Ginouves, PhD student @ the Geology Departmen ...[Read More]

Elemental etymology – what’s in a name?

Elliot Carter 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]

The strangest rock you’ve probably never heard of

Elliot Carter March 9, 2022

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]