Thirty years ago, we knew of no planets outside our Solar System. Today, astronomers have discovered more than six thousand, many of which resemble nothing in our solar backyard. Some of these exoplanets orbit so close to their star that a year on them lasts only a few hours. Their daysides reach temperatures above 3,000 degrees centigrade (above the boiling point of rock!), so their surfaces are oceans of magma overcast by rock clouds. Our home Earth briefly looked like this in the aftermath of the Giant Impact that formed the Moon. But what would the weather be like on a world made of molten and boiling rock? Would there be clouds of vaporized minerals, and would it rain lava? Until recently, we could not answer these questions for one simple reason: no one knew how rock behaves at such high temperatures, how it boils, and how much heat it carries. It is difficult to recreate those conditions in an ordinary laboratory. So, my group decided to make magma oceans and lava rains inside a supercomputer. In this talk, I will describe how we use quantum mechanics to calculate the properties of molten and vaporized rock atom by atom, properties that no experiment has measured. These calculations revealed information about 55 Cancri e, a famous lava planet whose bloated size has puzzled astronomers for years.

Junjie “JJ” Dong is an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University. His research group studies the physics and chemistry of planetary materials. Prior to joining Stony Brook, he was a Stanback Fellow in Comparative Planetary Evolution at Caltech. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research group uses a combination of high-pressure experiments and quantum-mechanical simulations to study how rock, iron, and ice behave at extreme temperatures and pressures from the Earth's core to the rock vapor atmosphere of planets orbiting other stars. Their work provides key information that allows astronomers to infer the structure of planets located thousands of trillions of miles away.

 

 

Three upcoming missions to Venus, VERITAS, EnVision, and DAVINCI, will investigate the planet’s surface geology in the next decade. Past missions have revealed that Venus is similar to Earth in size and bulk composition but has an extreme surface environment, widespread volcanic plains, and a geologic history that remains poorly constrained due to limited compositional data. VERITAS and EnVision will provide global radar and spectroscopic observations to map surface morphology and composition, while DAVINCI will probe the atmosphere to better understand Venus’s climate evolution. In particular, Venus orbital spectroscopy from the VERITAS mission will enable quantitative interpretation of surface geology by measuring emissivity variations related to rock composition. Achieving this requires detailed analysis of terrestrial analog samples, such as basalt and granite, to develop and calibrate spectral models that link laboratory measurements to orbital observations, ultimately allowing us to constrain the surface geology and geochemical evolution of the planet Venus.

Dr. Laura B. Breitenfeld is a Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University and an Associate Research Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Laura is a mineralogist and planetary scientist who utilizes vibrational spectroscopy techniques to characterize geologic materials on Earth and across the solar system. Her planetary science research includes remote sensing of Venus, Mars, the Moon, and asteroids as well as laboratory measurements of extraterrestrial samples and their analogs. Laura is motivated to answer fundamental mineralogy questions for a wide range of mineral groups by utilizing quantitative methods such as multivariate analysis. Her primary research goal is to understand the nature and distribution of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon across our solar system. 

The Orkney Islands in northern Scotland have become a natural laboratory for the exploration of dietary isotopes related to maritime human and animal lifeways. Specifically, the island of North Ronaldsay has been the focus of this research thanks to a humble and yet remarkable animal, the North Ronaldsay sheep. The North Ronaldsay sheep are an ancient breed that arrived on the island during the British Neolithic period (at least 5,000 years ago). What makes these sheep remarkable and useful for research is that they are adapted to having a diet that is exclusively or near exclusively seaweed. Seaweed is the world’s oldest complex, multicellular plant, and humans have been using it for food for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. The ability to detect seaweed in ancient mammal diets, especially in the absence of historical writing or art, is very difficult. A biogeochemical proxy is needed, and boron isotopes is a good candidate. Seaweed is rich in boron and provides a boron isotope value that is distinct from other plants on North Ronaldsay. The sheep on North Ronaldsay, and their seaweed diet, provide a unique means to assess boron’s potential to act as a proxy for seaweed in ancient mammal diets as well as to begin to study mammal boron physiology.

