Elmar Albers

The EGU Galileo Conference ‘Exploring new frontiers in fluid processes in subduction zones’ took place at Schloss Seggau in Leibnitz, Austria, from 24 to 29 June. With just above 40 attendees the informal meeting was small but highly specialized. Scope of the conference was to improve the understanding of fluid-mediated processes in subduction zones that are a key question in Earth sciences. Despite its significance on a global scale, the quantitative understanding of the role of fluids on large-scale mass exchange between Earth’s reservoirs remains limited. The EGU conference aimed at building a community around fluid processes in subduction zones to joint individual efforts lead by the different communities.

The state-of-the-art was outlined in keynote presentations designed to trigger discussion of important aspects of the conference topic. Further, recent findings were presented in the form of oral and poster presentations the conference attendees. About 50% of the conference time was dedicated to debate and dialogue. A voluntary mid-conference field trip to the Pohorje Massif, Slovenia, was offered on Wednesday. On the last conference day, future research directions were discussed at a final round table. My own contribution was a talk with the title ‘Carbon mobilisation in the shallow Mariana subduction zone: insights from IODP Exp. 366’ in the theme ‘Natural observations—the rock perspective’. I presented results from an ongoing study, which prooves of previously undescribed trapping of carbon in carbonate mineralisations inside the forearc of a subduction system. Results strongly suggest that the carbon was derived from the subducting plate and is hence not returned back into the convecting mantle. Our findings highlight the mobility of carbon in shallow portions of subduction zones and contribute to the understanding of the deep carbon cycle. A short discussion after my talk as well as later in-depth debates with other PhD students and leading scientists in the field were fruitful and showed that other researchers in the community are highly interested in our work.

I hence successfully advertised our work and could expand my scientific network. In particular during the discussion sessions, which were held in small groups, I could further significantly increase my knowledge on past achievements on fluid-related processes in subduction zones and could as well contribute to the discussion based on my scientific background. I kindly thank GLOMAR for the financial support to attend this conference.