Thank You Kirsty the first thing
I'll say is can everybody hear me
because I'm not very good at standing
behind podiums with microphones. I assume
that's a yes. Okay so what has been a
linking theme in what I've done over the
years as a geologist since I've been in
Brighton and before then involves always
rocks and water so I think most people
are familiar with the water cycle this
is an image from the United States
Geological Survey and we've got the
surface water system and Kirstie's
already mentioned the ground water
system which is vitally important
particularly if you live in Brighton about 90%
of your tap water comes out of the
aquifer rather from surface water
reservoirs but what I really want to
focus on today starts down much deeper
than this and I want to look at what's
happening deep down in the earth system
and the way water reacting with rocks
generates some of the resources we're
going to need in the next 20 years to
move away from carbon intensive energy
production. So we're going to be way down
below the lowest part of this diagram
because what water is doing down there
is driving some major geological
processes so I'm not a volcanologist
this isn't my photograph of a volcano
but this is Mount Mayon in the
Philippines
last year erupting quite violently and
what powers this type of eruption is the
water that's held deep down in the earth
that's dissolved in the magma and which,
as it comes out of solution expands,
drives up fluid pressure and drives
fluid volcanism so this partly is visual
aid number one I could demonstrate the
power of hydraulic pressure if I gave
this bottle of something quite nice a
really good shake and took the wire off
and left it in the middle of the stage
and I can see the AV people blanching as
I say that so we'll save that for later
but you all understand the power of
fluid pressure and we can find the
record of that deep down in the rocks
this is the summit of a hill called Kuru
Navara in northern Sweden and what we've
got here is the remains of a lava flow
but it's been blown apart by fluid
pressure and then the water that's
caused that explosion has precipitated
minerals in between these blocks of lava
cemented the thing up and this is next
to 2 billion tons of iron ore so the
deep fluids that are powering these
geological processes are responsible for
carrying the metals that make the
resources we need for development and
that's going to be a theme I'm going to
talk about so the first question is what
is the toolkit we can use to look at
these kind of things and I started
worrying about that down in Cornwall
during my PhD and then as I worked for
the Natural History Museum we moved up
to Sweden. So this is Cornwall and this
is batalik for anyone who's familiar
with it
tin mine Aiden Turner's just around the
corner with his shirt off if anyone's
looking for Poldark in that but all shot
through the granite sink or more we've
got veins, quartz veins and they hold the
tin and tungsten, so the first thing we
can do to look for evidence of what
water's done deep down in the rock cycle
is look for the evidence in the rocks
I'll just say there's a photograph of my
hammer here and I go away to do these
things and my children always come back
and say why are you taking photographs
of your hammer daddy mostly it's for scale
we're looking at what scale that is so
if we look at the rocks we can look at
what the evidence is for these fluid
processes. So this is magnetite breccia.
already we said this on the summit of Carew Navarra within the iron ore at Carew Navarra we
can see individual crystals and minerals
this is apatite and we know this formed
at about 400 degrees centigrade but this
is the same mineral that your teeth are
made out of and we can look at the
chemistry of the minerals involved in
these processes to give us indications
of what went on we can look at where the
waters fractured the rocks and
precipitate and minerals and we can find
the
actual metals that have been transported
so this is what we were doing in Sweden
we were looking for this. So this is
magnetite again it's iron oxide it's
been blasted apart by fluid pressure and
faulting in this case and it's cemented
back together by this lovely golden
yellow mineral that's Chalco pyrite
that's copper iron sulfide so this is
the main ore of copper and we were quite
happy when a drilling rig cooked through
this at the time there isn't a side
there it was continuing on the theme of
looking at the rocks because if you go
to the literature a lot of people will
say that those iron ore deposits in
northern Sweden formed by
crystallization from magma and they like
to shout at me when I say no it's all
hydrothermal fluids hot water well these
are very similar rocks from Kazakhstan
so this green mineral here is diopside I
won't keep talking about mineral formula
I think mineral formula are fantastic
but most people think not for some
reason but this is diopside it's a
calcium magnesium silicate it's in
magnetite again it's associated with
volcanic breccias again but deep down
in the heart of the turguy magnetite
deposits in Kazakhstan we get fossils so
the probability is that this probably
wasn't a lava flow what we've done here
you can see there's an ammanoid here
beautiful spiral cooked through by the
slab we've cut through that sample and
