Rice team forges path toward geothermal future

/0 Comments/in /by

MIKE WILLIAMS – FEBRUARY 26, 2021

Jonathan Ajo-Franklin leads development of monitoring system for DOE’s Utah project
HOUSTON – (Feb. 26, 2021) – Rice University scientists have been tapped to join a Department of Energy project to accelerate breakthroughs in geothermal systems that could someday provide unlimited, inexpensive energy.

Jonathan Ajo-Franklin

Rice geophysicist Jonathan Ajo-Franklin will now enter negotiations to finalize and ultimately lead the three-year project expected to be worth more than $5 million to develop a fiber optic system incorporating seismic and temperature sensing that can withstand high temperatures and provide real-time monitoring of conditions deep underground.

The grant to the Rice-led group includes faculty at California State University, Long Beach, and the University of Oklahoma as well as researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and industrial scientists from Silixa LLC and Class VI Solutions. The team was one of 17 named by DOE this week to develop a variety of technologies associated with the Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (Utah FORGE). Collectively, the awards by the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy could amount to $46 million.

The concept of Utah FORGE seems simple: Send cold water down, bring hot water back up and use it to generate electricity. But this project differs from similar systems around the world.

Utah FORGE has completed drilling of its first deviated well, a critical step in the enhanced geothermal project backed by the Department of Energy. Rice University scientists have been tapped to join the project to accelerate breakthroughs in geothermal systems that could someday provide unlimited, inexpensive energy. (Credit: Eric Larson)
Utah FORGE has completed drilling of its first deviated well, a critical step in the enhanced geothermal project backed by the Department of Energy. Rice University scientists have been tapped to join the project to accelerate breakthroughs in geothermal systems that could someday provide unlimited, inexpensive energy. Photo by Eric Larson

“The big difference is this is enhanced geothermal,” Ajo-Franklin said. “For traditional geothermal, you need the rock to be permeable so the water can flow through. In enhanced geothermal, you create fractures that allow the flow of water through the system to draw the heat out.

“It’s a little like the difference between normal oil production and unconventional production, like shale,” he said. “But in this case, we’re moving heat, using water as the working fluid.”

Along with managing the grant, Ajo-Franklin’s Rice Environmental and Applied Geophysics Laboratory will design and provide distributed fiber optic sensing resources and instrumentation for the project. Senior Rice personnel involved in the project include postdoctoral fellows Benxin Chi and Feng Cheng.

Some of the work at the facility in Milford, Utah, administered by the University of Utah, is already done, including an injection well completed this year that reaches more than 8,000 feet into the Earth, where the temperature exceeds 442 degrees Fahrenheit. (The wellbore itself is nearly 11,000 feet long, as it deviates 65 degrees at 6,000 feet.) That well extends into the zone Utah FORGE will use as a reservoir, where water will be stored for heating and later recovered via a to-be-drilled second well.

The team’s fibers will be placed in both the production well and a third, vertical well in the middle specifically for monitoring. The fiber optic cable itself will be coated with durable polyimide and encased in steel. Data returned by the sensor system will be used to generate a model of the site’s fracture permeability, which will guide further development of the reservoir.

A Rice University-led team of scientists plans to design and place fiber optic sensor systems into the monitor (center) and production (right) wells at the Utah FORGE geothermal plant under development. (Credit: Rice Environmental and Applied Geophysics Laboratory)

Ajo-Franklin expects the project will spin off technologies of value to geoscience in general. “You can use this technology for many applications where seismic events can help us better understand and image the Earth,” he said. “Fiber is great for that because we can record for long periods of time over long distances, and then use either artificial sources or naturally-occuring noise to generate images of properties underneath it.”

But for now, proving the viability of geothermal energy in the United States is of critical importance, Ajo-Franklin said.

The federal government agrees. “There is enormous untapped potential for enhanced geothermal systems to provide clean and reliable electricity generation throughout the United States,” said Kathleen Hogan, assistant deputy undersecretary for science, in a press release announcing the grants.

“The big thing about geothermal is its baseload capacity,” Ajo-Franklin said. “It’s not a situation where you need to move fuel to the site, because it’s all underground to begin with. And like renewables it doesn’t have a big carbon dioxide footprint, but it’s not intermittent.

“So in comparison to wind and solar, there’s no time when the Earth isn’t hot,” Ajo-Franklin said. “That’s a nice advantage, too.”

Video:

 

Credit: Utah Governor’s Office of Energy Development

Related materials:

Telecom cables offer undersea seismic-sensing bonanza: https://news.rice.edu/2019/11/28/telecom-cables-offer-undersea-seismic-sensing-bonanza/

Rice Environmental and Applied Geophysics Laboratory (Ajo-Franklin lab): https://earthscience.rice.edu/ajo-franklin-lab/

Utah FORGE: https://utahforge.com

Rice Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences: https://earthscience.rice.edu

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu

 

Mars, happy to see you again

/0 Comments/in /by
Kirsten Siebach reacts as the Perseverance rover hits the bullseye, landing at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. Photo by Brandon Martin

Kirsten Siebach reacts as the Perseverance rover hits the bullseye, landing at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. Photo by Brandon Martin

MIKE WILLIAMS

– FEBRUARY 19, 2021

Terror, be gone! This happy landing was pure delight.

It remains to be seen how well the Perseverance rover and its helicopter, Ingenuity, perform as they traverse the surface of Mars, but for the moment NASA and Rice geologist Kirsten Siebach are getting a moment to celebrate with the spacecraft’s long-awaited successful landing on Feb. 18.

