Wed 12th February

12 – 1 pm

Rm 312.222

Holly Stein

Director, AIRIE Program, Colorado State University, USA, and Professor, CEED-University of Oslo, Norway

The Re-Os library in earth’s crust

Abstract

Re-Os has irreversibly changed our geochemical understanding of earth’s crust.  What was first a gateway to directly dating sulfides in ore deposits is now a tool for gaining understanding in how petroleum systems work.  As an outgrowth of these resource-based applications, Re-Os also yields information on fundamental geologic processes.  Re-Os isotope geochemistry can tell us about paleoenvironmental changes that produced global mass extinctions of life.  Re-Os isotope geochemistry can tell us about fluid-enhanced metamorphic-magmatic activity in the deep crust.  This talk is for both beginners and more advanced students, with either little or large knowledge of isotopic geology.

Biographical Details

After obtaining her Ph.D. at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Gilbert Fellowship at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver and Reston, Dr. Stein set out to work with the mineral industry.  Her laser focus was the how and why of sulfide formation in economic quantities.  During this time she developed a keen interest in geochronology as a tool to track the movement of metals, and ultimately hydrocarbons in the earth’s crust.  Dr. Stein is a Fulbright Scholar, and received the SEG Silver Medal in 2005 and the Helmholtz-Humboldt research prize in 2008.  She founded the AIRIE Program at Colorado State University in 1995, and is a professor at a newly announced Norwegian Centre of Excellence (CEED, Center for Earth Evolution and Dynamics) at the University of Oslo.  She and her team pioneered Re-Os dating of sulfides.  They are particularly noted for establishing Re-Os dating of molybdenite as a highly respected chronometer in the geochronology community.  More recently the AIRIE group has worked innovatively to bring Re-Os to the petroleum industry in a creative geologic context.  The AIRIE Program routinely dates organic material extracted from source rocks for precise depositional ages, time-scale refinement and global correlations.  Most importantly, they use Re-Os data from source rocks to characterize paleo-environment and connect to the timing of hydrocarbon maturation and migration through direct dating of oils.  The success of the AIRIE Program in bringing forefront research to real-world application is measured in its unwavering support from industry, as the entire workings of the Program are based on externally-derived funding.