this is where the ore minerals the
metals that have been transported by
these high temperature solutions have
perfectly replaced a limestone even to
the extent here we're in the middle of a
rock that's seen about five hundred
degrees centigrade we can find corals
preserved in magnetite and a mineral
called pyroxene so we've always got to
go back and look at the rocks first for
evidence then we can look at what's
actually in the minerals so these are
quartz crystals from parts of sweden
they're under a microscope so this is 50
microns 50 millionth of a meter and what
you can see here are fluid inclusions
these are individual samples of the
solutions that form these ore deposits
and in this case they've got a little
vapour bubble they've got a gas bubble
in there and they've got
perfect cube so that's halide,  that's
sodium chloride so we know from looking
at these kind of samples that the
solutions that were involved in forming
that iron deposit at about 50 weight
percent salts 10 times more salty than
seawater and when we heat these up until
they form a single liquid, again they
have formed out over 400 degrees
centigrade deep down in the earth system
the other thing that can happen like my
bottle of cava is these kind of things
. We've got a fluid inclusion with a vapour
bubble then one liquid and a second
liquid and we've frozen these we've
measured the melting temperature of
those liquids so this part of the
inclusion is still salty water on the
outside and the darker part here is
liquid carbon dioxide and when we look
at a single group of these inclusions
trapped in a quartz crystal again
we can see we've separated out from the
salty water the liquid carbon dioxide
the fluids of effervesce in essence
though we're not looking at carbon
dioxide gas coming out we're looking at
carbon dioxide liquid so we get a
fantastic record of what's gone on in
these deposit types and nowadays we can
get even cleverer we can crush the
quartz and analyze the chemistry of the
solutions so this is the dissolved salt
content this is how much chlorine and
bromine they have up at the side and the
top graph there and what's shaded red is
the ratio of chlorine to bromine we see
in gases coming out of the top of modern
volcanoes the spot down in the bottom
corner is modern seawater so what we can
see here is that the solutions that are
responsible for making these iron
deposits probably came from
crystallizing magma but somewhere along
the line they've picked up extra
chlorine and what we think happened here
is that these wonderful saline solutions
came off crystallizing Granites and
then dissolved rock salt preserved in
the rock sequence they were intruded
into to make these brines that are 10
times or more saltier than seawater and
they can carry a lot of metal they can
certainly carry a lot of iron but down
here
we've done an extra thing we've gone the
extra mile we stopped just crushing the
quartz now and we've blown individual
inclusions open with a laser up at Leeds
University and in this case now we can
see they're really really salty stuff
has less copper in than the solutions
with the least salt we've got this is a
logarithmic scale so every 10 here is a
nother increment of 10 so we're actually
about a thousand times more copper in
the least concentrated solutions and
that's because coppers not following
salts it's following sulfur and that we
can get from analyzing individual
inclusions the last part of the toolkit
but I want to mention is to really go
down in detail so this is an electron
microscope photograph this is a
backscattered electron image so the
shades of gray here are telling us where
we've got different chemistry's heavier
elements so you can see this is a
mineral called titanite it's calcium
titanium silicate and the core of the
crystal here has been corroded and
dissolved away and then we've got a new
layer of titanite on top so this is just
from next to one of these iron deposits
and these very regular shaped holes here
and where we've blown it holes in it
with a laser again we like doing things
with lasers lasers great so the round
holes we've done a chemical analysis and
the long holes are where we've measured
the radioactive isotopes in the mineral
and that's giving us information about
when this all happened
so they've got here uranium.Uranium
radioactively decays to lead and there
are two radioactive uranium isotopes -
two forms of uranium that decay to two
different forms of lead which is great
because if we measure the ratios of the
different isotopes we can get a
cross-check so the black line on this
diagram here is where everything agrees
and the numbers are millions of years
old so this is two billion years old at
the top and 1.8 billion years old down
here
and we can see the core of those
crystals formed about two billion years
ago and the rims that
match up with the iron mineralization
formed about 1.8 million billion years
ago so we've got a real difference in
time between processes and we can match
that up with the chemistry of the sample
so we've got both radioactive isotopes
given his age and chemistry giving us
extra information and the chemicals here
to compare the elements we've used are
the rare earth elements so this is a
group of elements if you use the
periodic table it's the long thin bit in
the middle that they drop down off the