Siebach and her colleagues gave an hourlong talk and Q&A session via Zoom before the notorious “seven minutes of terror,” during which the spacecraft would be on its own to execute the complex landing sequence to Jezero Crater.

The action shifted to Rice’s Visualization Laboratory, where Siebach shared her reaction to live reports from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech with Rice video producer Brandon Martin.

The Perseverance work for Siebach is just beginning as she assumes her duties as a mission specialist tasked with helping operate the rover and scout for samples that will ultimately be brought back to Earth. These, she said, will lead to years of study to determine what Mars is made of, and whether life in any form ever existed there.

In the meantime, she is still studying data from the last rover to land, Curiosity, in 2012. She recently issued a paper that concluded the region’s climate was once like Iceland, and just this week was part of a paper that revealed the chemical contents of aqueous processes on a mixture of amorphous materials found at Gale Crater. That evidence suggests water persisted at Gale Crater for about 1 billion years.

Kirsten Siebach reacts as the Perseverance rover hits the bullseye, landing at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. Photo by Brandon Martin

Kirsten Siebach reacts as the Perseverance rover hits the bullseye, landing at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. Photo by Brandon Martin

Perserverance has Landed! Mars 2020 scientist Kirsten Siebach led EEPS landing party

/0 Comments/in , /by

 

EEPS assistant professor and Mars 2020 scientist Kirsten Siebach answers questions about the mission during EEPS virtual landing party.

Thursday February thee 18th was a big day.  From her office in the Keith Wiess Geological Laboratories, EEPS planetary scientist Kirsten Siebach led a Mars 2020 mission virtual landing party. More than 120 participants were treated to a first-hand account of the upcoming landing from one of only 13 scientists chosen to operate the rover and help select samples.

 

Siebach answered numerous questions about the Mars 2020 mission, the Perseverance Rover and its analytical instrument payload, and the sample collection activities that she will be helping to direct. You can watch both the Q&A and entire landing party zoom meeting HERE.

About 5 minutes before Perseverance lands, Kirsten Siebach joins undergraduate Madison Morris in the Chevron Visualization Lab to watch the landing on the large projection screen.

 

At about 5 minutes from Mars 2020 atmospheric entry, Kirsten moved to the EEPS Chevron Visualization Laboratory where she watched the final countdown—known as Entry Descent and Landing or EDL, with Rice undergraduate Madison Morris.  Morris is working with Siebach on research related to the upcoming rover activities.

The final 7-10 minutes, known as the ‘seven minutes of terror’, is the period during which the spacecraft must operate on its own, with no eyes to see and a 14 minute data delay back to Earth.

During those seven minutes, the spacecraft enters Mars atmosphere at almost 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 kmh).  Facing towards the planet, a heat shield is the only protection the rover has as it descends down to an altitude of about 1 mile (1.5 km).  The descent module then fires its engines to slow the spacecraft while JPL’s new terrain relative navigation system (TRN) identifies a place to land. The TRN scans the surface and compares it with maps of a landing ellipse that are already loaded into its database. A signal from the TRN triggers the deployment of a 70-foot (21-meter) diameter parachute that slows the craft further, bringing its descent down to a few meters per second. Finally, the hovering-landing sky crane system lowers the rover the rest of the way to the ground.

The flight engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory create a graphic that tracks Mars 2020 spacecraft milestones. Siebach and Morris watch intently the final steps of the deployment of the rover by the sky crane.

Siebach sits in silence, listening to the engineers mark each step in the process.  At the final minute she stands, looking intently at the screen.  As the flight engineers signal a successful deployment of the sky crane, cheers erupt on screen and in the Viz Lab.  Perseverance has landed!!!

Clenched fists and happy exclamations instead of hugs in celebration of a successful landing!

 

And the first picture from Jezero crater arrives.

Perseverance is proceeded by four other rovers, Sojourner in 1997, Spirt and Opportunity in 2004, and Curiosity in 2012. Perseverance is the largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world. It traveled 293 million miles (472 million km) – over 203 days – to get to Mars. It will look directly for signs of past life on Mars, test ISRU tools, and collect samples from one of Mars oldest regions—what scientists believe is a river delta. The rocks in this region could tell us about Mars earliest wet history of the Red Planet and thus is a good target for signatures of past life.

 

Mars Perseverance rover scientist Kirsten Siebach is excited to see the first image from Jezero crater sent by Perseverance’s hazard camera.

Mark Torres wins Geochemical Society’s Clarke Award

/0 Comments/in /by
JADE BOYD

– FEBRUARY 12, 2021

Early-career honor goes to fourth Rice U. geochemist in 12 years

Rice University’s Mark Torres has won the Geochemical Society’s top honor for early-career scientists, the F.W. Clarke Award, becoming the fourth Rice faculty member to win the award since 2009.

Mark Torres with water samples collected from Iceland’s Efri Haukadalsá River in 2016. (Photo by Woodward Fisher)

Torres, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, joined Rice in 2017. He will receive the 2021 Clarke Award at the society’s annual meeting in July in recognition of “his work on the geochemistry of the Earth’s surface focused on interactions between the hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and the crust.”

Torres said the impact of the honor sank in when he looked at the list of previous winners and recognized names from “papers I read as a student that really impressed me and sort of guided or shaped my thinking. To be on that same list is amazing. And then, similarly, to also have this legacy of so many other Rice faculty in my department winning. It’s fun to join the club.”

