Welcome to Lindsay McHenry’s lab at UWM
Minerals can tell us a lot about the environments in which they form, providing clues to the processes that have operated on the Earth and other Planetary surfaces. We use the compositions and assemblages of minerals preserved in varied environments to help interpret the conditions under which they formed and altered. This can help us see through the veneer of alteration to reconstruct the “original” compositions, or to use the alteration assemblage to reconstruct the post-depositional conditions. We study tephra, both from a primary igneous perspective, using phenocryst composition to correlate eastern African tuffs, and from the perspective of alteration, where we look to authigenic zeolites and clays as keys to the environments into which these tuffs were deposited. We study volcanic hydrothermal environments, and how their mineralogy reflects their conditions. We study the mineralogy of ancient and modern saline-alkaline lakes. We also study the surface veneers formed on the interior walls of lava tubes as they cool. While we conduct these studies on Earth, we are always considering their relevance to ancient Mars.