ERL FISH Seminar – Frieder Klein (WHOI)

Back to Calendar
When:
December 1, 2023 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
2023-12-01T12:00:00-05:00
2023-12-01T13:00:00-05:00
Where:
54-209 and Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/3672871694
Categories
Department Lecture Series

Title: Hydrogen and Methane formation During Hydrothermal Alteration of Mantle Rocks in Oceanic Settings 

Abstract: The hydrothermal alteration of mantle rocks, referred to as serpentinization, is known to create extremely reducing conditions and generate abundant molecular hydrogen via the oxidation of ferrous iron to ferric iron by water. Some of the hydrogen reacts with carbon dioxide to form abiotic methane. However, the conditions of hydrogen and methane formation remain incompletely understood. In this seminar, Frieder will discuss some of his research on serpentinization in oceanic settings where mantle rocks are particularly abundant and exposed to heated seawater. Field observations of altered mantle rocks recovered by scientific drilling will be complemented by hydrothermal laboratory experiments, and theoretical models to assess the fundamental controls of hydrogen and methane formation during serpentinization. 

Short bio: Frieder is an Associate Scientist with tenure in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). He received his Ph.D. at the University of Bremen where he was first introduced to serpentinization processes by his advisor Wolfgang Bach in 2006. He was a postdoc in Granada (Spain), Woods Hole, and Boulder, before becoming a member of the scientific staff at WHOI in 2011. He loves going to sea, where collects rocks using human occupied vehicles, cooking rocks at elevated pressures and temperatures, modeling hydrothermal processes, and analyzing rocks (and all kinds of other samples) in his lab.

Aboout this series: The MIT Earth Resources Laboratory’s Friday Informal Seminar Series (FISH) features talks by our lab members as well as special guests from academia and the energy industry on our areas of interest including geothermal energy, carbon sequestration, machine learning for geophysics, multiphase flow, subsurface imaging, and uncertainty quantification. Titles and abstracts will be posted here when available. For more info or Zoom password please contact erl-info@mit.edu.