bottom they're very useful as traces of
geological processes we do have to do
one thing this will come up a lot if we
just plot their concentrations up
they're really spiky they're really
irregular so we smooth them out and just
to get even bigger picture we do that by
dividing their concentration by what we
think is the best estimate of the bulk
composition of the earth
so chondrite is a type of meteorite and
we reference everything back to
chondrite meteorites so we've got the
rocks themselves we've got the fluids
that are trapped in them we've got the
chemistry of the minerals and we've got
radiation radioactive isotopes of
different sorts so that's great and I
love iron mines have spend a lot of time
around them but we've been mining iron
for millennia and we recycle an awful
lot of it so the question is what do we
need to mind now and trying to
illustrate this with a wind turbine an
electric car so this is the periodic
table these are the rare earths down the
middle
we can play bingo for a minute now so
this is partly who have I bored in the
last five years and partly how many of
my students remember what I'm talking
about
but who's carrying some gallium? Oh no
one's listening! Oh someone was, okay how
about dysprosium this the same person
was listening every time which is very
very good okay
arsenic it's the same person again
fantastic you're carrying all of them
they're all in your mobile phone,
interestingly.So the ones I'm
particularly interested in as we said
are the lanthanides the rare earths
this group here light to heavy and the
reason for that is if we take a normal
iron magnet and put some neodymium or
dysprosium in it it gets very very
strong so this is a set of iron
neodymium boron magnets from a place
called Baneoboe in China and dangling
off it we've got a piece of drill core
from Karuna the iron mine and somebody
said to me earlier on when I tried this
out inevitable have I got a piece of
string on that no I haven't.I've also
now broken my sample -I'll pick that up
in a minute
don't bring visual aids to your
inaugural lecture is probably the latest
in there so if you look at a smartphone
as I say 50 years ago we mined about ten
metals now we mined all of this lot and
we've got the rare earths dysprosium
neodymium, we've got arsenic in the
silicon chips
we've got indium in the screen we've got
indium in the screen all sorts of
elements that you might not be that
familiar with apart from the person who
kept putting their hand up I think it's
Frederico in the back that's me
someone's listened to me recently but
that's not the end of it the important
thing here is Kirstie's making sure I
don't trip up over my own samples is
that if you want to put a turbine
generator on a wind turbine 30 meters up
in the air you need to make the magnet
at the core of that generator as
lightweight for the maximum magnetic
field strength that you can if you want
an electric car you need to reverse that
but still you need the marketest
strongest magnet you can get so both of
these need rare earth elements if you
want to go to solar we need selenium and
tellurium so there's a whole selection
of elements that we don't currently
produce in huge concentrations which are
going into our renewable energy
generation so this has been expressed
and so this is from one our co-workers
Kathryn Goodenough at the British
Geological Survey we've got a shift from
producing oil and gas and go back to
mining and we've got to do it in an
environmentally sensitive way as
possible because we're trying to reduce
our carbon footprint
so we don't want to make it worse by
mining things but the quote that sums it
all up from the journal Nature in 2017
basically a transition to a low carbon
society is a change that will require
vast amounts of metals and minerals
mineral resources and climate change are
inextricably linked because the world
cannot tackle climate change without an
adequate supply of raw materials to go
into those technologies so we need to
look at these things so this is the rare
earths I haven't looked at everything
here and lithium and cobalt our next
ones people are going to have to worry
about but this is the amount of total
rare earth content of the ore plotted
against the amount of rock that's got
that content in and the lines cutting
across it at the contained amount of
metal so we've got all sorts of deposits
here and all the biggest ones you'll
note a black circles they related to
carbonatites
and all the next biggest ones are
squares and they're related something
called alkali granites so basically
we've got two rock types that are
controlling our supply of these 
elements and bayan obo here
Kirsty mentioned in the introduction is
the world's largest deposit of these
things and inner Mongolia in China so
we've got to explain what these rock
types are to start with this is Oldoinyo Lengai
 in Tanzania I've never
been there
I'd like to go there if anyone's funding
grants in the audience this is the
world's only carbonatite volcano so what
you can see here the top of this volcano
the white material is sodium bicarbonate
it's baking soda but it's coming out an
erupting from a volcanic crater molten
so in the rock record we see these there
calcium carbonate or magnesium
carbonates largely because if it rains
heavily the lava flows will dissolve on
