I have a broad interest in understanding how mountains form and how such processes are recorded in high-grade rocks. This often comes down to linking time (t), pressure (P) and temperature (T) recorded in minerals within a structural framework. My main project here at EOAS and the Swedish Museum of Natural History focuses on garnet, a key mineral that usually crystallizes from mineral reactions occurring when rocks get heated up and buried e.g. during the formation of a mountain. Not only garnet records, but it also often preserves, in each of its growth zones, important chemical and isotopic information —in a way often compared to the rings of a tree— that can be translatable into P, T, but also t. Dating single zones of garnet has logically been a long-standing goal: each of these zones has the potential to reveal a direct snapshot into the timing and condition of metamorphic processes; their compilation, the potential to unravel the pace, pressure and temperature evolution of mountains and deep processes therein. We are therefore developing here, at the PCIGR, a method to precisely and accurately date multiple single garnet zones using Lu-Hf. This project branches towards the overarching goal to improve our ability to capture how deep processes are recorded in rocks and understand how and how fast mountains have been shaping the Earth through time.
