Research

Weathering of uplifted continental rocks consumes carbon dioxide and transports cations to the oceans, thereby playing a critical role in controlling both seawater chemistry and climate. The knowledge of temporal evolution of seawater chemistry can help us decipher the interplay between tectonic collision driven orogeny of mountains and their subsequent chemical weathering driven drawdown of atmospheric CO2.

Our group is interested in using Earth observation data for monitoring and understanding the changes in the Earth system. Our core expertise is in processing and using geodetic datasets, such as GRACE, GNSS and altimetry, in tandem with other Earth observation datasets/models for mapping various surface processes that are related to climate change and human activities.

We are trying to understand how the deep mantle talks to the lithosphere; how big a role the mantle plays in explaining processes that we see on the Earth’s surface such as mountain building, plate motions, earthquakes, deformation.

Can you spot real seismograms in the figure above? Here, the time series highlighted in orange are real and the rest are virtual: similar to deepfakes in computer vision, we generated virtual seismograms after training a symmetry-constrained autoencoder neural network.

The Earth’s magnetic field is generated by a dynamo in its fluid outer core. Understanding the origin and evolution of the geomagnetic field is an important area of global research. In CEaS, we use fluid dynamical models and laboratory experiments to study core processes and the generation of the magnetic field. Dynamo models are used to simulate the magnetic fields of the Earth as well as those of other planets in the solar system. The seismic shear wave velocity variation in the lower mantle provides additional constraints on the physical state of the Earth’s interior, fundamental to the functioning of the dynamo. A state-of-the-art computational facility has been set up to perform direct numerical simulations of planetary cores.

Research in my group primarily involves application of radiogenic and stable isotope geochemistry of metals, major- and trace-element geochemistry, mineralogy and petrology as well as imaging techniques to different aspects of Earth and planetary sciences, including impact cratering and planetary processes, origin and evolution of Earth’s mantle and crust, weathering and water chemistry as well as deep-time paleoclimate studies.

This research focuses on global and regional climate change in time and space using isotope geochemistry to understand climatic and atmospheric processes.