hold on your lingo but these are always
associated with these rare metals this
is one of my photographs this is khan
bogdan mongolia these are the alkali
Granite's so a granite down in Cornwall
will have lots of potassium minerals in
it but come bogs all the dark green
flecks here are sodium minerals and in
amongst the sodium minerals we get this
brown material this is something called
you dial it-- so she's a connor silicate
and this actually has probably got more
rare earths in it than the carbonatites
but anything was the Konya min is really
hard to dissolve so these are very very
difficult to dissolve up but there's a
lot of these around particularly places
like Greenland somebody recently offered
to buy Greenland there wasn't reason so
if we look at these these are these
Conrad normalize plots again and if we
look at the carbonatites they're very
rich in the light end but what we really
want we want neodymium which is up this
end that's great but we also want a lot
of dysprosium and there's not so much of
that in the carbonatites but there is a
lot of it in the alkali Granite's so
we've got a problem we've got things we
can process easily which don't have rare
earths we use but not the ones we want
quite the proportions we want them and
we have things that are very hard to
process that have got more like what
we're looking for so we've got to answer
some questions about these and the first
one is how do we form the world class
the world's largest rare earth deposit
because this is why there's a
political angle to this China controls
the world's rare earth supply because
Bayan Obo sits there in Inner
Mongolia as the world's largest rare
earth resource and I've spent quite a
lot of time worrying about this so here
we see these are eroded down but these
are the feeders that fared a carbonatite
volcano probably about a billion years
ago
we've got limestone dykes that could
across the surrounding rocks and they
surround this ore deposit and we get
these stripy rocks here so the gray
stripes doesn't look very much like a
cup on a tight anymore a magnetite iron
oxide again the purple stripes of
fluorite calcium fluoride and the pale
stripes are a mixture of apatite and
things like Bassonsite and monocite
which are less familiar but they're rare
earth minerals so they're all sitting in
these rocks
but you can see those layers have been
folded they've been squished up and if
down at the base here we've got a
photograph this is a microscope
photograph it's taken in
cathode luminescence in other words we
fired electrons at the sample and made
it blow and that's another use of these
elements they go into making your TV
screen work all those nice colors on
your phone but what it allows us to see
is that these minerals have been crushed
up
they've been deformed they've been
broken up but then they could across by
yet more hydrothermal solution veins and
this is the real key this is the clue at
Bayan Obo it hasn't happened once if we
look at the radioactive isotope dates of
Bayan Obo and this is a compilation of all
the data that's ever been published
these are bits of the rock that they
intruded through so they're 2 billion
years old
but they're nothing to do with the story
we want to investigate the cub on a
tight dykes are about 1.2 billion years
old and then there's a second stage on
the cub on a tight dykes it's about 400
million years old so this is the same
sort of age as the mountains in Scotland
there's a clue there if we look at the
or deposits in red here they've got
radio radioactive isotope ages about the
same as the carbonatites
but then they've got lots and lots of
little clusters of Ages that are younger
and then if we look at the devane's that
could across the day the ores they're
all this age and what's that telling us
is that we formed a metal concentration
about a billion years ago and then we've
kept upgrading it with metamorphosed it
we've had more solutions and we keep
adding more and more metal over time so
that's how you form the biggest one if
you want to find another one you've got
to find somewhere else where lightning
struck twice three times four times but
we can see their sister from our
colleague Linda Campbell and she's
actually dated this crystal with a laser
and the core here is a billion years old
and the rim is 400 million years old
so we've reactivated the deposit but the
problem with Bayan Obo is it's richest
in the light rare earths its richest in
the ones we don't have quite the demand
for so because we know how to process
carbonotite
deposits it might be good if we could find
one that had more of the heavy rare
earths in and that's down this end and
this is it's very bad but I take great
delight in this I would spent my career
waiting to work in this place and these
are from a cabonotite deposit called
Hwong Hwong poo which is in the kindling
mountains in central China so we've come
south this is the kindling mountain belt
and here we can go and look for a heavy
rare earth enriched cub all the time so
again we've got this swarm of dikes that
cook through ancient rocks and we get
calcite we get calcium carbonate
we've got quartz in the center of these
dikes there's the hammer here for scale
again and we've got shattered rock
because of the fluid pressure the
hydrothermal processes and we see
beautiful minerals in there so this is
