News

  • Anna, Isaiah and Bridgett are awarded the Galileo Circle Award for their “exceptional potential in the physical, mathematical, environmental, cognitive, or life sciences.” in 2024. This is the second time for Anna and Isaiah. Congratulations Anna, Isaiah and Bridgett!

  • Emilie passes her PhD defense with flying colors! Congratulations Dr. Bowman and all the best for your onward postdoc journey to Cambridge University.

  • Isaiah was awarded the Best Overall Talk at GeoDaze 2024 (The University of Arizona Geosciences Symposium). Isaiah presented his research on early crust formation on the Moon using geochemical analyses of the Apollo sample 76535. Congratulations Isaiah!

  • Ananya, Arka and Isaiah had a very productive week at LPSC from March 11-15, 2024. We presented talks and posters on a diverse range of topics from water outgassing from lunar magma ocean, lab simulation of small body impacts, deriving how hot the Moon is, understanding secondary crust formation on the Moon, and proposing a lunar crustal analog.

  • Arka publishes a paper from his predoctoral internship at Caltech - Wambo, J.D.T., Roy, A., Ganno, S., Fossi, D.H., Wilner, M.J.,  Nzenti, J.P., & Asimow, P.D., Single-zircon U-Pb geochronology and petrogenesis of Pan-African granitoids associated with gold-bearing quartz veins in the Ngoura-Colomines area, Eastern Cameroon. Lithos. doi: 10.1016/j.lithos.2024.107553 . Congrats Arka!

  • Ananya gave an invited research talk at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore on Feb 19, 2023. Prof. Prosenjit Ghosh at IISc kindly organized the visit and hosted Profs. Pranabendu Moitra and Kaustubh Thirumalai from UArizona. It was a great visit with lots of interesting discussions with faculty at students at IISc.

  • Our research group hosted Prof. Marc Hirschmann (UMinnesota) as our colloquium speaker from Jan 31-Feb 2 2024. Marc spoke about his recent study on deep oxygen cycling in the Earth and our group had productive research discussions with him.

  • Arka and Ananya are now executive secretary and panelist, respectively, on the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) science goals committee.

  • Our proposal on how wet the Moon is selected for funding by NASA! Congratulations team (PI: Ananya; co-Is: Pranabendu Moitra, Sabrina Schwinger, Maitrayee Bose, Rick Hervig; collaborators: Jessica Barnes, Vishnu Reddy; graduate student: Arka)..!

  • Congrats to Emilie for being awarded a Spring 2024 Louise Foucar Marshall Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. This prestigious fellowship is given to help Arizona resident graduate students complete their doctoral dissertations.

  • Anna gives a talk about subduction of ultramafic mélanges and their implications for chemical geodynamics at 3:25-3:35 PM PST on Tue, Dec 12 in session DI23A of AGU Fall Meeting 2023

  • Bridgett is awarded the prestigious M. Lee Allison Scholarship by the Arizona Geological Society. The M. Lee Allison Scholarship is awarded to students who demonstrate exceptional achievement in pursuit of degrees in the earth sciences and who show balanced records exhibiting academic excellence, a passion for research, outstanding professional and general community involvement, and leadership in all of these areas. Congratulations Bridgett!

  • Ananya was quoted in the media article on “What's the deepest-occurring gemstone on Earth?” - spoiler alert - diamonds of course!!

  • Isaiah is awarded the Galileo Circle Fellowship for his “exceptional potential in the physical, mathematical, environmental, cognitive, or life sciences.” in Oct 2023. Congratulations Isaiah!

  • We were funded once again to study the geochemical fingerprints for provenance determination of emeralds - great collaboration between Geosciences, School of Mining and Mineral Resources, the Gem and Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona and the Gemological Institute of America.

  • Ananya is a panelist for NASA’s LIFE RCN Workshop: Nitrogen cycling across planetary scales on Oct 18 and 20, 2023. Anna, Arka and Isaiah are also attending the virtual workshop.

  • Prof. Pranabendu Moitra’s research group and ours hosted Dr. Laura Kerber (Jet Propulsion Lab) as our colloquium speaker on Oct 12, 2023. Dr. Kerber gave an excellent talk about her proposed Moon Diver mission. We had productive research discussions during her visit.

  • Ananya, Anna and collaborators (Paul Kapp, Long Li, Yifan Du, Ahmed AlShams and Emily Cooperdock) published an article titled “Metabasic Rocks as Important Nitrogen Carriers to Forearc Depths: Implications for Deep Nitrogen Cycling” in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. Congratulations team!

