Title: Mass transfer, deformation, and hydrologic evolution during basalt weathering.
The weathering of basalts makes an outsized contribution to the long-term global CO2 budget. There is strong coupling between weathering, plant colonization, mass loss, soil development and deformation. These interactions give rise to important hydrologic and landscape evolution in ways that we are only beginning to understand. There is also strong interaction between the development of weathered materials and the storage of soil carbon, out to time scales of > 10,000 yrs.
Weathering environments are open systems where we need to account for additions and buffering in addition to dissolution reactions and losses, creating real challenges for constraining net mass transfer. Derry will discuss natural and experimental systems that are helping us do a better job addressing some of the coupled processes involved. An important tool in geochemistry for dealing with open systems has been normalization to an “immobile” element – this approach has a long history (Ébelman 1855). New data from HFSEs and d49Ti help address what is “immobile” and how this normalization can be correctly applied in heterogeneous systems. Mass transfer is also associated with irreversible deformation and hydrologic evolution.
Derry will also discuss some implications for Enhanced Weathering as an engineered CO2 sink, which has recently received a lot of attention as a possible solution to excess emissions. What does our current understanding tell us about the potential efficacy of EW? What are appropriate methods of estimating carbon dioxide removal (CDR) via EW?
Louis Derry received a B.A. in Geology from Colorado College in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Harvard University in 1990. He also worked in the mineral exploration (Homestake Mining Co.) and petroleum (Chevron) industries. Following his doctoral work, Derry was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (CNRS) Nancy, France. He came to Cornell as a Snee Research Fellow in 1994 and joined the faculty in 1996. Derry is a Senior Scientist with the Kohala Center, Hawaii, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