The Clarke Award honors outstanding contributions to geochemistry or cosmochemistry and is awarded to a single individual each year. Torres joins Rice Clarke Award winners Cin-Ty Lee (2009), Rajdeep Dasgupta (2011) and Laurence Yeung (2016).

Torres’ lab focuses on interactions between rock and water near Earth’s surface, the transport and burial of organic carbon and how the oxidation of sulfide minerals affects atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

“At Earth’s surface, materials like water and sediment tend to move and chemically react at the same time,” Torres said. “If you think about rivers, for example, there’s chemistry that happens as the river flows. Groundwater flows into the rivers, and there’s chemistry that happens during that process too.

“It turns out, how fast something moves dictates how much chemistry you can do,” he said. “Things happen at a certain rate, and how quickly something goes from point A to point B determines how much it can react. At the same time, the chemistry changes how fast it moves. Do sediment grains get smaller? Do they get bigger? Right? Do we dissolve things? Or do we precipitate new things? So, transport and reaction end up feeding back on each other, resulting in complex patterns. And so a lot of my research is sort of thinking about those kinds of problems.”

Torres grew up in Southern California and was fascinated by dinosaurs as a child. His interest in paleontology and geology continued in high school, when he spent summers hunting fossils and afternoons cleaning dinosaur bones at the Alf Museum of Paleontology on his high school campus. But he also had a growing interest in environmental issues, especially climate change, and he enrolled as an environmental studies major at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.

Rice University geochemist Mark Torres (second from right) on Iceland’s Efri Haukadalsá River in 2019 with Rice graduate students Yi Hou (right) and Trevor Cole ’20 (left) and California Institute of Technology graduate student Preston Kemeny (second from left). (Photo by Trevor Cole)

“For some reason, I thought that despite all my interest in the Earth sciences, that I would do that,” he said. “I got about a semester in, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait. No. Obviously, I want to be a geologist.’ And so, it was like, a really quick switch.”

Torres cited his parents and Alf Museum director Don Lofgren as important early influences, and his Ph.D. advisor at the University of Southern California, Josh West, as a critical late influence. But Torres’ passion for geochemistry emerged in the laboratories of undergraduate mentors Robert Gaines and Jade Star Lackey, both of Pomona College. Torres said Gaines’ research on the geochemistry of Burgess Shale fossils was particularly pivotal.

“It’s a unique type of fossil deposit, and he studies it from the perspective of geochemistry,” Torres said. “Like, what about this place at this time — the seawater — allowed us to have access to these fossils?

“And that little twist on paleontology took,” he said. “In my mind, it was like, ‘Oh. The tools to answer a lot of the questions that interest me — like, what was the Earth like in the past? How will it change in the future? What sets Earth’s climate? — are kind of rooted in chemistry.’ Those questions are fundamentally linked to paleontology, what I thought was originally my passion. But being around (Gaines and Lackey), at that time, really showed me, ‘Oh, no, no. Geochemistry is it.’”

Much of Earth’s nitrogen was locally sourced

/0 Comments/in /by

MIKE WILLIAMS, Rice News

 – JANUARY 21, 2021
Rice-led study shows two distinct origins of life-essential element in present-day planet

HOUSTON – (Jan. 21, 2021) – Where did Earth’s nitrogen come from? Rice University scientists show one primordial source of the indispensable building block for life was close to home.

The solar protoplanetary disk was separated into two reservoirs, with the inner solar system material having a lower concentration of nitrogen-15 and the outer solar system material being nitrogen-15 rich. The nitrogen isotope composition of present-day Earth lies in between, according to a new Rice University study that shows it came from both reservoirs. (Credit: Illustration by Amrita P. Vyas)

The solar protoplanetary disk was separated into two reservoirs, with the inner solar system material having a lower concentration of nitrogen-15 and the outer solar system material being nitrogen-15 rich. The nitrogen isotope composition of present-day Earth lies in between, according to a new Rice University study that shows it came from both reservoirs. Illustration by Amrita P. Vyas

The isotopic signatures of nitrogen in iron meteorites reveal that Earth likely gathered its nitrogen not only from the region beyond Jupiter’s orbit but also from the dust in the inner protoplanetary disk.

Nitrogen is a volatile element that, like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, makes life on Earth possible. Knowing its source offers clues to not only how rocky planets formed in the inner part of our solar system but also the dynamics of far-flung protoplanetary disks.

The study by Rice graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal, Rice faculty member Rajdeep Dasgupta and geochemist Bernard Marty at the University of Lorraine, France, appears in Nature Astronomy.

Their work helps settle a prolonged debate over the origin of life-essential volatile elements in Earth and other rocky bodies in the solar system.

“Researchers have always thought that the inner part of the solar system, within Jupiter’s orbit, was too hot for nitrogen and other volatile elements to condense as solids, meaning that volatile elements in the inner disk were in the gas phase,” Grewal said.

Because the seeds of present-day rocky planets, also known as protoplanets, grew in the inner disk by accreting locally sourced dust, he said it appeared they did not contain nitrogen or other volatiles, necessitating their delivery from the outer solar system. An earlier study by the team suggested much of this volatile-rich material came to Earth via the collision that formed the moon.

An artist’s conception shows a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star. New research by Rice University shows that Earth’s nitrogen came from both inner and outer regions of the disk that formed our solar system, contrary to earlier theory. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An artist’s conception shows a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star. New research by Rice University shows that Earth’s nitrogen came from both inner and outer regions of the disk that formed our solar system, contrary to earlier theory. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

But new evidence clearly shows only some of the planet’s nitrogen came from beyond Jupiter.

