Thursday 13 and Friday 14 September 2007
Organised by Professor Andrew Jephcoat and Professor Alexander Halliday FRS
Click here to see full details of this event
Professor Carl Agee (chair)
Carl Agee is the Director of the Institute of Meteoritics and Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. The Institute of Meteoritics (IOM), which Dr. Agee has led since 2002, was one of the first institutions in the world devoted to the study of meteorites. More than sixty years later, IOM has now earned a reputation as a premier center for research on the origin and early history of our solar system and the evolution of the planets. Dr. Agee's research focuses on the origin and evolution of planetary interiors and application of high-pressure multi-anvil techniques to problems in experimental petrology. His research interests include magma physics with emphasis on mobility of silicate and metallic liquids at high pressure and experimental trace element partitioning studies to elucidate the differentiation of the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Before coming to New Mexico, Dr. Agee held posts as Deputy Director of Space and Life Sciences (2001-2002) and Chief Scientist for Astromaterials (1998-2001) in the Office of the Director at NASA Johnson Space Center. From 1990 to 1998 he was on the faculty of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and was a visiting scientist from 1988-1990 at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. In 1994 he was awarded the F.W. Clark Medal from the Geochemical Society for "his original research on Mantle Differentiation". Dr. Agee holds a bachelors degree in Geology from the University of California, Berkeley (1984), and a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Columbia University (1988).
Professor Chris Ballentine (speaker)
Chris Ballentine's research interests range from the study of crustal fluid systems, with current focus on anthropogenic CO2 storage, to the origin of terrestrial volatiles and the chemical evolution of the deep Earth. He has made several important advances in understanding the origin and evolution of volatiles in the mantle through both measurement of noble gas isotopes and incorporation of this information into numerical simulations of mantle convection. Originally trained in Physical Chemistry (BSc, UMIST 1984) and Isotope Geochemistry (PhD, Cambridge, 1991) Chris worked at several institutes as a research scientist, including the University of Michigan (1994-1998) and the ETH Zurich (1999-2001), before joining the faculty at the University of Manchester in 2001 where he is currently Professor of Isotope Geochemistry. Chris sits on the UK AURORA advisory committee (AURORA is the European Space Agency Mars exploration program), the UK NERC peer review college, is an EAG council member and chairs the organising committee for the 2009 Goldschmidt Conference to be held in Davos, Switzerland.
Professor Robin Canup (speaker)
Robin Canup (speaker) is Executive Director of the Planetary Science Directorate of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Before joining SwRI in 1998, she received her bachelors in physics from Duke University in 1990, and a masters and PhD in astrophysics and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1992 and 1995. Her research has focused on the dynamics of planet and satellite origin, including the formation and orbital evolution of the Moon, hydrodynamic models of planet-scale giant impacts, the origin of the regular satellites of the outer planets, and the accretion of terrestrial planets. A fellow of the American Geophysical Union, she was the recipient of the Urey Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 2003 and the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 2004.
Professor Richard Carlson (speaker)
Richard Carlson majored in chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego and then obtained a PhD in earth science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1980. After a one-year post-doctoral position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), he assumed a position on the scientific staff of DTM, where he remains today. Dr Carlson's specialty is the field of trace element and isotope geochemistry and geochronology. This field uses the elemental composition of rocks and minerals and the products of natural radioactive decay, to investigate the origin and evolution of the solar system, terrestrial planets, Moon and Earth. His research interests include: timescales and mechanisms of crust formation and mantle differentiation on the terrestrial planets; origin of large-volume volcanism; characteristics of sub-continental mantle and its role in continent formation and preservation; formation of the differentiated meteorites; radiometric dating techniques; and techniques for high precision chemical and isotope analysis. Dr Carlson is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geochemical Society. He currently is Editor of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters and Chair of the International Program Committee for the 2008 Goldschmidt Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.