Chalcopyrite and molybdenite
sulfide minerals bounding hydrothermal
quartz hot water solutions again in the
center of the vein there and in this
part of the carbonatite we find rare
earth minerals and what we can see we're
back to electron microscope photographs
but this is monocyte rare a phosphate
and it's reacted to make apatite so it's
lost its rare earths as the hot
solutions or hydrothermal fluids have
entered into this thing but then we get
other minerals coming in so these things
flora carbonates and these progressively
get more of the heavy rare earths so if
we look at these early on in the history
of the carbonatites
when it's still a magma we get light
rare earth elements but as we move
recorded by these mineral reactions we
move through the history the
carbonatites we get progressively more
and more of the heavy rare earths coming
in the dysprosium that's going into our
high-strength magnets so that is of
interest and we want to know why can we
find this somewhere else as well
Oh Delia Kendalocy is a PhD student and
working with at the moment at the
University of Leeds and she's gone into
those quartz veins and looked for the
fluid inclusions
and you can see here again we get lots
and lots of salt dissolved in the water
that's reacted with these cub on a tight
dikes we also get carbon dioxide the
inclusion in the middle here has got
that dark rim of liquid carbon dioxide
again but the salts are different
Delia's gone in with a laser measured
part of the spectroscopy of these
minerals and we're finding not chlorides
normal salt but sulfates so this is an
hydric calcium sulfate we've also got
potassium sulfate strontium sulfate I'm
giving the chemical name so I don't have
to try and pronounce a fifth of yeah
that one because I can't it's not a
common mineral but we've got a mix
potassium sodium sulfate so sulfate
brines have carried more of the heavy
rare earths that we're interested in
compared to chloride blind grinds that
we see at places like bonobo so if we
want to look for a really big deposit
let's go and look for somewhere where it
kept happening the same process over
nearly a billion years kept happening in
the same place and making a bigger and
bigger deposit we can also see deposits
where the sequence of minerals has given
us progressively more of the type of
element we want and that might relate to
sulfur rich brines sulfur rich solutions
instead of chloride rich solutions but
I'll step back a second here because one
of the issues that is down at this end
of the diagram of plotted thorium and
uranium so in searching for the elements
we want for renewable energy
we'd probably rather not leave behind a
waste product that's radioactive it's
not really the point of what we're about
so the next stage really is okay that's
where our rare earths are coming from
now can we find something that doesn't
have radioactive elements in it where do
we want to go for low actinide
radioactive element easy to process
heavy rare earth rich rare earth
deposits well we went to Madagascar
which was nice but if you look here
China's the main producer of these
things and down in China there are
tropical soils
there are enriched in their rare earth
elements they're caring Australia as
well Mount Weld is in Australia they're
caring places like Vietnam dump house in
Vietnam but only in China do we get the
really heavy rare earth rich versions
which we'd like for our resource supply
so what we have in Madagascar is a
series of ancient volcanoes they've been
eroded down and they've got these
alkaline granite igneous rocks in them
but the key point is they're in the
tropics so they've got really intense
soil forming processes so those minerals
that are really really hard to
industrial process industrially might
cause as their own environmental
problems have already been partly broken
down by weathering it's an exciting
place to get around in and this is one
of the bridges but we get these very
thick soil profiles on the right hand
side there you can see quite clearly
these are the dikes this is the plumbing
below the ancient volcano but all the
minerals are partly broken down by the
tropical soil weathering processes so
we've looked at profiles like this to
try and see what's happening with the
rare earths again we've also worked with
mining companies in the area who are
drilling through this material to see if
they can actually find workable
resources and down below the soil
profiles we find the same sorts of
things I was looking at in Mongolia so
this is an alkaloid pegmatite again with
the same sorts of minerals in again so
if we look at this so up in the soil
zone here this is where the plants are
rooting what we'd think of as soil and
here we've lost the rare earth elements
they've been leached out of the soil
zone in the degraded broken down Rock
below that we get a maximum
concentration of the rare earths so the
things that have been leached up here
have been deposited deeper in the soil
zone and there are more of the metals
were interested in here in the weathered
rock than there are down in the bedrock
and they're not in in soluble minerals
anymore because we've got this data by
just pouring ammonium sulfate solution
onto our samples it's a bit more
technical than that but that's basically
what we did
so these can be processed and extracted
