Hundreds of geochemists congregated in Boston, MA, USA for Goldschmidt 2018, with many Deep Carbon Observatory scientists among their ranks. The annual meeting, organized by the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry, included participants from all four of DCO’s Science Communities (Extreme Physics and Chemistry, Reservoirs and Fluxes, Deep Energy, and Deep Life) as well as members of the Data Science, Modeling and Visualization, and Engagement groups.
For those available before the conference began, workshops and field trips brought small groups together. Local organizer and Deep Life scientist Dawn Cardace (University of Rhode Island, USA) co-led a two-day field trip to New Hampshire to examine current ecosystems and past tectonics. In Boston, Mark Ghiorso (OFM Research, USA) and colleagues hosted a weekend-long, hands-on workshop aimed at early career researchers on computational thermodynamics and fluid dynamics using the Enabling Knowledge Integration (ENKI) software portal, and Kerstin Lehnert (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, USA) and colleagues convened a day-long seminar on data science in geochemistry to expose researchers, especially early career scientists, to geochemical data resources and tools for mining, visualizing, and statistically analyzing the data, as well as to explore software tools and data resources that can advance the use of data science in geochemistry.
The meeting itself brimmed with a variety of exciting talks touching upon deep carbon science. Featured field expeditions included new results from Deep Life’s T-Limit (IODP Expedition 370) team, as well as presentations on the shallow hydrothermal vent fields of Prony Bay, the seamounts of the East Pacific Rise, and the Australian-Antarctic Discordance. Stories from the lab included presentations on the origins of blue diamonds, carbon substitution in the silicate mantle, and the origins of life on Earth. Several talks focused on the oxidation state of the mantle, including investigating garnet inclusions in diamonds, olivine-hosted melt inclusions, and fluid-rock modeling experiments. Last but not least, conference Co-chair Shuhei Ono (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) shared his new work on clumped isotopologues of methane.
DCO colleagues Fumio Inagaki (JAMSTEC, Japan) and Bernard Marty (CRPG, France) shared their work with a large proportion of conference attendees during two daily plenary lectures. Inagaki spoke about his lifelong quest to understand the limits of life on Earth, highlighting key ocean drilling expeditions and the technological and laboratory challenges overcome along the way, while Marty took the audience into space, focusing on the role of comets in the origins of Earth’s volatiles.
Goldschmidt 2018 also provided an opportunity to recognize achievement in geochemistry, and DCO’s Executive Committee Chair Craig Manning (University of California Los Angeles, USA) was recognized as a 2018 Geochemical Fellow.
Main image: Fumio Inagaki delivers a plenary lecture at Goldschmidt 2018. Credit: Gaël Kazaz
View more photos from the conference here.
