Reports: G8
47853-G8 Capillary Tension in Reactive Two-Phase Flow
The research in this project led to two major outcomes. The first part of this project led to the formulation of a new theoretical formulation for magma migration and two-phase flow that incorporates the Gibbs-Thompson effect. This formulation was able to identify two different mechanisms of surface tension-driven magma migration. This work also demonstrated that these two mechanisms can operate simultaneously at different length scales. A number of experimental observations on melt migration were explained by these results. This work is in press with Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The second part of the project involved Xiaoming Liu's Masters thesis research under my joint supervision on combining field observation of chemically reactive metamorphic fluids with a two-dimensional model of reactive porous flow. Using her model, xiaoming was able to identify that advective transport of pore-fluid can explain a number of yet unexplained features of radioactive isotopes distribution in metamorphic rocks. This grant provided partial support for Xiaoming's graduate assistantship. Currently, an article is in preparation with Xiaoming as the first author.
Finally, travel support from this grant enabled undergraduate/continuing graduate student Jodi Gaeman to present her undergraduate research on chemical fractionation and thermal evolution of Neptune's moon, Triton, in an international conference. This grant also supported undergraduate students Mathew Abbott from the University of Maryland and Alexandra-Selene Jarvis from Dickinson college, to carry out their summer research. Mathew studied the relationship between the melt geometry and their chemical signature while Alexandra worked on model ling chemical fractionation of a cooling magma ocean.