at really low environmental cost that's
good and there's no uranium and well
there's a little bit of uranium and
thorium but not so much as to cause a
problem so the question we had to ask
Glenn is alright where exactly are the
rare earths in these systems so this is
diamond it's the UK synchrotron x-ray
facilities it's basically a small
particle accelerator and what it does is
generate a very very focused very very
high intensity high-energy x-ray beam
that comes out in these little units
here where we're standing about to put
some rocks into that x-ray beam which I
was quite excited about because I'm
smiling okay but what we can do with
that x-ray beam we can focus it down
onto a millionth of the meter and we can
map where individual elements sit in a
sample so this is an electron microscope
photograph of one of these soil samples
we've broken down the minerals to make
china clay which is what most of the
background grays in there there's some
iron oxides and there's some manganese
oxides but when we map the distribution
of yttrium one of the rare earths across
that sample the red here is it reom and
it's sitting on the edges of the K all
the night crystals so the rare earths
are now sticking to the surface of the
clay we're getting rare metals out of
china clay deposits basically this is
the complicated told not to go to
technical but what we've got here is the
x-ray absorption spectrum of each of
these of a whole range of different
mineral types and in green at the top
there are chinese clays and they don't
look like any of these possible rare
earth minerals but they do look like if
we put a solution in there the x-ray
absorption pattern of yttrium in
solution and what we find is that if we
process this data to extract the
distance between the atoms this is why
we go to these phenomenally high-power
x-rays we can actually see that the
clays in Madagascar and in China have
got exactly the same molecular structure
as just the metals in solution so we
know now that actually just surrounded
by water molecules very loosely bound to
the surface of the quays we've got a
rare metal deposit you could recover
that
with detergent that's fantastic in terms
of producing these things and we've got
as far as actually producing a molecular
model I say we because this has been
done by a postdoc and nuke bust but
we've got a rare earth element atom
surrounded by water molecules here and
it's attracted just by electrostatic
forces to the surface of the clay
mineral particle so this is a molecular
model that we've built from the x-ray
data these things are only used at the
moment in China but they're occurring
elsewhere we've proved that they're on
alkaline igneous rocks where we might
get more of the elements we're
interested in
although the concentrations aren't
necessarily higher and we've
demonstrated for the first time what
form the rare earths are there out there
sat surrounded by water molecules
absorbed onto china clay kaolinite all
you have to do is disrupt that water
layer and you can recover the metals so
that's fantastic but that's been the
focus of a lot of what I've done in the
last few years but we've gone to an
additional problem now there's an extra
factor in looking at the soil zone which
is we've got plants rooted into it and
they're part of what are breaking down
the minerals so when we're talking about
deep hot hydrothermal solutions
interacting with rocks we're not worried
too much about life but when we bring it
back to the surface we've got my plants
microbes a whole range of things going
on and the latest thing we've been
working on is to look at what's
happening to metals in the environment
and that's been down really exotic field
location now Shoreham Harbor just
outside Brighton so abroad is back home
for the last little bit I want to talk
about so this is Shoreham harbour we've
had a lot of support from Shorehem ports
so I can't find Tony he's waving at the
back so the engineering team at Shoreham
Port been phenomenally supportive
with this as have our salami towels
steel company and we've been concerned
what happens to the iron once it's out
in the environment and the reason for
that is we get this effect so this
orange streak this is a steel pile going
into the tidal park Shoreham harbour
into the bed sediment
and this orange streak is what's known
as accelerated low water corrosion so
we've got something here that is eating
steel about five times faster than
normal predictor marine corrosion rates
and we'd like to know what's going on
for fairly obvious reasons this is
affecting the distribution of metals in
the environment it's affecting marine
structures and through this process of
renewable energy generation we're
actually just about to start putting or
already have put if you look out the
windows at Brighton
a lot more infrastructure into the
marine environment so we want to know
what's happening so we've been down to
Shoreham Harbor
Heidi Burgess my wife isn't in this
photograph but she's taking the
photograph
Richard Brennan's PhD student John
Kaplan was the microbiologist on this
team and I'm somewhere down here taking
a water sample and what we've done is
looked at the water the bed sediment and
the corrosion itself so these are
electron microscope photographs of the
corrosion in Shoreham Harbor they are in
