MEET stands for Monitoring Earth Evolution through Time.
The main goal of the MEET project is to investigate the Earth’s evolution since its creation, over 4.5 billion years ago. The three principal investigators are Alexander Sobolev (Université Grenoble Alpes, France), Stephen Sobolev (GFZ Potsdam, Germany), and John Valley (University of Wisconsin- Madison, USA).
This project will investigate two main questions: How has Earth’s chemical composition evolved over time? And what (...)

Read more

The establishing of new microanalytical platform in ISTerre (Figure 2) we consider as one of the major achievements in the first two years of project.
Using this new equipment, we developed a number of new in-situ analytical methods to analyze elemental and isotopic compositions of melt inclusions and host minerals. This allowed us to discover the most depleted in radiogenic 87Sr melt from Earth in a subset of melt inclusions in olivine from 3.3 billion years old mantle-derived melts (...)

Read more

The rate of formation of the continental crust and the time of the onset of subduction and recycling of the lithosphere is an unsolved problem in the history of the Earth of paramount importance. Our collaborations with Profs. Nadja Drabon and Annie Bauer have contributed to understanding an important geochemical change 3.7 billion years ago (3.7 Ga, Figures 3). The step-changes seen at ca 3.7 Ga in εHfT, U/Nb, and Sc/Yb correlate to εHfT patterns in nine other Archean terranes and (...)

Read more