Deep time in deep Earth: using the relationship between trace elements and transport properties to constrain deep Earth processes

Time is the great unknown in many geological processes. While great progress has been made dating the geological record, working out the duration of many events is still in its infancy. The timing of geological processes are particularly poorly constrained where they take hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years, because such durations cannot easily be resolved by traditional geochronology yet are far too long for direct study. This project will investigate experimentally the connection between trace elements, chemical potentials and diffusivities in rock-forming minerals at high temperatures and pressures, with the aim of constraining the duration of deep Earth processes from trace-element zoning preserved in these minerals.