Geochemistry & Environmental Sciences
Earth’s surface and subsurface environments are shaped by chemical processes operating within sediments, rocks, groundwater, surface waters, gases, and biogenic minerals. These processes regulate elemental and nutrient cycling, control water chemistry, and link geological substrates to ecosystems, oceans, and climate. Addressing environmental challenges such as climate change, ocean acidification, groundwater salinization, contaminant transport, and sustainable water supply, including desalination, requires a quantitative understanding of how matter is transported, transformed, and stored across coupled geological and hydrological systems.
The chemical building blocks forming earth atmosphere, hydrosphere, soils and sediments originate in earth mantle, a thick spherical shell of rock lying deep below us, which constantly deforms and occasionally melts. Mantle derived magma ascend and upon erupting in volcanos and crystallizing provide the materials required for surface processes, including those generating and preserving life. Deciphering the geochemical diversity of the mantle and understanding the reasons, rates and conditions of melting and magma ascent which shaped earth and other rocky planets for billions of years are among the holy grails of geology.
Many of the processes we study are not yet fully constrained. These include the mechanisms governing carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen cycling in sediments, groundwater, and aquatic systems; redox-driven transformations that control nutrient and contaminant mobility; and the interactions between water flow and geochemical reactions in the subsurface. We investigate the geochemistry of groundwater and geo-hydrological processes, including water–rock interactions, salinization and freshening pathways, and the geochemical impacts of natural and engineered desalination. We also study how changes in water chemistry are recorded in the shells of calcifying organisms such as foraminifera, providing archives of carbonate chemistry, oxygenation, and environmental stress.
High temperature processes involving melting of rocks, bubble nucleation in magma chambers causing violent eruptions, magma crystallization at depth to form granite intrusions, and solid-state rock flow and metamorphism, are hidden from our eyes. We have the final products, namely rocks, volcanoes, landscapes. We strive to reconstruct the hidden driving processes by measuring chemical and physical characteristics of rocks, melt and deforms them in the lab and applying the rules of thermodynamics.
Our faculty integrate field observations, laboratory experiments, and high-resolution chemical analyses to study environmental geochemical processes across scales. Research infrastructure includes stable isotope analysis of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur using IRMS, elemental and isotopic measurements with ICP-MS and LA-ICP-MS, inorganic carbon analyzers, and titration systems for carbonate chemistry, alongside complementary wet-chemical methods. Present-day challenges addressed by this work include quantifying sedimentary and groundwater biogeochemical fluxes, tracing contaminant sources and transformations, assessing geochemical controls on desalination and water quality, and evaluating chemical feedbacks that influence ecosystem resilience and water resources under ongoing environmental change.