  • Prof. Paul Asimow and Dr. Paula Antoshechkina from Caltech offered a workshop on alphaMELTS at the University of Arizona on Sep 12-13, 2023. Our research group hosted the workshop and we had 30+ participants from Geosciences and LPL.

  • Ananya gave an invited talk on her research about the importance of metabasic rocks in deep nitrogen cycling using metabasic rocks from Central Tibet at Goldschmidt 2023. The details of the presentation are here: https://conf.goldschmidt.info/goldschmidt/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/5096?clearcache=1

  • Arka attends the Gordon Research Conference on “Origins of Solar Systems” on June 11-16, 2023 and the Gordon Research Seminar prior to that on June 10-11, 2023. The conference will be held in Mount Holyoke, MA. Enjoy!

  • Arka is doing an internship at Jet Propulsion Laboratory during summer 2023 working with the team for the proposed Moon Diver mission.

  • Anna and Emilie will attend the CIDER workshop at UC Berkeley from June 19-July 14, 2023. Enjoy!

  • Congratulations to Arka for being awarded one of the student research grants in petrology/mineralogy by Mineralogical Society of America! Arka’s project is titled “ Investigating the urKREEP Origin of Lunar Silicic Magmas”

  • Anna gave an invited research presentation on April 26, 2023 about partial melting of mélanges and implications for chemical dynamics in subduction zones at the Lithospheric Dynamics Seminar at University of Southern California.

  • Anna and Ananya spent 3 days in San Simeon, CA sampling Franciscan mélange rocks along with friends and collaborators from University of Southern California during the week of April 3, 2023. Ananya also presented a colloquium talk at University of Southern California on April 3, 2023.

  • Arka and Ananya just spent a fantastic week at LPSC 2023 in The Woodlands, TX. Arka presented two posters on his work on heat producing element distribution within the Moon and constructing the selenotherm as well as petrogenesis of highly silicic lunar magmas with involvement of urKREEP. Ananya presented her work on determining the bulk water content of the Moon using results from modeling the outgassing of H bearing volatiles during crystallization of the lunar magma ocean. Stay tuned for publications on all these studies!

  • Emilie is awarded the prestigious ARCS foundation scholarship for her outstanding promise as a researcher. Congratulations Emilie!

  • Emilie publishes her article on using Zn/Fe ratios as tracers for pyroxenite melting in thick crusted arcs: https://doi.org/10.1130/G50929.1. Congratulations Emilie!

  • Anna published an article as the lead author about multiple episodes of slab melt fluxing the sub arc mantle - https://academic.oup.com/petrology/advance-article/doi/10.1093/petrology/egad011/7043833 . Congrats Anna!

  • Ananya presented her research at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata, India in early Jan 2023.

  • Anna, Arka and Emilie present their research at AGU in December 2022. Congrats all of you!

  • Ananya and Arka, with collaborators Sabrina Schwinger and Pranabendu Moitra, published an article titled “Controls on determining the bulk water content of the Moon” in Meteoritics & Planetary Science. They demonstrated how the partition coefficients of H between minerals and the lunar magma ocean are the key factors required to determine how dry or wet the Moon is.

  • Anna and Ananya are a part of the recently published exciting research led by UArizona Geosciences graduate student Nitzan Yanay and postdoc Zhennan Wang about rapid and precise measurement of clumped isotopes in carbonates by laser spectroscopy (Rapid and precise measurement of carbonate clumped isotopes using laser spectroscopy. Science Advances. 8, eabq0611, 2022). We were happy to synthesize a high temperature standard for the thermometry and this is technically the first data to be published from our lab! Great collaboration between experimental petrology and clumped isotope teams!

  • Ananya presented her research at UT El Paso, University of Idaho and Michigan State University during the week of Oct 24, 2022 as the MSA Distinguished Lecturer.

  • Arka is once again awarded the Galileo Circle Scholarship for “exceptional potential in the physical, mathematical, environmental, cognitive, or life sciences.” in Oct 2022. Congratulations Arka!

  • We got funded to do a pilot study on geochemical fingerprints for provenance determination of emeralds - great collaboration between Geosciences, School of Mining and Mineral Resources, the Gem and Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona and the Gemological Institute of America.

  • Ananya gives a presentation at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society in Tucson. Wonderful interactions with mineral and gem enthusiasts!

