News

Ben Urann (PhD student in Le Roux’s group) just published his work on SIMS developments and halogen budgets of the Earth’s mantle! The fluorine (F) and chlorine (Cl) contents of arc magmas have been used to track the composition of subducted components, and the F and Cl contents of MORB  have been used to estimate…

Constraining the scale and the nature  of mantle heterogeneities is critical to understand mantle dynamics, but there is still limited information available on the mechanisms and timing of formation of mantle heterogeneities observed in exhumed mantle rocks. Most of those heterogeneities are layered pyroxene-rich veins that form as a result of melt focusing and subsequent…

First-row transition element (FRTE) concentrations in primitive mantle-derived melts have been used as direct indicators of mantle source mineralogy (e.g., Ti, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Zn) and as proxies to trace the oxidation state of the mantle (e.g., Sc, V, Cu, Zn). Ga and Ge, which share chemical similarities with FRTEs, may also have the…

Emmanuel is a master thesis student from the University of Philippines, and a guest student at WHOI until March 2016. He is learning to do experiments to decipher how material is transported from subducted slabs to the source of arc lavas. Welcome Emmanuel!

Emma Soucy comes from Northeastern University (Boston), and is working on calculating temperatures of rocks to understand how our planet Earth has cooled over time. Emma has started in July and has already taken the temperatures of many rocks! Welcome Emma!

After a successful summer as a PEP student last year, Marienel Basiga (San Jose State University) is back into the experimental laboratory to figure out how slab melts modify the composition of mantle wedges in subduction environments. She is now a prestigious Summer Student Fellow at WHOI!

The skyscan 1272 has safely arrived in le Roux’s lab. The table-top micro-CT instrument can scan objects in 3-D up to 7 cm in height and up to 7 cm in diameter. For small objects (< few mm), highest resolution is 0.45 um.

Gaining research experience led Marienel Basiga, a junior geology major at San Jose State University, to the Woods Hole PEP. Her research project with mentor Veronique Le Roux at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in a field of geology known as experimental petrology, involved measuring grain-scale permeabilities of calcite and quartz through high-pressure, high-temperature experiments to…

“Tracking flux melting and melt percolation in supra-subduction peridotites (Josephine Ophiolite, USA)” is now In Press for Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology. Abstract Here, we investigate the scale and nature of melting and melt percolation processes recorded by 17 supra-subduction peridotites collected in a ~70 km2 area in the northern portion of the Josephine ophiolite (Western USA). We present…