2018 AGU Fall meeting attendees from the current ExPeRT group and some of the former members in a group dinner at Washington, D. C. Far side (from left) - Raj, Daman, and James; near side (from left) - Proteek, Michelle (currently a grad student at U Oregon), Echo (currently a post-doc at CUNY), and Sriparna
ExPeRT’s high-pressure, high-temperature lab enables exploration of chemical rock reactions, mineral stability, melt generation up to ~400 km deep and over 2000 degrees C.
Michael Lara and Daman Grewal show a few of the many steps that go into preparing a capsule to be pressurized and heated in our experimental apparati.
Proteek Chowdhury shows a step that goes into preparing for an experiment, the production of Barium Carbonate sleeves that envelope our samples and help evenly pressurize them.
James Eguchi (left) and Damanveer Grewal at the 2018 Industry-Rice Earth Science Symposium (IRESS) reception.
Laura Carter shows some middle school Girl Scouts the high-pressure lab, explaining about experimental petrology and her research.
The Rice EEPS department magazine, Outcroppings, featured James Eguchi on a field trip for the cover of the fall 2017 issue, which went online in spring 2018.
ExPeRT members explore the source of melt that produces ocean island basalts when the mantle is in the presence of volatile elements like sulfur.
In a few publications, Laura Carter explores the ways that various magma types (basalt, andesite, dacite) can interact with and break-down carbonate rocks (limestone and dolostone) that store carbon in Earth’s crust at different temperatures and depths: assimilation (consumption), thermal decomposition (heating) and skarnification (hot water reaction). This has implications for volcanic gas emissions and therefore Earth’s long-term climate.
Megan Duncan published her work on cycling organic carbon through subduction zones where one plate slides beneath another, melts, and releases gases back into the atmosphere via volcanoes. The results have implications for the initial rise in oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere billions of years ago and made the News.
Working to answer a question ExPeRT is exploring, Yuan Li and other expert members published in Nature Geoscience about how some of Earth’s unique geochemistry could have been added during some of the impacts that occurred in the Solar System’s early years, such as the moon-forming impact. This work made the News.
In an overarching area of research ExPeRT explores, heterogeneities in the Earth’s mantle can lead to melting and ocean island eruptions, which was an area of investigation on which Ananya Mallik published.
In exploring mantle chemical heterogeneities, ExPeRT members determined the depth at which melting begins for volatile-bearing rocks deep in Earth’s interior.
One area of interest for ExPeRT is how planetary interiors form in their early stages and evolve over time to modern processes, which controls element storage and cycling, as is shown in this image from Rajdeep Dasgupta’s 2013 publication.
In this image from Dasgupta & Hirschmann 2010, we see the differences in Earth (BSE) and various layers of Earth (core, mantle, exosphere) as compared to other material in the solar system, which tells us about how carbon was provided and stored in the Earth.
