K.D. Nelson Lecture – Dr. Megan Holycross

The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the K.D. Nelson Lecture Series featuring  speaker Dr. Megan Holycross from Cornell University. Her talk is titled: “Probing the Earth’s deep oxygen cycle with vanadium.”

Earth is the only planet we know of that has an oxygen-rich atmosphere and a plate tectonic cycle. Are these two things related? To answer this question, we need to better understand how oxygen is transferred throughout the subduction cycle. In this talk I’ll share the results of a series of experiments to calibrate a new geochemical tool, based on the partitioning of the multivalent element vanadium between high-pressure phases, that can be applied to constrain the oxidation state of subducting slabs throughout space (depth) and time.

 

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