Department Head, Professor Pamela Kempton, participated in a two-month long research cruise this spring, sailing as an igneous petrologist on International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 390.
The cruise is part of a multi-expedition effort to recover cores from the ocean floor along a transect of the South Atlantic (https://iodp.tamu.edu/scienceops/expeditions/south_atlantic_transect.html). IODP expeditions are international initiatives that take years to plan. Expedition 390 was originally scheduled to sail in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic made international travel impossible for most people, so the cruise was rescheduled and sailed from April to May 2022. The scientific objectives for the cruise are multi-disciplinary, ranging from better understanding of the timing, duration, and extent of fluid-rock exchange within 
basaltic basement to investigating evidence for ocean circulation patterns in response to rapid climate change found in the overlying sediments. Collectively, Expeditions 390, 393 and 395 recovered drill cores from a transect of seven sites located at approximately 30oS between the mid-Atlantic Ridge and the eastern margin of the Rio Grande Rise off the eastern margin of South America. Pamela, and her graduate student Adrien Van Wagenen, will be working on variations in the Cu isotope composition of the basaltic basement rocks to better understand how ocean crust alters over time along the 60 m.y. long time span of the transect.