In recent years, scientists have analyzed nonvolatile elements in meteorites, including iron meteorites that occasionally fall to Earth, to show dust in the inner and outer solar system had completely different isotopic compositions.

“This idea of separate reservoirs had only been developed for nonvolatile elements,” Grewal said. “We wanted to see if this is true for volatile elements as well. If so, it can be used to determine which reservoir the volatiles in present-day rocky planets came from.”

Iron meteorites are remnants of the cores of protoplanets that formed at the same time as the seeds of present-day rocky planets, becoming the wild card the authors used to test their hypothesis.

Rice University graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal, seated, with faculty member Rajdeep Dasgupta, conducted the study on nitrogen isotope compositions of iron meteorites to show volatile elements deposited on Earth and other rocky planets in the early solar system had more than one source. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

Rice University graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal, seated, with faculty member Rajdeep Dasgupta, conducted the study on nitrogen isotope compositions of iron meteorites to show volatile elements deposited on Earth and other rocky planets in the early solar system had more than one source. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The researchers found a distinct nitrogen isotopic signature in the dust that bathed the inner protoplanets within about 300,000 years of the formation of the solar system. All iron meteorites from the inner disk contained a lower concentration of the nitrogen-15 isotope, while those from the outer disk were rich in nitrogen-15.

This suggests that within the first few million years, the protoplanetary disk divided into two reservoirs, the outer rich in the nitrogen-15 isotope and the inner rich in nitrogen-14.

“Our work completely changes the current narrative,” Grewal said. “We show that the volatile elements were present in the inner disk dust, probably in the form of refractory organics, from the very beginning. This means that contrary to current understanding, the seeds of the present-day rocky planets — including Earth — were not volatile-free.”

Dasgupta said the finding is significant to those who study the potential habitability of exoplanets, a topic of great interest to him as principal investigator of CLEVER Planets, a NASA-funded collaborative project exploring how life-essential elements might come together on distant exoplanets.

“At least for our own planet, we now know the entire nitrogen budget does not come only from outer solar system materials,” said Dasgupta, Rice’s Maurice Ewing Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.

“Even if other protoplanetary disks don’t have the kind of giant planet migration resulting in the infiltration of volatile-rich materials from the outer zones, their inner rocky planets closer to the star could still acquire volatiles from their neighboring zones,” he said.

A NASA FINESST grant, a NASA Science Mission Directorate grant to support CLEVER Planets, the European Research Council, and the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughan Fellowship at Rice supported the research.

-30-

Read the abstract at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01283-y.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Planetary collision that formed the moon made life possible on Earth: https://news.rice.edu/2019/01/23/planetary-collision-that-formed-the-moon-made-life-possible-on-earth-2/

What recipes produce a habitable planet?: https://news.rice.edu/2018/09/17/what-recipes-produce-a-habitable-planet-2/

Breathing? Thank volcanoes, tectonics and bacteria: https://news.rice.edu/2019/12/02/breathing-thank-volcanoes-tectonics-and-bacteria/

ExPeRT: Experimental Petrology Rice Team (Dasgupta group): https://www.dasgupta.rice.edu/expert/people/dasgupta

CLEVER Planets: http://cleverplanets.org

Rice Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences: https://earthscience.rice.edu

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://www.rice.edu

Images for download:

The solar protoplanetary disk was separated into two reservoirs, with the inner solar system material having a lower concentration of nitrogen-15 and the outer solar system material being nitrogen-15 rich. The nitrogen isotope composition of present-day Earth lies in between, according to a new Rice University study that shows it came from both reservoirs. (Credit: Illustration by Amrita P. Vyas)

https://news.rice.edu/files/2020/12/1221_NITROGEN-1a-WEB.jpg

The solar protoplanetary disk was separated into two reservoirs, with the inner solar system material having a lower concentration of nitrogen-15 and the outer solar system material being nitrogen-15 rich. The nitrogen isotope composition of present-day Earth lies in between, according to a new Rice University study that shows it came from both reservoirs. (Credit: Illustration by Amrita P. Vyas)

Rice University graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal, seated, with faculty member Rajdeep Dasgupta, conducted the study on nitrogen isotope compositions of iron meteorites to show volatile elements deposited on Earth and other rocky planets in the early solar system had more than one source. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

https://news.rice.edu/files/2020/12/1221_NITROGEN-2-web.jpg

Rice University graduate student and lead author Damanveer Grewal, seated, with faculty member Rajdeep Dasgupta, conducted the study on nitrogen isotope compositions of iron meteorites to show volatile elements deposited on Earth and other rocky planets in the early solar system had more than one source. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

An artist’s conception shows a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star. New research by Rice University shows that Earth’s nitrogen came from both inner and outer regions of the disk that formed our solar system, contrary to earlier theory. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

 

https://news.rice.edu/files/2020/12/1221_NITROGEN-3-web.jpg

An artist’s conception shows a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star. New research by Rice University shows that Earth’s nitrogen came from both inner and outer regions of the disk that formed our solar system, contrary to earlier theory. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Rocks show Mars once felt like Iceland

/0 Comments/in /by
MIKE WILLIAMS

– JANUARY 20, 2021

Crater study offers window on temperatures 3.5 billion years ago

HOUSTON – (Jan. 20, 2021) – Once upon a time, seasons in Gale Crater probably felt something like those in Iceland. But nobody was there to bundle up more than 3 billion years ago.

