Water Planet Events

Water Planet

An Umbrella Project at the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics

Water Planet Events

In addition to seminars, the Water Planet holds periodic activities and events. Please scroll below to see an overview of some of these.

September 2019

Following the Water: Art, Geology and Education

Slănic Moldova is a place where art and nature mix thanks to the In Context programme. For more than three years now, Alina Teodorescu has been inviting artists and musicians from all over the world to her atelier to experience Slănic’s nature and culture and create new artwork. Through the language of art she also teaches to kids of the local schools the importance of protecting our planet and eco-sustainability. Educating the young generations to these topics is clearly essential not only for our future, but also for our present. Just look at what is happening with the movement that activist Greta Thunberg started. And this is where we come in. Geology and Education.

From left to right: (1) In Context atelier and its striking pink tower, (2) the inside of the atelier, (3) Carmen and Alina chatting at the local school in front of an artwork made in Slănic Moldova by Indian artists.

Carmen Gaina (CEED director) and Valentina Magni (CEED researcher), invited by the In Context programme, visited Slănic Moldova in September. This small town of Romania is located in the south-east part of the Carpathian mountains. Tourists come here for its mineral water springs, artists come here to be inspired by its nature, and we came here to talk to high school students about geology, plate tectonics, and the environment. And as an extra perk for us, we also got to explore the surroundings and look at the geology of the region.

Map of the Carpathian mountain chain and the subduction zone location (with triangles on the overriding plate showing the dip direction of subduction)

The Carpathians are a relatively young mountain chain that formed as a continuation of the Alps due to subduction of a small ocean basin. As this plate was sinking into the Earth’s mantle, it released water, creating the perfect conditions for the mantle above it to melt, rise at the surface, and form new volcanoes (see Water & Volcanism). Subduction and generation of new volcanism migrated progressively towards South-East, where a small part of the slab is still present at depth and where volcanic activity at the surface is very recent (up to 200 kyr ago). Slănic Moldova is at the northern edge of this slab remnant in the accretionary prism of the Carpathian mountains. Walking around this region you can often find layers of sediments that have been tilted and deformed during nappes formation.

From top to bottom: (1) Carmen and (2) Valentina giving lectures to the highschool students of Oneşti, (3) group pictures with Alina and the volunteers and teachers involved in the project.

The recent tectonic and volcanic history is tightly linked to the presence of large salt diapirs (like that of Târgu Ocna Salina) and numerous mineral water springs. These waters have different characteristics depending on what the hostrock they travel through and dissolve is; some are more salty, some are more metallic, some have that rotten egg smell typical of sulphur, and some can even be set on fire. But more importantly, they all have healing properties. The Târgu Ocna Salina is also used for curative purposes by people with respiratory problems. Here, salt is extracted for commercial use, but when you go down 8 floors and 240 m you find yourself in a large playground where you can drive a kart, play basketball, volleyball, football, table tennis, chess, and just relax while breathing air that is good for you.

From a geological perspective, this region is a great place to study how the solid Earth interacts with water at different depths and time scales.

From left to right: (1) Sediments layers and (2) one of the mineral water springs in Slănic Moldova, (3) inside the Târgu Ocna Salina.

June 2019

Water Planet Seminar Day @ CEED Summer Party

The first day of the CEED summer party (17th June, 2019), we held a seminar day on the theme “Water Planet” in the beautiful venue of Hafslund Hovegård. Water was the overarching theme of all talks, going from the deep Earth’s interior to the solar system, passing through ocean floor, sea level, and glaciers.

Plenary discussion at the Water Planet Seminar

The invited speakers Martha Pamato (University of Padova), Philip Brandl (Geomar), Pippa Whitehouse (Durham University), Laurent Montesi (University of Maryland), and CEED researchers Razvan Caracas, Krister Karlsen, Sergei Medvedev, and Agata Krzesinska gave great overviews on different water-related topics that set up the base for a couple of hours of group discussions, interrupted only by a waffles break. At the end of the day of talks and discussions, we might have left with more questions than those we had when we started, but that is the exciting part, because it means there is a lot we can do.

Mantle Water

More water than previously thought can be stored in different minerals in the Earth’s mantle, especially in the transition zone between upper and lower mantle. But how much water is there in the mantle? And how is it distributed? Because it is subducting slabs that bring most of the water into the mantle, we expect that this water is not uniformly distributed, instead, it is likely that the mantle is composed of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ regions. How do plumes and slabs interact with these ‘wet’ regions in the mantle? For instance, water changes the rheological properties, and thus can influence the vigor of mantle convection and plate tectonics. Finally, the presence of water in the mantle affects elasticity, seismic velocities and electrical conductivity. However, with today’s tools it is still difficult to detect it and thus it is hard to validate models and hypothesis.

Seafloor Water

Ocean floor bathymetry affects ocean circulation, which, in turn, influences the climate. It is important to achieve higher resolution for the bathymetry, by looking into morphological parameters and using machine-learning techniques. This approach could also be useful to study serpentinized bodies in the ocean floor. Much more can be done to understand the chemical reactions occurring between seawater and oceanic crust, from ridges to old crust. The distribution of these serpentinized regions can tell us something about previous tectonics (i.e., spreading velocities, type of passive margins,…) and could provide better constrains on the volumes of water stored in oceanic plates before they subduct. Finally, we discussed hydrothermal systems, which not only have a huge effect on the presence of life in the oceans, but also are sites in which we find metal deposits. How do these systems start? What is their role in the cooling of the oceanic crust? Can the distribution pattern of inactive vents give us information on the tectonic processes taking place during their formation?

Land Water

Melting glaciers produce sea level rise. However, locally, the feedback between a melting glacier, the sea level, and the isostatic response of the solid earth is more complex and not easy to predict. In some scenarios, the changes in sea level can actually slow down the melting process, but this is not always the case. Understanding these processes is crucial to understand the past, present and future sea level. A feedback exists also between glacial isostatic rebound and volcanism (through decompression melting) for example in Iceland. Can this be important also elsewhere or have been important in the past (e.g., during the snowball Earth)? Water also plays a key role in metamorphic reactions and weathering. In mountain ranges, for instance, erosion produces exhumation, enhancing weathering reactions that can change the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, sedimentation produces subsidence. These processes, therefore, play an important part in climate changes and regional tectonic history; however, the feedback between them is very complex and hard to understand.

Planetary Water

The presence of water on planetary bodies and, more generally, in the solar system and beyond has always been a hot topic. A big question is still what is the origin of the water on Earth and other planets? And what is the short-term and long-term fate of this water? For instance, why and how did Venus desiccate? Understanding the fate of water is important because it has a role on the internal structure of planets (and other bodies) and on possible volcanism. The presence of ice on the surface of a planetary body would also have an effect on the impact crater formation, but how might this affect cratering statistics?

May / June 2019

MAGPIE Fieldwork in Greenland

CEED's MAGPIE project started in the spring of 2019 and the first item on the agenda was fieldwork on the Greenland Ice Sheet!

A snow-level view of MAGPIE fieldwork, from a station only a few km from the EastGRIP camp (the camp is barely visible on the horizon on the left side).

The MAGPIE fieldwork team, led by CEED associate Kate Selway, included CEED team members Clint Conrad and Maaike Weerdesteijn. They were on the ice sheet for about four weeks, based out of EastGRIP camp. During this time they performed the first ever magnetotelluric survey of the ice sheet, which will help us to understand the water content and temperature structure of the upper mantle beneath Greenland, and the glacial isostatic adjustment that should result from these structures.

You can read more about the MAGPIE adventures, and view many photos from the ice, at the MAGPIE Blog.