11/02/2020 – 10TH INFORMATIVE TALK WITH MARCO RODRÍGUEZ: GEODYNAMIC CONCEPTS OF THE CARIBBEAN

On February 11th took place the 10th Informative Talk given by Marco Rodríguez and organized by our Chapter. Marco Rodríguez is studying the second year of the Master's degree, specialization on Mineralogy and Geochemistry, at the University of Freiburg, Germany. 

During the talk, he explained that he had the opportunity to start collaborating in this project when he was working in the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, in Mainz, Germany. To introduce his project, he first showed us the geological and geographical context of the Caribbean. Later on, he started explaining the main objectives of the project and the study he and his colleagues had to carry out to achieve all the objectives.

Regarding to the project, he explained that it all started when they found zircons from the Caribbean in the Galápagos Island, so the main question of the project was: "How did some zircons from the Caribbean end up in the Galapagos island?". He exposed the several hypothesis he and his team discussed.

He showed us the different softwares used to achieve the objectives they had, such as GPlates and MatLab. Additionally, we got to see the geodynamic evolution of Central America, the evolution of the plates conforming the area and how the limits between the plates have changed during the last 200 My, thanks to the GPlates software.

Finally, he explained that once all the data was processed by the different softwares and interpreted by him and his colleagues, the hypothesis that fit better their ideas and conclusions was that these zircons were transported by convection movements in the mantle that followed toroidal flows.

We want to express our admiration towards him, for being involved in this project of major difficulty, and, also, we want to thank him for sharing with us his his project and for giving a talk.