Nickel is part of our everyday life, from the coins we have in our pockets, to the utensils we use in our dining tables, and the smartphones and laptops we are probably reading this with. Nickel laterite deposits are the world’s main source of nickel, accounting for 60% of the global nickel production. These are layered iron-rich deposits formed by weathering of ultramafic rocks in tropical to subtropical regions. Most are found in accretionary terrains (e.g., Indonesia, Philippines, New Caledonia) where upper mantle lithologies are transformed into ophiolite complexes. In nicke ..read more

Bruno at Kilauea. Photo by Corliss Sio I am a second-year PhD Student at the University of Toronto, Canada under the supervision of Prof Corliss Kin I Sio. I was very honoured to be one of the first recipients of the TravelingGeologist Field Scholarship that supported sampling for my PhD in the Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii, USA. I am studying the kinetics involved during the entrapment of melt inclusions in magmatic systems. Melt inclusions are small pockets of magma trapped inside host crystals (such as olivine, pyroxene, plagioclase, etc) that are supposed to record the chemical composition of th ..read more

Dieke is a master’s student Earth, Structure and Dynamics Masters at Utrecht University, currently working on her graduation thesis in paleomagnetism. Plate reconstructions are essential tools in tectonic, palaeogeography, -climate, -oceanography, and -biology studies. Apparent polar wander paths (APWPs) provide quantitative information to create these plate reconstructions and their calculation requires that the palaeosecular variation (PSV) of the geomagnetic field is adequately recorded and averaged. This is straightforward for volcanic datasets, which provide spot readings of the paleoma ..read more

Roberto Téllez-Vizcaíno has a master’s degree in applied geosciences and is passionate about volcanoes. He will soon be a doctoral student at the Potosino Institute of Scientific and Technological Research. Born curious, his interest in volcanology dates back to his hometown Colima, the place of the Colima Volcano of Fire. He conducted research for his master’s thesis on the stratigraphy and volcanology of the Xoxoctic Tuff of the Los Humeros Volcanic Complex in Puebla, Mexico. He is the creator of the Facebook page on volcanic disclosure “Infovolcán“, with more than 20 thousand followers. I ..read more

Douwe van Hinsbergen is Professor of Global Tectonics and Paleogeography at Utrecht University. He led teams that focused on tectonic reconstructions of the Tethyan and Panthalassa realms from reconstructing orogens, studies subduction initation, mantle structure and evolution, to unravel the drivers of plate tectonics. He is an avid field geologist focused on structure, stratigraphy, paleomagnetism, and everything else that is useful to unearth now-subducted lithosphere. In 2017, my team from Utrecht University (the Netherlands) joined forces with friends from the University of Calcutta (In ..read more

Sarah WM George is a postdoc in the Arizona LaserChron Center at University of Arizona.  She is a tectonic sedimentologist who is interested in integrating records of tectonics, magmatism, and climate, and likes to tinker with new developments in petrochronology. It’s hard to beat the Central Andes when studying Cordilleran processes—with protracted shortening since the latest Cretaceous to earliest Cenozoic, these mountains show extreme retroarc shortening (in excess of 300 km) and other end-member Cordilleran features such as basement-cored foreland uplifts, delamination, and pla ..read more

Josephine DiMaurizio grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. As of September 2021, she will be completing her final year at Queens University with a BSc Honours and a Specialization in Geology. She will be working under Chris Spencer to complete her honours thesis in the characterization of hydraclubbioknikokex7njhwuahc2l67lfiz7z36md2jvopda7nchid.onion metamorphic history and geochemical characteristics of what is thought to be the youngest blueschist in the world, found on the Indonesian island of Leti. Josephine plans to continue her education through a master’s degree. Growing up in t ..read more

Vitor Barrote is a postdoc at the RUB University in Germany where he studies isotopes and resources. He is also the host of the Gneiss Chats podcast, where he adopts the pseudonym of Dr. B. Fieldwork in geology is not always a synonym for long hours of walking under the blazing sun. Very often geologists have to conduct fieldwork in areas with very limited rock exposure and when that is the case you have to resort to other ways of finding and describing rocks. This is commonplace in the life of economic geologists. A lot of the scientific advances that are made in the field of ore deposit ..read more

Originally from Brazil, Bruna is a research fellow at the University of Padua in Italy. Her research involves the study of anatexis and fluid regime of the deep portions of the continental crust using melt and fluid inclusions. Find out more about her work here. Large scale partial melting of deep levels of the continental crust and subsequent segregation of granitic magma to the upper crust are the processes that ultimately resulted in the differentiation of the outermost portion of our planet. Therefore, investigation of those processes is fundamental to shed light on how the place we live ..read more

Viktor Bertrandsson Erlandsson is originally from Gothenburg, Sweden, where he did his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He is currently a PhD student in economic geology at the Montanuniversität Leoben in Austria. His PhD project brought him to Namibia to collect samples from a sediment-hosted copper-cobalt deposit, which he now studies back in the labs. He primarily focuses on sulfide geochemistry by utilizing his method of choice, laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). During the first year of my Master’s degree, I was fortunate enough to join the yearly ..read more