Professor Tom Duffy (speaker)
Thomas Duffy is a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He studies the structure, composition, and evolution of planetary interiors through experimental studies of materials at high pressures and temperatures. He received a BS from Boston College, an MS from the University of Illinois, and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology. Honors include a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.
Dr Dan Frost (speaker)
Dan Frost is a research scientist at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, Bayreuth, Germany. Before coming to Bayreuth he obtained his PhD in Bristol in 1995 and then worked at the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington DC. His main research interests are in high pressure and temperature experimental petrology and geochemistry. In recent years his work has focused on using experimental data to relate seismic observations of the Earth's interior to it's physical and chemical state. He is also interested in the processes of terrestrial core formation and the evolution of the redox state of the Earth's mantle.
Professor Andrew Jephcoat (organiser and speaker)
A central feature of planetary research is the creation in the laboratory of the extreme high-pressure high-temperature states of matter. In particular, Andrew is interested in the nature of the Earth's mantle and core and their physical and chemical interaction processes that operate up to 3000 km below the Earth's surface. Pressures reach over 300GPa (3 million atmospheres) with temperatures perhaps as high as 7000K (greater than the sun surface temperature) at the center of the Earth's inner core. These conditions are achieved in the laboratory with the laser-heated diamond-anvil high-pressure cell (DAC) wherein natural or synthetic samples, fractions of a millimeter in size, are confined between two brilliant-cut, single-crystal diamond anvils. One focus of his research is a systematic improvement in the accuracy of temperature measurements and relative melting points at high-pressure in the diamond-anvil cell. For example the measurement of the melting point of iron compounds at high-pressure can be used to constrain temperatures at the Earth's Inner-Outer Core boundary.
Research at simultaneous high pressures (P) and high temperatures (T) opens many possibilities for understanding deep-Earth processes. Experimental techniques include Synchrotron X-ray diffraction and spectroscopy, Raman scattering, laser-heating, Brillouin scattering, and multi-anvil synthesis.
For example, the measurement of elastic properties of materials at pressure and temperature is fundamental because compressional and shear velocities (functions of the elastic coefficients) are primary observables in seismology.
High P and T can also change chemical bonding in materials and could lead to the synthesis of new compound structures with new and/or unusual properties. Bonding change in materials is most readily examined with vibrational spectroscopic methods (Raman and IR). Synchrotron storage rings can now offer bright, collimated sources of IR radiation orders of magnitude greater than laboratory techniques.
X-ray diffraction experiments at high-brilliance, synchrotron sources yield direct structural data on high-pressure phases and provide a measure of density and crystal structural change as a function of compression and temperature (the equation of state, EOS). Experiments have been performed at Daresbury, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble (ESRF). He is actively involved in building the extreme conditions beamline at the new UK synchrotron X-ray source (DIAMOND).
Andrew's high-pressure research covers a wide range of material types such as planetary ices (condensed gases) and other molecular solids (eg C60), pure metals and their oxides, carbides, hydrides, and silicates.
Professor Alessandro Morbidelli (chair)
Alessandro Morbidelli received his PhD in 1991 at the University of Namur (Belgium) with a thesis on the dynamics of the small bodies of the solar system. He is currently Director of Research in CNRS, at the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in Nice, France. His main current research activity is on the origin and primordial evolution of the Solar System. This includes numerical modeling of the formation of the terrestrial planets and of the primordial sculpting of the asteroid belt. In 2000, he showed that the Earth might have acquired most of its water budget from primitive asteroids in the outer main belt. He is also an expert of the history of the bombardment of the terrestrial planets and in 2005 he has proposed a model for explaining the origin of the so-called Terminal Lunar Cataclysm. He is member of the International Astronomical Union and of the American Astronomical Society. He was the recipient of the Urey Prize of the Division of Planetary Science of the AAS in 2000 and is is one of the editors of the Journal Icarus on Solar System science
Professor Peter Olson (speaker)
Peter Olson is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. His research is the dynamics of Earth's interior and the interiors of other planets. He has authored one book and more than 130 research papers on these topics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the European Union of Geoscientists, former C.F. Gauss honorary professor and President of the Tectonophysics section of the American Geophysical Union. He has served on the editorial staff of eight scientific journals, and has taught geophysics to more than 1500 Johns Hopkins undergraduate students.
