Tag Archives: Minerals

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.

Forensic probe of Bali’s great volcano

My colleagues and I wrote a piece for the American Geophysical Union’ s (AGU’s) Eos magazine about Agung volcano on Bali, Indonesia. You can read it here: https://eos.org/science-updates/forensic-probe-of-balis-great-volcano

Print copies of the April 2019 issue of Eos, featuring a beautiful display for our article!

In the Eos article, we talk about how studying minerals like pyroxene and feldspar can help us to learn more about volcano-magma systems.

Lavas from Agung on Bali contain numerous crystals
Lavas from Agung on Bali contain numerous crystals, such as this pyroxene surrounded by plagioclase feldspar (viewed under a polarizing microscope; field of view is approximately 3 millimeters (mm)). These crystals are held in a groundmass (or matrix) made of tiny, barely perceptible crystals (microlites) and glass (former melt).