My traditional interests are in the fields of Volcanology, high-temperature Geochemistry but current interests and efforts are shifting more toward the the cutting edge research involving triple oxygen isotopes, with applications mostly in the “low-temperature” geochemistry fields. For example, we are using shales and clays to talk about climate and evolutions of weathering conditions on the surface, the crust, and hydrosphere. We are also using volcanic glass as recorder of paleoenvironmental conditions. See titles of papers under Publications to get the sense of current our efforts.
Our Earth Science Department is particularly great for volcanology, and we have a recently created Volcanology cluster with many faculty and students who are interested in various aspects of volcano behavior.
Oxygen isotopes are important because oxygen is the major component of many minerals, rocks, and fluids. Each of these have different isotopic values which are controlled by the sources of drivation, thermodynamics of isotope fractionation, and by the kinetics of isotope exchange. Laser fluorination and ion microprobes, two instruments of my expertise, serve as excellent tools to unravel these phenomena in nature and interpret the variations. High precision is critical in volcanology, igneous petrology, and mantle and crustal geochemistry, simply because at high temperatures isotopic fractionations are small, and so the requirements for precision are very demanding.
I collaborate with scientists in Switzerland on zircon U-Pb dating and other aspects of zircon research. I spent two of my sabbaticals in Switzerland.
I collaborate with scientists in Russia on numerical modeling of magmatic processes. We are trying to bring together isotope geochemistry and numerical models to better understand the nature of the processes