Prof. Dr. Steven Goderis

Steven Goderis is a Research Professor and Pi of the ERC-CoG: Flux: Tracing the FLUX of cosmic dust arriving to Earth during the Phanerozoic.

RESEARCH QUESTION:

What constitutes the flux of extraterrestrial material reaching Earth, and how has it changed through time?

SUMMARY:

We live in a dynamic Solar System, where collisions have played an important role in shaping Earth throughout its history. Impacts may have contributed to the delivery of water and other volatiles, created hydrothermal environments capable of supporting life, and triggered global environmental crises, including the asteroid impact on the Yucatán Peninsula that caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

Steven Goderis is a Research Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel whose research spans early Solar System evolution, processes occurring on meteorite parent bodies, impact cratering, and global changes throughout Earth’s history. Since 2009, he has participated in expeditions to recover meteorites and micrometeorites from the blue-ice fields surrounding the Sør Rondane Mountains and elsewhere in Antarctica.

He is also Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant FLUX: Tracing the FLUX of Cosmic Dust Arriving to Earth During the Phanerozoic. The FLUX team studies modern and fossil micrometeorites to reconstruct how the influx of extraterrestrial material has changed over the last 500 million years. Their research combines fossil particles extracted from sedimentary rocks with meteorites and micrometeorites collected around the world, from the Atacama Desert to Greenland and Antarctica.

SAMPLES AND FIELD SITES:

My research encompasses a wide variety of materials, including impact-crater rocks, often recovered from drill cores, meteorites from Antarctica and hot deserts, micrometeorites, ores, carbonates, biominerals, and ice. These samples come from field sites around the world, including Norway, France, Germany, Italy, Greenland, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.

KEYWORDS:

Planetary science, cosmochemistry, meteoritics, micrometeorites, cosmic dust, impact cratering, early Solar System evolution, meteorite parent bodies, Phanerozoic Earth history, isotope geochemistry, elemental and trace element analysis, mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS, TIMS, LA-ICP-MS, ICP-QQQ, IRMS, and SIMS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF and µXRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM-EDS), electron-probe microanalysis (EPMA-WDS), and clean laboratory sample preparation.