What do we know about the composition of the mantle (Part 2)? An Interview with Catherine Chauvel
As Goldschmidt shows each year, geochemistry is a small, but mighty field. Yet like many sub-fields in the Earth Sciences, geochemistry remains a male-dominated field. Women remain one of the under-represented groups at the top of the academic ladder, decreasing with each rung of seniority (Anand et al., 2024). This means that senior women scientists at the top of the geochemical ladder, although increasing in numbers, are still few and far between. So imagine my delight that there is a session dedicated to not one, but two women geochemists! The session “02l – Chemical heterogeneities in the Earth’s mantle (session in honor of Catherine Chauvel and Dominique Weis)” covers three oral sessions and an extensive poster session, a testament to the legacies of Drs. Weis and Chauvel.
(This is the second of a 2-part series dedicated to the work of Profs. Dominique Weis and Catherine Chauvel).
1. What did you think of the session?
Catherine Chauvel (CC): I loved it! There were a lot of discussions, talks, and the organizers made it so that there was thematic links between the presentations. The morning session covered the mantle heterogeneities from trace elements and radiogenic isotopes. The afternoon was all about the noble gases, which I have not done myself, but presented new information and independent constraints. The next session was about novel isotopic systems, which is the new frontier in the field. The presentations was a mixture of young people and more established researchers, with general perspectives/review presentations, and then there were other presentations with new exciting data, so the combination of the two was very nice.
2. The session is remarkable in its range of research contributions with respect to career stage, gender, nationality, etc. Why is it important to you to have a wide range of research ‘voices’ in the field?
CC: Having a wide range of type of scientists and subjects shows that the field is lively. When you have young people doing top science in the field, it’s good and shows that the field is active, and that science has somethings to discover. With regards to nationalities: I am French, whereas Dominique is Belgian but lives in Canada. The speakers of the session came from all sorts of countries, meaning that the field is active everywhere in the world.
3. Looking to the future, where do you see mantle geochemistry and geodynamics research heading?
CC: Two directions are promising: improvement of data with new isotopic systems and difficult measurements that offer new constraints that we didn’t have before. Using isotopes that people have not used before opens new doors. The short-lived radiogenic systems open new interpretations and demonstrate that some very old material are still sampled by mantle plumes. These are features that nobody has ever imagined before.
The second one is that collaboration with geophysicists and geodynamicists should be favoured. It is important to combine the two approaches, to understand what is going into the present-day mantle and what is being sampled by volcanoes. Geophysicists can see where the material that erupts from these volcanos comes from in the mantle, whereas the geochemists can characterize the materiasl. The combination of the two approaches is important ‘see’ the dynamics inside the mantle.
Honoree Biography
Prof. Catherine Chauvel is currently a CNRS geochemist and Directrice de Recherche (Research Director) at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris in France. Prof. Chauvel earned her PhD from the University of Rennes and has garnered awards and major grants including the AGU Norman L. Bowen Lecture and Daly Lecture, an ERC Advanced Grant (SHRED), and serves on the advisory board of journals including Chemical Geology and as associate editor of Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. Chauvel was the President of the Volcanology, Geochemistry and Petrology section of American Geophysical Union, and is a past-President of European Association of Geochemistry.
References
Anand, P., Bots, P., Gagnon, J., Appiah, F., Maters, E., Bhagwat, S., Little, S., Riches, A., ChiFru, E., Lawrence, A. and Ngwenya, B., 2024. You can’t climb a broken ladder: examining underrepresentation of multiply-disadvantaged groups in secure and senior roles in UK geochemistry. Earth Science, Systems and Society, 4(1), p.10098.