The ancient Martian crater is the focus of a study by Rice University scientists comparing data from the Curiosity rover to places on Earth where similar geologic formations have experienced weathering in different climates.

Iceland’s basaltic terrain and cool weather, with temperatures typically less than 38 degrees Fahrenheit, turned out to be the closest analog to ancient Mars. The study determined that temperature had the biggest impact on how rocks formed from sediment deposited by ancient Martian streams were weathered by climate.

Weathering of sedimentary rock at Gale Crater likely happened under Iceland-like temperatures more than 3 billion years ago, when water still flowed on Mars. Rice University researchers compared data collected by the Curiosity rover, correlated with conditions at various places on Earth, to make their determination. (Credit: NASA)

Weathering of sedimentary rock at Gale Crater likely happened under Iceland-like temperatures more than 3 billion years ago, when water still flowed on Mars. Rice University researchers compared data collected by the Curiosity rover, correlated with conditions at various places on Earth, to make their determination. Courtesy of NASA

The study by postdoctoral alumnus Michael Thorpe and Martian geologist Kirsten Siebach of Rice and geoscientist Joel Hurowitz of State University of New York at Stony Brook set out to answer questions about the forces that affected sands and mud in the ancient lakebed.

Data collected by Curiosity during its travels since landing on Mars in 2012 provide details about the chemical and physical states of mudstones formed in an ancient lake, but the chemistry does not directly reveal the climate conditions when the sediment eroded upstream. For that, the researchers had to look for similar rocks and soils on Earth to find a correlation between the planets.

The study published in JGR Planets takes data from well-known and varying conditions in Iceland, Idaho and around the world to see which provided the best match for what the rover sees and senses in the crater that encompasses Mount Sharp.

The crater once contained a lake, but the climate that allowed water to fill it is the subject of a long debate. Some argue that early Mars was warm and wet, and that rivers and lakes were commonly present. Others think it was cold and dry and that glaciers and snow were more common.

A river-fed sedimentary plain in Iceland bears resemblance to what might have fed Mars’ Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago. Researchers at Rice University studied rover data on sedimentary rocks at the crater and compared them to similar formations on Earth to determine what the climate might have been like at the crater when the sediments were deposited. (Credit: Photo by Michael Thorpe)

A river-fed sedimentary plain in Iceland bears resemblance to what might have fed Mars’ Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago. Researchers at Rice University studied rover data on sedimentary rocks at the crater and compared them to similar formations on Earth to determine what the climate might have been like at the crater when the sediments were deposited. Photo by Michael Thorpe

“Sedimentary rocks in Gale Crater instead detail a climate that likely falls in between these two scenarios,” said Thorpe, now a Mars sample return scientist at NASA Johnson Space Center contractor Jacobs Space Exploration Group. “The ancient climate was likely frigid but also appears to have supported liquid water in lakes for extended periods of time.”

The researchers were surprised that there was so little weathering of rocks on Mars after more than 3 billion years, such that the ancient Mars rocks were comparable to Icelandic sediments in a river and lake today.

“On Earth, the sedimentary rock record does a fantastic job of maturing over time with the help of chemical weathering,” Thorpe noted. “However, on Mars we see very young minerals in the mudstones that are older than any sedimentary rocks on Earth, suggesting weathering was limited.”

The researchers directly studied sediments from Idaho and Iceland, and compiled studies of similar basaltic sediments from a range of climates around the world, from Antarctica to Hawaii, to bracket the climate conditions they thought were possible on Mars when water was flowing into Gale Crater.

“Earth provided an excellent laboratory for us in this study, where we could use a range of locations to see the effects of different climate variables on weathering, and average annual temperature had the strongest effect for the types of rocks in Gale Crater,” said Siebach, a member of the Curiosity team who will be a Perseverance operator after the new lander touches down in February. “The range of climates on Earth allowed us to calibrate our thermometer for measuring the temperature on ancient Mars.”

Michael Thorpe

Michael Thorpe

Kirsten Siebach

Kirsten Siebach

The makeup of sand and mud in Iceland were the closest match to Mars based on analysis via the standard chemical index of alteration (CIA), a basic geological tool used to infer past climate from chemical and physical weathering of a sample.

“As water flows through rocks to erode and weather them, it dissolves the most soluble chemical components of the minerals that form the rocks,” Siebach said. “On Mars, we saw that only a small fraction of the elements that dissolve the fastest had been lost from the mud relative to volcanic rocks, even though the mud has the smallest grain size and is usually the most weathered.

“This really limits the average annual temperature on Mars when the lake was present, because if it were warmer, then more of those elements would have been flushed away,” she said.

The results also indicated the climate shifted over time from Antarctic-like conditions to become more Icelandic while fluvial processes continued to deposit sediments in the crater. This shift shows the technique can be used to help track climate changes on ancient Mars.

While the study focused on the lowest, most ancient part of the lake sediments Curiosity has explored, other studies have also indicated the Martian climate probably fluctuated and became drier with time. “This study establishes one way to interpret that trend more quantitatively, by comparison to climates and environments we know well on Earth today,” Siebach said. “Similar techniques could be used by Perseverance to understand ancient climate around its landing site at Jezero Crater.”

In parallel, climate change, especially in Iceland, may shift the places on Earth best-suited for understanding the past on both planets, she said.

Siebach is an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice. Hurowitz is an associate professor of geosciences at Stony Brook.