Professor Hugh O'Neill (speaker)
Hugh O'Neill is an experimental petrologist at the Research School of Earth Sciences, the Australian National University. He obtained his BA in geology from Oxford University and his PhD from the University of Manchester. His research focuses on applying physical chemical measurements to understanding the origin and evolution of the Earth and the terrestrial planets. He is especially concerned with studying the accretion and early differentiation the Earth and how this influences the Earth's composition, and the subsequent mantle processes that lead to partial melting and the production of basaltic magmas. He has spent much of his career measuring the thermodynamic properties of minerals and melts at high temperatures and pressures.
Professor David Rubie (chair)
David Rubie is a professor at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth, Germany. He received a B.Sc. from the University of Manchester in 1967 and a Ph.D. from the University of Leicester in 1972. He has held academic positions at ETH-Zurich, University of Bern, University of Manchester and Bayerisches Geoinstitut. He was appointed professor at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in 1993, and was Director during the periods 1995-1999 and 2002-2006. His research is based on experimental studies of the properties of planetary materials at high pressures and temperatures. He has studied the effects of phase transformations on rheology and mantle dynamics, the transport properties of minerals and melts at high pressure, and element partitioning at extreme conditions. In recent years, his research has concentrated on understanding the physical and chemical processes involved in the early differentiation of the Earth and other planets and the mechanisms of planetary core formation. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America.
Professor David Stevenson FRS (speaker)
David Stevenson is the George Van Osdol Professor of Planetary Science, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology. He received bachelors and masters degrees in physics at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. His PhD was in theoretical Physics and obtained in 1976, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. His thesis was on the interior of Jupiter, and included the first attempt to calculate the phase diagram of fluid hydrogen-helium mixtures at extreme pressures. In his subsequent career, his research has branched out to all aspects of planets, including large satellites, but with a particular emphasis on the application of condensed matter physics and fluid mechanics to the origin, evolution and structure of planets. Among the important results or proposals in this work are:
Explanations for the unusual magnetic fields of Saturn and Mercury, models for the thermal histories of planets, descriptions of core formation in Earth, first detection of an ocean in Jupiter's moon, Europa; evolution of a lunar-forming disk, and speculations on interstellar planets and planet diversity. Honors include the Urey Prize (Division of Planetary Science, American Astronomical Society) in 1984, the Hess Medal (American Geophysical Union) in 1998 and Foreign Associate, National Academy of Sciences (USA), elected 2004.
Professor Bernard Wood FRS (speaker)
Bernard Wood received a BSc in Chemistry and Geology from the University of London in 1967, an MSc in Geochemistry from the University of Leeds in 1968 and a PhD in Geophysics from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1972. His research involves the application of high pressure, high temperature experiments and thermodynamic modelling to the evolution of the Earth's mantle, core and crust. Currently he is a Federation Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Previously he has held academic posts at the University of Manchester (UK) Northwestern University (USA) and University of Bristol (UK). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998 and amongst other awards he has received the Murchison Medal (Geological Society of London), Schlumberger Medal (Mineralogical Society), Holmes Medal (European Union of Geosciences) and Goldschmidt Medal (Geochemical Society).
Professor John Woodhouse FRS (speaker)
John Woodhouse received his PhD in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.
Following postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge and at University of California, San Diego he was Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Harvard University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Since 1990 he has been Professor of Geophysics at the University of Oxford, Department of Earth Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000. Other honours include the Macelwane Award (1984) and the Lehmann Medal (2001) of the American Geophysical Union.
His research interests are in theoretical and observational seismology and, in particular, in the use of global seismological data to characterize earthquakes and to image the Earth's three dimensional structure.