Dr. Carrie Wright is a bioarcheologist and archaeological scientist specializing in isotope biogeochemisty. Carrie works to investigate ancient peoples’ (and animals’) lives through their skeletons. We write our life stories on and in our bones and teeth: the food we eat, the changes that happen to our bones as we grow and age, the bones we break and heal, the sicknesses we may suffer, and even, possibly, our social behaviors. Carrie looks for surface clues on skeletons (bioarchaeology) for evidence of things like disease, stress, and injury as well as using the bones to estimate a person’s age-at-death, their sex, their stature, and possibly their ancestry. She then does chemical analysis on small bone and dental samples to determine carbon, oxygen, strontium, calcium, and/or boron isotope values, which provides information about a person’s diet, their mobility (see if a person moved from place to place), and to see if we can learn about the natural environment in which a person lived. Bringing these two approaches together, bioarchaeology and biogeochemistry, is what allows the stories of people that lived and died thousands of years ago to be told.

The behavior and physical properties of critical minerals and rocks under extreme pressure and/or temperatures are of paramount importance for a range of technological and scientific applications, ranging from nuclear and energy sciences to the study of the deep interior of the Earth. Currently, much of this information is obtained from laboratory investigations involving experimental measurements and first principles calculations. In this talk, I will present data on some selected critical minerals under extreme conditions obtained using synchrotron X-radiation and ultrasound. In addition, studies of Earth materials under pressure and temperature conditions will be used to demonstrate their applications to advance our current understanding of the mineralogical composition of the Earth and other planets.

Baosheng Li received his PhD in Geophysics from Stony Brook University in 1996. He joined Mineral Physics Institute as a faculty member in 1997 and then the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University in 2018. His research focuses on the study of critical minerals and rocks under extreme pressure and temperature conditions and their applications in modern technology, nuclear and energy sciences, as well as advancing current understanding of the interior of the Earth and other planets.

Meteorites are fragments of asteroids that record the chemical and physical conditions of the early solar system. By studying their chemical composition, we can learn a lot about how the first solids formed, how asteroids evolved, and how the building blocks for planets and possibly life on Earth originated. Additionally, samples collected directly from the surface of asteroids enable direct chemical and mineralogical investigations of pristine solar system materials, and also provide ground truth for interpreting the chemical composition and history meteorites. We use spectroscopic and microscopic methods to investigate chemical composition of carbonaceous chondrites and returned asteroid samples to better understand their formation and evolution in space. In this talk, I will present what we’ve learned from their laboratory investigations and demonstrate how state-of-the-art analytical techniques allow us to reconstruct the conditions and chemical pathways that transformed cosmic dust into the diverse materials we find in meteorites today

According to the USGS “A critical mineral is one that is important for specialized applications yet is at risk for supply disruption”. Rare Earth Elements (REEs) fit this definition. They are essential components that underpin technologies important to advanced energy systems and national security, for example. Their uneven global distribution, concentration of production in a few countries, and environmentally intensive extraction processes pose significant geopolitical and sustainability challenges. Research and policy efforts increasingly focus on diversifying supply sources through geological exploration, substitution, and circular economy (recycling) approaches. Securing resilient and sustainable access to REEs is the challenge of our time. Such challenges are not without precedence in human history, where we see that from the stone age to the present, technological innovation has depended critically on mineralogical research.

The Basin and Range Province and the Colorado Plateau provide an exceptional setting to study how deep Earth processes shape landscapes. The relative roles of crustal rebound, mantle-driven uplift, and lithospheric forces in driving Cenozoic extension and canyon formation remain debated. We use numerical models that combine mantle flow, lithospheric stresses, plate boundary changes, and surface processes to reconstruct the region’s history since the late Eocene. Our results show that high topography supported by a thick crustal root generated strong gravitational forces that drove large-scale crustal stretching and the rise of metamorphic core complexes as the crust collapsed. These forces, together with the shift from subduction to Pacific–North America plate motion, explain the observed directions and magnitudes of extension. Slab rollback and related mantle flow mainly weakened the lithosphere by adding heat, melts, and fluids. The models also reproduce drainage reorganizations—from northeast-directed flow onto the Colorado Plateau, to later southward and then southwestward flow—helping explain the timing and pathways of Grand Canyon development. Together, these results highlight how mantle processes, lithosphere dynamics, and surface evolution combine to sculpt landscapes in southwestern North America.