  • Ananya presents her lunar research at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at University of Arizona on Sep 6 2022

  • Arka and Ananya attend the Lunar Petrology and Landed Instruments Interchange Workshop at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California on Aug 9-11, 2022

  • Ananya has been invited to present at the AGU Union Session “U016: The formation and early evolution of the Earth and the Moon” in Dec 2022.

  • Ananya is nominated as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Mineralogical Society of America for 2022-23 - http://www.minsocam.org/msa/lecture_prog.html

  • Ananya presents her research on how hot and wet the Moon is at the Planetary Science Division at Physical Research Laboratories, Ahmedabad, India on June 2, 2022.

  • Check out Ananya’s public lecture on gems and planetary evolution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrcVkUJvcWk&t=2151s . This was part of the University of Arizona College of Science Lecture Series.

  • Emilie led a very successful AWG outreach event with Pistor Middle School and Desert View High School at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Museum in May 2022.

  • Our manuscript on “Diapirism of Carbonate Platforms Subducted into the Upper Mantle” by Mihai Ducea, Claire Currie, Constantin Balica, Iuliana Lazar, Lucian Petrescu, Mihai Vlasceanu and I has been accepted in Geology - pre-print coming soon!

  • Emilie wins the Best Geochemistry and Petrology Talk at UArizona Geosciences GeoDaze Research Symposium in March 2022. Congrats Emilie!

  • Ananya presents her research at University of Hawaii in Spring 2022.

  • Emilie led a successful 2-month field campaign in the southern and central Andes in Dec 2021-Feb 2022 as part of the UA Geoscience TANGO project. Welcome back to Tucson Emilie!

  • Emilie is awarded the prestigious ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation Scholarship as a future potential leader in STEM. Congrats Emilie!

  • Ananya presents her research at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata and University of Utah in Fall 2021.

  • Emilie’s paper is published as Editor's Choice in Journal of Petrology in Nov 2021 (Bowman, E.E., Ducea, M.N., and Triantafyllou, A., 2021, Arclogites in the subarc lower crust: effects of fractionation, partial melting, and retained melt on the foundering ability of residual roots: Journal of Petrology, egab094, https://doi.org/10.1093/petrology/egab094). Congrats Emilie!

  • The Gem Science emphasis under Geosciences major is officially launched starting Fall 2021. See https://www.geo.arizona.edu/gemscience for more details.

  • Our group’s abstract for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is about constraining the bulk water content of the Moon better. This is part of Arka’s doctoral research. Here’s a video of the pre-recorded presentation that captures our exciting proof-of -concept study.

  • Ananya presents her research at Idaho State and James Madison University in Spring 2021.

  • Arka receives the David J. Lowell Scholarship in Jan 2022 which is a UArizona Geoscience departmental graduate scholarship. Congrats Arka!

  • Arka and Anna receive the Galileo Scholar award from the College of Science at University of Arizona in May 2021. Galileo scholars “demonstrate exceptional potential in the physical, mathematical, environmental, cognitive, or life sciences.” Congratulations Arka and Anna!

  • Anna publishes her latest research on carbon diffusion in liquid iron (with implications for light element composition of planetary cores) from her masters: https://doi.org/10.2138/am-2021-7644

  • AGU 2020 starts Dec 1: here are the presentations from our research group:

    • How wet is our Moon - check out this poster by Ananya, Sabrina Schwinger, Pranabendu Moitra and Arka.

    • Multiple episodes of melt-rock reaction in subduction zones - check out this poster to find out what Anna Rebaza’s research (involves Ananya and Susanne Straub as well) says why that is exciting!

    • Melt-rock reactions do not just happen in subduction zones - they take place deep inside terrestrial planets too - where basal magma oceans may exist - check out this poster by Maxim Ballmer, Rob Spaargaren, Ananya and team to learn more!

  • Learn more about deep volatile cycling and intra plate magmatism in this session at AGU (co-chaired by Val Finlayson, Bernard Marty, Bradley Peters and Ananya)

  • The Gem Science track for undergrads is under development - see https://www.geo.arizona.edu/gemscience for more details!

  • Ananya will present her research at Iowa State University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Stanford University, University of Maine, and University of Michigan in Fall 2020

  • Ananya, Anna and Arka will begin their journey at University of Arizona starting Fall 2020

  • Ananya starts as Associate Editor of JGR Planets from July 1, 2020