Caroline Martin

Dissolved Fluxes of the Taiwan Orogen: active mountain belts and Earth's thermostat

Chemical weathering of Earth’s surface and silicate weathering in particular, through consumption of atmospheric CO2, regulates the global carbon cycle and thus mediates climate over geological timescales.  Investigations that quantify global weathering rates focus primarily on fluvial fluxes, yet riverine input to the oceans is out of balance with the partnered loss of elements via subsequent reactions with, for example, the oceanic crust, giving rise to discrepencies in studies that rely on a quantification of ocean geochemical budgets. My research is focused on the role that groundwater circulation might play in drawing down CO2 by silicate weathering, and in quantifying the chemical weathering fluxes to the ocean attributable to subsurface processes. 

I collect groundwater samples primarily from two distinct reservoirs in the tectonically and climatically hyperactive Taiwan: alluvial-fill coastal plains and fractured-bedrock mountain aquifers.  Access to municipal wells enables the sampling of groundwaters at low elevations, but the exploitation of disused and used transport network tunnels is required in intercepting and tapping high-altitude, deeply sequestered H2O.

I am jointly funded by the O'Reilly Foundation and a Benefactors' Scholarship from St. John's College, Cambridge.  I have three, equally-invested supervisors here at Cambridge: Niels Hovius, Albert Galy and Mike Bickle, and rely on the personal and professional help of many friends here at the department to conduct my laboratory work.  I have been lucky enough to travel to Taiwan several times to collect samples, adventures which could not have been undertaken without the generous and kind assistance of too-many-to-mention-individually collaborators in Taiwan, and my honorary geologist, English literature professor husband, Deep.

 

 


Last updated on 02-Feb-12 12:31