Dreaming of the Atacama…

Before the pandemic, I participated in a field and sampling campaign to the Central Andes in Chile. Last year, our research team published a paper sharing some of our initial findings (link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63454-1#article-info focusing on oxygen isotopes in mafic erupted products).

The Andes are breathtakingly beautiful!

Flamingos in front of a towering volcano in the Central Andes.
The Central Andes made it to the front slide of an outreach presentation I gave at Uppsala University.
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The rocks we studied were basaltic-andesites and this is what they look like under the microscope: they contain lots of olivine, pyroxene, and plagioclase feldspar minerals. This image is from our 2020 paper (Gonzalez-Maurel et al., 2020) in Scientific Reports.