A NASA postdoctoral fellowship to Thorpe, the NASA Solar System Workings program and the David E. King Field Work Award from Stony Brook supported the research.

-30-

Read the abstract at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JE006530.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Siebach Lab: https://kirstensiebach.com/lab

Michael Thorpe: https://mikethorpe.weebly.com/

Joel Hurowitz: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/geosciences/people/_faculty/hurowitz.php

Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/

Mars 2020: Perseverance: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences: https://earthscience.rice.edu

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu

Images for download:

Weathering of sedimentary rock at Gale Crater likely happened under Iceland-like temperatures more than 3 billion years ago, when water still flowed on Mars. Rice University researchers compared data collected by the Curiosity rover, correlated with conditions at various places on Earth, to make their determination. (Credit: NASA)

https://news.rice.edu/files/2021/01/0125_GALE-1-WEB-1.jpg

Weathering of sedimentary rock at Gale Crater likely happened under Iceland-like temperatures more than 3 billion years ago, when water still flowed on Mars. Rice University researchers compared data collected by the Curiosity rover, correlated with conditions at various places on Earth, to make their determination. (Credit: NASA)

A river-fed sedimentary plain in Iceland bears resemblance to what might have fed Mars’ Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago. Researchers at Rice University studied rover data on sedimentary rocks at the crater and compared them to similar formations on Earth to determine what the climate might have been like at the crater when the sediments were deposited. (Credit: Photo by Michael Thorpe)

https://news.rice.edu/files/2021/01/0125_GALE-2-WEB.jpg

A river-fed sedimentary plain in Iceland bears resemblance to what might have fed Mars’ Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago. Researchers at Rice University studied rover data on sedimentary rocks at the crater and compared them to similar formations on Earth to determine what the climate might have been like at the crater when the sediments were deposited. (Credit: Photo by Michael Thorpe)

Michael Thorpe

https://news.rice.edu/files/2021/01/0125_GALE-3-WEB.jpg

CAPTION: Michael Thorpe. (Credit: Wiess School of Natural Sciences/Rice University)

Kirsten Siebach

https://news.rice.edu/files/2021/01/0125_GALE-4-WEB.jpg

CAPTION: Kirsten Siebach. (Credit: Rice University)

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

Research finds tiny bubbles tell tales of big volcanic eruptions

/0 Comments/in /by
JADE BOYD, Rice News

 

Study: Nanocrystals may explain staggering number of bubbles in erupted lava

HOUSTON – (Jan. 19, 2021) – Microscopic bubbles can tell stories about Earth’s biggest volcanic eruptions and geoscientists from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have discovered some of those stories are written in nanoparticles.

In an open-access study published online in Nature Communications, Rice’s Sahand Hajimirza and Helge Gonnermann and UT Austin’s James Gardner answered a longstanding question about explosive volcanic eruptions like the ones at Mount St. Helens in 1980, the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo in 1991 or Chile’s Mount Chaitén in 2008.

aerial view of plume from Mount St. Helens, Washington, May 18, 1980.

An aerial view from the southwest of Mount St. Helens, Washington, May 18, 1980. The Plinian eruption was the deadliest and most costly volcanic disaster in U.S. history. (Photo by Krimmel, Robert. Public domain.)

Geoscientists have long sought to use tiny bubbles in erupted lava and ash to reconstruct some of the conditions, like heat and pressure, that occur in these powerful eruptions. But there’s been a historic disconnect between numerical models that predict how many bubbles will form and the actual amounts of bubbles measured in erupted rocks.

Hajimirza, Gonnermann and Gardner worked for more than five years to reconcile those differences for Plinian eruptions. Named in honor of Pliny the Younger, the Roman author who described the eruption that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79, Plinian eruptions are some of the most intense and destructive volcanic events.

“Eruption intensity refers to the both the amount of magma that’s erupted and how quickly it comes out,” said Hajimirza, a postdoctoral researcher and former Ph.D. student in Gonnermann’s lab at Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “The typical intensity of Plinian eruptions ranges from about 10 million kilograms per second to 10 billion kilograms per second. That is equivalent to 5,000 to 5 million pickup trucks per second.”

One way scientists can gauge the speed of rising magma is by studying microscopic bubbles in erupted lava and ash. Like bubbles in uncorked champagne, magma bubbles are created by a rapid decrease in pressure. In magma, this causes dissolved water to escape in the form of gas bubbles.

“As magma rises, its pressure decreases,” Hajimirza said. “At some point, it reaches a pressure at which water is saturated, and further decompression causes supersaturation and the formation of bubbles.”

As water escapes in the form of bubbles, the molten rock becomes less saturated. But if the magma continues to rise, decreasing pressure increases saturation.

“This feedback determines how many bubbles form,” Hajimirza said. “The faster the magma rises, the higher the decompression rate and supersaturation pressure, and the more abundant the nucleated bubbles.”

In Plinian eruptions, so much magma rises so fast that the number of bubbles is staggering. When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, for example, it spewed more than one cubic kilometer of rock and ash in nine hours, and there were about one million billion bubbles in each cubic meter of that erupted material.

Sahand Hajimirza

Sahand Hajimirza is a postdoctoral research associate in Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. (Photo courtesy of S. Hajimirza/Rice University)

“The total bubbles would be around a septillion,” Hajimirza said. “That’s a one followed by 24 zeros, or about 1,000 times more than all the grains of sand on all Earth’s beaches.”

