Igor Puchtel
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Earth's crust and mantle have exchanged material and heat ever since the planet formed. Reconstructing how that system changed chemically over time is one of the central problems in the Earth sciences.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
- Topics
komatiite
basalt
Archean
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Nov 2028
What they work on
- Estimate the timing, volumes and proportions of continental and oceanic crust extracted in the Archean, using lead, samarium-neodymium and lutetium-hafnium isotopes in thirteen 3.6–2.7-billion-year-old komatiite-basalt systems.
- Calculate long-term Sm/Nd, Th/U and Nb/U ratios of the mantle sources of ancient komatiite-basalt suites to build a model of continental crust growth and matching mantle depletion.
- Establish how trace elements, especially tungsten, split between minerals and melt in 150 rocks from 15 komatiite-basalt systems, comparing well-preserved and chemically altered samples.
- Distinguish between tungsten that originated in Earth's interior and tungsten added from outside, by relating trace-element patterns to tungsten-182 compositions, and use the results to test models for mantle tungsten-182 anomalies.
More about the research
The best records come from the oldest well-preserved rocks. Two kinds are especially useful: komatiites, very hot lavas that came straight from the mantle billions of years ago, and the basalts that formed alongside them. Over his career, the PI has assembled samples of these rare early rocks. Both projects analyze them with high-precision isotope and trace-element methods. One project asks when continents grew. The other asks where tungsten in these rocks came from and what tungsten signals reveal about Earth's earliest history.
Why it matters
This work addresses long-standing questions about how terrestrial planets form and evolve. It will clarify when continents grew and whether ancient reservoirs deep inside Earth survived the Moon-forming impact. The projects will also produce openly shared, high-precision geochemical databases for Earth's oldest volcanic rocks. These databases can serve future research by the wider Earth science community.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Johannes Haemmerli
Washington State University, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify which accessory minerals, such as zircon, apatite, allanite and titanite, take part in mineral reactions caused by deformation in granitic rocks, using electron probe microanalysis.
David Moecher
University of Kentucky, KY·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine whether monazite carried by rivers from the Appalachians to the Atlantic coast comes from metamorphic rocks, granitic rocks or both, by dating detrital grains with laser-ablation split-stream mass spectrometry (LASS-ICP-MS).
Elizabeth Bell
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Separate the effects of magma depth from those of fractionation, the chemical evolution of magma during crystallization, on trace element ratios in zircon, using zircons from magmas of known melting depth.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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