Wed 28th January @ noon, room 312.222

Abstract:

Arc magmas are oxidised relative to MORB, leading to the controversial proposal that the mantle beneath arcs is more oxidised than the mantle elsewhere.  A cause proposed to explain this oxidation is that the presence of water during peridotite melting beneath the arcs affects the melt structure, thereby increasing the partitioning of ferric iron into the melt.  The validity of this proposal was explored with a series of piston cylinder experiments, the preliminary results of which are inconclusive.  To mitigate the tedium of the inconclusive results, a photo tour through the ocean crust on Macquarie Island will be presented.

Bio:

Katy completed a Ph.D on “Metamorphic Fluid Flow in East Central Vermont” in 1999. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Sheffield (UK) on kinetically-controlled mineral dissolution and precipitation in the unsaturated zone of mine spoil. She moved to Australia in 2002 to take up a position as a Research Fellow at CSIRO Exploration and Mining, where she worked on greenstone-hosted gold deposits and the thermodynamic characteristics of sulphur-bearing, high ionic strength, mixed solvent fluids. In 2005 she was awarded an Australian Synchrotron Research Fellowship, hosted by the ANU, and used this time to undertake experiments on S- and Cl-bearing silicate glasses and CO2-bearing solutions. She began a Research and Teaching Fellowship at Curtin in 2007.