In his Ph.D. studies, Hajimirza developed a predictive model for bubble formation and worked with Gardner to test the model in experiments at UT Austin. The new study builds upon that work by examining how magnetite crystals no larger than a few billionths of a meter could change how bubbles form at various depths.

“When bubbles nucleate, they can form in liquid, which we call homogeneous nucleation, or they can nucleate on a solid surface, which we call heterogeneous,” Hajimirza said. “A daily life example would be boiling a pot of water. When bubbles form on the bottom of the pot, rather than in the liquid water, that is heterogeneous nucleation.”

Bubbles from the bottom of the pot are often the first to form, because heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation typically begin at different temperatures. In rising magma, heterogeneous bubble formation begins earlier, at lower supersaturation levels. And the surfaces where bubbles nucleate are often on tiny crystals.

“How much they facilitate nucleation depends on the type of crystals,” Hajimirza said. “Magnetites, in particular, are the most effective.”

In the study, Hajimirza, Gonnermann and Gardner incorporated magnetite-mediated nucleation in numerical models of bubble formation and found the models produced results that agreed with observational data from Plinian eruptions.

A NASA satellite image of a volcanic plume from Chile's Mount Chaitén rising over the Andes Mountains and drifting across Argentina on this May 3, 2008.

A volcanic plume flows southeast from Chile’s Mount Chaitén in this May 3, 2008 image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The Plinian plume rose over the Andes Mountains and drifted across Argentina before dissipating over the Atlantic Ocean. (Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Rapid Response Team/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Hajimirza said magnetites are likely present in all Plinian magma. And while previous research on hasn’t revealed enough magnetites to account for all observed bubbles, previous studies may have missed small nanocrystals that would only be revealed with transmission electron microscopy, a rarely used technique that is only now becoming more broadly available.

To find out if that’s the case, Hajimirza, Gonnermann and Gardner called for a “systematic search for magnetite nanolites” in material from Plinian eruptions. That would provide observational data to better define the role of magnetites and heterogeneous nucleation in bubble formation, and could lead to better models and improved volcanic forecasts.

“Forecasting eruptions is a long-term goal for volcanologists, but it’s challenging because we cannot directly observe subsurface processes,” said Hajimirza. “One of the grand challenges of volcano science, as outlined by the National Academies in 2017, is improving eruption forecasting by better integration of the observational data we have with the quantitative models, like the one we developed for this study.”

Gonnermann is a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice. Gardner is a professor of geological sciences in UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (EAR-1348072, EAR-1348050).

-30-

Links and resources:

The DOI of the Nature Communications paper is: 10.1038/s41467-020-20541-1

A copy of the paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20541-1

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https://news.rice.edu/files/2021/01/0113_BUBBLES-smH-b.jpg
CAPTION: Sahand Hajimirza is a postdoctoral research associate in Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. (Photo courtesy of S. Hajimirza/Rice University)

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/plinian-eruption-column-may-18-1980-mount-st-helens
CAPTION: An aerial view from the southwest of Mount St. Helens, Washington, May 18, 1980. The Plinian eruption was the deadliest and most costly volcanic disaster in U.S. history. (Photo by Krimmel, Robert. Public domain.)

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/19887/chaiten-volcano-erupts
CAPTION: A volcanic plume flows southeast from Chile’s Mount Chaitén in this May 3, 2008 image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The Plinian plume rose over the Andes Mountains and drifted across Argentina before dissipating over the Atlantic Ocean. (Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Rapid Response Team/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Postdoc Sahand Hajimirza’s collaborative research on Yellowstone’s Steamboat Geyser highlighted

/0 Comments/in , /by

Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park is active again!

Considered the worlds tallest active geyser, the 400 foot jet of water can be tough for the average tourist to witness, with quiescent periods lasting as long as 50 years.  Yet since 2018, Steamboat has erupted more times than it has in the last half century.

Image and caption from Berkeley News: A 2019 eruption of Steamboat Geyser in the Norris Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park. The geyser’s first documented activity was in 1878, and it has turned off and on sporadically since, once going for 50 years without erupting. In 2018 it reactivated after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus, for reasons that are still unclear. (UC Berkeley photo by Mara Reed)

Sahand Hajimirza is on the team (with lead author Dr. Mara Reed and senior author Professor Michael Manga from University of California at Berkeley) that wanted to know why.

Geysers, from the name describing water that erupts from the ground, have some thermodynamic similarities to volcanic eruptions.  Yet geyser eruptions, which range in size from bubbling pools to extraordinary skyward jets such as Steamboat, are much rarer than volcanoes, and according to the U.S. Geological survey, number less than a thousand in the world, with most of them found in Yellowstone National Park.

During the 2019 CIDER (Cooperative Institute of Dynamic Earth Research hosted by UC Berkeley), which focused on volcanic and hydrothermal eruptions, a group of researchers set out to study the reawakening of Steamboat. Sahand’s expertise in the dynamics of volcanic eruption helped the group to address what makes Steamboat the tallest active geyser in the world.

Six members of the science team assembled around a table in McCone Hall at UC Berkeley in the summer of 2019, at work on the Steamboat Geyser project. Clockwise from lower left, Carolina Munoz-Saez, Anna Barth, Sahand Hajimirza, Tarsilo Girona, Sin-Mei Wu and Majid Rasht-Behesht. The three questions and hypotheses the team analyzed are on the greenboard, while the fluid dynamics equations that describe a geyser eruption are on the whiteboard. (UC Berkeley photo by Michael Manga)

Sahand builds thermodynamical models that show how the thermal energy of water and steam drives geyser eruptions. His model, published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests geysers with a deeper water reservoir, that directly feeds the eruption have taller plumes.  The model hypothesis was verified when tested against a worldwide database of geyser plume height and reservoir depth, and then compared with data collected from Steamboat.

