I am a PhD. student at the School of Earth and Space Exploraiton at Arizona State University. During my time as an undergrad, I became exposed to the undiscovered potential of many areas within planetary science. Within this broad and diverse field, I began to focus my research interest around a group of meteorites thought to come from an early-formed, differentiated asteroid. I spent my junior year studying the shock effects within the rocks that resulted from high-velocity impacts billions of years ago. These shock effects provide a glimpse into the peak pressures and temperautres experienced and can help provide context into the impact history of the parent body. In my senior year, I began working more closely with Professor Mélanie Barboni after the exciting discovery of 17 zircon grains in a eucrite meteorite. With Professor Barboni’s expertise in realizing the utility of zircon, I began to shift my research focus to unraveling the complex geochemical history of early-formed bodies. Zircon can be used as a novel tool in geochemistry as not only does it record the decay of U-Pb, but also contains a wealth of chemical tracers to track chemical processes occuring over millions of years, such as planetary differentaion, magmatic evolution and impacts. Over the course of my PhD., I plan to fully characterize zircon across many meteorite families to better understand the evolution of rocky planets in our solar system as well as providing a foundation for exploring the geochemistry of exoplanets.
Éamonn Needham (graduate student)
As a Ph.D. student in Dr. Barboni’s AMAZING Lab, I analyze zircons to answer questions about the Earth and the Moon using major and trace elements. From a young age, I have been fascinated by volcanic eruptions and how they shaped the Earth and human history. As a result of that fascination, I spent my undergrad researching experimental and physical volcanology topics. For my senior thesis, I experimentally linked groundmass crystal textures in obsidian-pyroclasts to the eruption dynamics of silicic magmas. Upon arriving at ASU, I exchanged my experimental toolkit for a geochemistry one, while still focusing on magma research. My Ph.D. project focuses on better understanding magma evolution in planetary bodies using trace elements in major and accessory minerals. To achieve this goal, I am working with lunar zircons collected during the Apollo missions to better constrain the composition of early lunar magmas, which are primary products of planetary differentiation. With the subsequent intense bombardment of the lunar surface, my research requires analysis of terrestrial zircons from an impact structure in Canada as proxies, to determine how impacts reset zircon geochemical information. And finally, by analyzing zircons that crystallized during subduction-related magmatism, we can better understand silicic crusts by investigating the conditions of shallow silicic magmatism. These research focuses will lead to better understanding of the history of magmas from planetary formation to matured and differentiated planetary bodies.