Earth is the only planet known to have subduction-driven active plate tectonics, to form granitic continental crust, and to support life.

To understand the interplays between these processes, I use geochemistry and computational science to study the formation and evolution of Earth’s continental crust over billion-year timescales. I am particularly interested in early Earth processes, reconstructing the evolution of Earth as a habitable planet, and how the solid Earth influences and coevolves with the surface Earth and the biosphere.

I am currently completing a Ph.D. in geoscience at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Dr. Annie Bauer’s Earth Evolution Group. My research is part of the ERC Monitoring Earth Evolution Through Time (MEET) project.

Current Projects

Detrital zircon geochemistry - detrital zircons are often the only record of igneous processes during the Hadean and Archean. I use trace elements and isotopic tracers in zircon to reconstruct the initiation and character of diverse tectonic styles on the early Earth.

Computational approaches to geoscience - large geochemical databases provide unique opportunities to understand long-term, whole-Earth processes. I am working on new methods to reduce sampling bias in these databases, and to constrain crustal composition in the present and throughout Earth history.

Open-source software development - I develop freely available analysis and visualization methods for geochemical data in the Julia programming language.

Contact

rowan (dot) gregoire (at) wisc (dot) edu