Sahand says the work is not finished; there are several questions that are left unanswered. Scientists still don’t know what initiated the current eruption phase that started in 2018. The other is more basic- why do geysers erupt?

“We know geysers need water, heat and a proper plumbing system. But we still do not know how the combination of these three factors lead to an eruption, “ says Sahand.

While the study rules out processes such as recent earthquakes or significant external water source (such as snowmelt) as factors for the sudden increase in activity, the mystery will keep scientists and Sahand looking for the answers.

For more information about the paper and other press coverage, go to the following links:

 

Chenguang Sun wins prestigious award from the Mineralogical Society of America

/0 Comments/in /by

Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Chenguang Sun (photo: J. Fitlow)

Mineralogical Society of America has selected EEPS postdoctoral researcher Dr. Chenguang Sun for the society’s 2021 MSA Award. The Mineralogical Society of America Award is intended to recognize outstanding published contributions to the science of mineralogy by relatively young individuals or individuals near the beginning of their professional careers. The work must have been accomplished either before reaching the age of 35 or within 7 years of the awarding of the terminal degree. Dr. Sun is recognized for his work on interpretation of trace elements in minerals and rocks and interactions between carbonatite and peridotite and genesis of kimberlitic magmas.

Dr. Sun received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2014 and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 2014 to 2016. Since summer of 2016, Dr. Sun has been a post-doctoral scholar at the EEPS department of Rice University. Starting this month, Dr. Sun will join University of Texas at Austin as a tenure-track assistant professor.

Kirsten Siebach

Kirsten Siebach selected for Mars 2020 Mission

/0 Comments/in /by

MIKE WILLIAMS

Martian geologist Kirsten Siebach among 13 chosen by NASA for rover mission

Kirsten Siebach has to persevere a little longer, waiting for her ship to come in.

That ship is in space, carrying a rover called Perseverance to Mars. And Siebach, a Martian geologist at Rice University, is now one of 13 scientists recently selected by NASA to help operate the rover and scout for samples that will eventually be returned to Earth.

An illustration shows the rover Perseverance, now on its way to Mars, and its PIXL instrument in operation. Kirsten Siebach, a Martian geologist at Rice University, is one of 13 scientists selected to help operate the rover. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

The rover, launched in July and landing next February, is the first of three missions that will relay pieces of the Red Planet back home. Perseverance will identify, analyze and then collect samples that scientists hope contain signs of ancient microbial life.

A second mission led by the European Space Agency will pick up the collected promising samples and launch them to Mars orbit. A third mission will dock with the orbiter, take the samples and bring them to Earth, likely in the early 2030s.

Siebach, an assistant professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, will be a main player in the first mission, helping direct Perseverance as it stops along an appointed path to look for interesting features and select the precious samples. Her proposal was one of 119 submitted to NASA for funding.

Kirsten Siebach

Kirsten Siebach

“Everybody selected to be on the team is expected to put some time into general operations as well as accomplishing their own research,” she said. “My co-investigators here at Rice and I will do research to understand the origin of the rocks Perseverance observes, and I will also participate in operating the rover.”

That duty, not unfamiliar to her as a member of the Curiosity rover team, will help her choose Mars rock and sand targets for analysis by Rice data scientist Yueyang Jiang, an expert in machine-learning algorithms, and research scientist Gelu Costin, a mineralogist.

“Because there is only one rover, the whole team at NASA has to agree about what to look at, or analyze, or where to drive on any given day,” Siebach said. “None of the rovers’ actions are unilateral decisions. But it is a privilege to be part of the discussion and to get to argue for observations of rocks that will be important to our understanding of Mars for decades.”

The landing site, the 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater, was selected for its history; it once hosted a lake and river delta where microbial life may have thrived over 3 billion years ago. Siebach is particularly excited to investigate carbonates, the products of atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolved in water that on Earth usually settle into the landscape as limestone. They often contain fossils.

“There are huge packages of limestone all over Earth, but for some reason it’s extremely rare on Mars,” she said. “This particular landing site includes one of the few orbital detections of carbonate and it appears to have a couple of different units including carbonates within this lake deposit. The carbonates will be a highlight of we’re looking for, but we’re interested in basically all types of minerals.”

A colorized image of Jezero Crater, the target for NASA’s Perseverance rover. Kirsten Siebach, a Martian geologist at Rice University, is one of 13 scientists selected to help operate the rover. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL

The primary instrument the Rice team will be using on Perseverance is PIXL, short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, which is designed to identify chemical elements while also providing closeups of soil and rocks with a resolution about the size of a grain of salt.

Siebach, Liang and Costin plan to develop computational and machine-learning methods that produce mineral maps of samples based on their high-resolution chemistry. They also aim to establish a context for samples that will eventually come back to Earth and could reveal the signatures of historic life on Mars.

It will take a couple months after landing to validate Perseverance before Siebach and the others get to start their scientific inquiry. Then the long game begins.

“Occasionally, something hits Mars hard enough to knock a meteorite out, and it lands on Earth,” she said. “We have a few of those. But we’ve never been able to select where a sample came from and to understand its geologic context. So these samples will be revolutionary.”