Lucy Schlicht
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Lucy Schlicht about her participation in the Goldschmidt Conference 2018 in Boston, USA from 12 to 17 August 2018
The Goldschmidt Conference is one of the largest conferences in the field of geochemistry worldwide. This year the conference was held in Boston from 12 to 17 August 2018, where over 3000 researches from countries all over the world presented their results in over 100 sessions in a broad range of topics related to geochemical questions.
One of the key topics of my research is to understand the behavior of boron isotopes in hydrothermal systems associated with the oceanic crust in arc and back-arc settings. The main goals are to get deeper insights to how fluid-rock interactions affect the compositions of altered crust and discharging fluids, how isotopic fractionation processes make changes to associated reservoirs, and to detect fluid sources and reconstruct the relative timing of alteration stages. At the Goldschmidt conference, I presented a poster about boron isotopes in hydrothermal altered rocks from the drilling cruise expedition ODP Leg 193, a back-arc basin within the Manus Basin in the Western Pacific close to Papua New Guinea that perfectly matched the session topic “03a: The fifth element: Boron isotope geochemistry”. During the poster session many interesting discussions arose and I got a lot of helpful feedback that will help me with my future research. Beside the poster session, there was also a related oral session with many interesting research studies that showed a good selection of the most recent approaches of boron isotopes ranging from climate to soil forming to metamorphic and hydrothermal processes related topics. Due to the specialized session with focus on boron isotopes, many well-established researches in the field of boron isotopes attended the conference that offered great opportunities for networking and insights to state-of-the-art research.
The broad range of session topics and research presented also allowed to learn about complete new research fields and to get in contact with researches from others fields to potentially find new approaches to use boron isotopes to study fluid-rock interaction processes.
Overall, the attendance in the Goldschmidt conference was a great benefit for my research and got in contact with many specialized researches in my field of interested but also beyond. I kindly thank GLOMAR for the financial support that gave me the opportunity to participate in this highly interesting conference.