secondary electrons this time so we're
not looking at the chemistry anymore
we're just looking at the topography of
the surface so when you see electron
microscope photographs of flies eyes
this is the kind of thing but now we're
looking at steel corrosion and we get
iron sulphide minerals we get iron
sulfate minerals and we get iron oxide
minerals but on top of them we get
individual bacteria so what we've got
here is bacteria interacting with the
minerals and the steel and causing this
major corrosion problem so we've tried
to look at what's in there in a number
of ways these are infrared absorption
spectroscopy spectra so we've put these
in infrared light and use an instrument
to measure the wavelengths of infrared
light that are absorbed and we see
sulfate we see pyrite iron sulfide but
we see things like thiosulfate there are
between sulphide and sulfate there are
different levels of oxidation and that's
all sitting within this accelerated low
water corrosion on the steel surface
we've even gone to things like x-ray
photoelectron spectroscopy and we see
the same thing we can find the pyrite
we can find iron sulfate so not just
iron oxide in the wrists but we find
these intermediate sulfur compounds
sulfite in that case so this is really
important there's more than just iron
making iron oxides here and it's down to
these guys so a normal photograph of
bhakti I'm not a biologist so apologists
the biologist they're not terribly
exciting to look at so we we've jazzed
them up a bit but what we've got here
we've looked at the DNA that's contained
in that corrosion so what we've got is
the microbial genes if we have bacteria
in an environment that's starved of
oxygen they start using other things to
process their food and they use sulfate
from seawater and produce hydrogen
sulfide that's that lovely smell that
comes out of the mud and then we've got
bacteria that oxidize the sulfur so we
can identify things that reduce sulfur
sulfate we've got things that oxidize
sulfur we've got things that oxidize
sulfide so we've got all these microbial
metabolisms operating in a few
millimeters of rust basically but what
happens alongside this at every single
stage of that they generate sulfate and
hydrogen ions so if we add sulfate and
hydrogen ions together we get sulfuric
acid and this is a little sulfuric acid
generating Factory living on the surface
of the steel this is a horrible diagram
for a talk like this where I've got lots
of different backgrounds but basically
we start with sulphate in the seawater
and bacteria things like diesel fabulous
prep Inachus and I'm not going to read
any more of these I'm really wrong but
basically these are processing the
seawater sulfate and making hydrogen
sulfide but then things like chlorobactotepidum
are processing the
sulfide back to sulfate and we've got
things appear that are doing the same
sort of process so sitting on the steel
surface we're generating sulfides and
then the back by bacteria and the
different group of bacteria then
oxidizing the sulfides back to sulfate
and then making
sulfuric acid all the way which is
generating iron sulfates on the steel
surface and rapidly corroding the steel
when we break these bacterial colonies
off the steel we get shiny etched steel
underneath there's sulfuric acid etched
normal rusting doesn't do that so we can
actually and we've actually gone as far
as looking at where these bacteria come
from and we can actually find them in
the harbour bed sediment there's small
colonies of them in the seawater they
don't like the seawater there's too much
oxygen around for them and so they're
colonizing the existing rust on the
steel surface where they've got a low
oxygen environment and then using the
sulphate from the seawater so this whole
process is based on basically we've put
steel piling into reducing bed sediment
so we can identify a risk factor and
this is where we're going next with this
hopefully we're waiting on a grant
proposal at the moment to try and take
this a little further and find out more
about what's going on in wider places
but there isn't anything unusual about
bacteria colonizing steel it's just that
we've introduced something new into the
environment for them to live on so
conclusions from all of this I've taking
you from magmas to bacteria water is
the geological material in and of itself
it's driving geological and geochemical
processes it's critical as a resource
itself and I haven't talked about
hydrogeology and the geology of water
resources at all but it's also critical
in the formation the resources we
require as we move to trying to get go
to renewable power generation and it's
driving the redistribution of metals in
the near surface and the interaction of
metals with life and for the last 15
years these have been growing areas that
we've just started to look at it
Brighton but biogeochemistry and geo
microbiology what the bugs do to the
rocks and that's where I'll leave you I
will say at the end there's too many
people to thank because this isn't me
this is a large group of a large number
of different teams from Czech Republic
Brighton, London, China, Mongolia
Madagascar have highlighted Heidi
because there are people out there I
wouldn't be able to do any of this
without and we've had a wide range of
funders supporting us to do this and I
end there thank you.
