Dr. John Luczaj Publishes Article in Minerals Journal
UW-Green Bay Geoscience professor John Luczaj, along with 4 current and former undergraduate students, is a coauthor of a collaborative research article with other faculty and students in the U.S. and China. The coauthors include 4 current and former UW-Green Bay undergraduate students (Neda Mobasher, Justice Saxby, Eryn Carney, and Arianna Hilbert), along with colleagues from Texas (several undergraduate students and Dr. Dan Lehrmann), researchers from New York, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, and a professor from Guizhou University in China (Xiaowei Li). Luczaj and his colleagues are excited about this project because it is a great example of collaborative research with multiple institutions and technologies that was funded by an NSF Collaborative Research Undergraduate institution grant (to UWGB and Trinity University). It is also an example of a laboratory-based project that achieved success despite initiating during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The work, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, is the culmination of several years of work to understand how limestone rocks are changed to the mineral dolomite during and after deposition. This article focused on the Yangtze Platform, a Triassic age oceanic environment in south China in which limestone was deposited and later altered to dolomite at elevated temperatures (100 to 200°C) in the presence of brines. The research involved field research in China, geochemical analysis, fluid-inclusion microthermometry, Laser Ablation Uranium-Lead age dating (using LA-ICPMS), and stable isotope analysis to work out the history of water-rock interaction. At least one additional paper is forthcoming that is related to the Great Bank of Guizhou, a Triassic isolated carbonate platform farther east of the Yangtze margin. That research involves some of the same students, but also two other students from UW-Green Bay that began working on the project in Summer 2023.
A link to the article in the journal Minerals: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/15/3/324
