Associate Professor Teresa Ubide doing fieldwork on Mount Etna, Sicily, Italy. Credit: UQ
The world changed for 12-yr-old Teresa Ubide when her middle school geology teacher asked her class to draw a volcano.
Ubide, now Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia, remembers that day well. How she and the rest of the group drew the predictable triangles spewing lava, with maybe a house on the side.
“That’s great,” said the teacher. “But what you don’t know yet is how this works. Volcanoes are fed by a complex system of magma chambers and reservoirs and conduits that bring this molten rock, the magma, all the way to the surface. What happens inside the volcano is the key to understanding what happens at the surface.”
“I was completely hooked,” Ubide told Cosmos. “That was it, and that’s exactly what I do [now]. I reconstruct how the volcano works inside from the information I get at the surface.”
Home was not far from the beach in the ancient resort town of San Sebastian, on the Bay of Biscay in the Basque country of Northern Spain, near the French border.
Her new passion for geology was met with support from her family, including her parents, both professors of chemistry, and her aunt a professor of psychiatry. “Role models are so important,” she says, adding her mum’s response was: “Do what you love, and you’ll be fine.”
The family academics were to be her main source of support and mentorship in the coming years.
All in for geology
With a geology career firmly in her sights, she eventually set off to the University of Zaragoza 316km north-east of Spain’s capital, Madrid, for undergraduate studies, master’s and PhD.
Her master’s thesis explored causes of eruptions using the rock crystals that float in the semi-fluid magma and pass between magma types.
“A magma reservoir under a volcano is more or less stable,” says Ubide. Then new magma rises into the reservoir from below, she says. “As it mixes with the old magma the pressure builds, triggering the eruption.”
Her project centred on a fossilised chamber in the Spanish Pyrenees, a very old magma chamber, where this mixing was frozen in place and time.
She was fascinated by crystals that form in the magmas before they mixed, and discovered that crystal growth recorded the processes, and differences, between the magmas as they were exchanged during mixing.
Growth of crystal layers, seen using special laser ablation techniques she developed, were sequential, Ubide says, like tree rings, recording mixing history.
Similar laser ablation methods are used in eye surgery.
Interrogating magma crystals
She delved into more detail on magma chambers for her PhD, also at the University of Zaragoza, using those same crystals and other techniques.
“The main thing was understanding magma chamber dynamics using crystals and [magma] melts.”
Work with Professor Jan Wijbrans at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) enabled Ubide to figure out when the rocks she was studying had erupted. She used a type of potassium: argon (K-Ar) dating, called 40Ar/39Ar, to estimate that age and was able to use that information to model movements of local tectonic plates.
Volcanic rocks naturally contain a radioactive form (an isotope) of potassium — potassium-39 — which very slowly breaks down into the gas argon-40. It’s a slow process, taking about 1.25 billion years for half the potassium to decay. But when a volcano erupts, the intense heat drives off any gas in the rock, ‘resetting’ the clock. Measuring how much ‘new’ argon has built up in a volcanic rock, relative to potassium, gives an approximate age for the last eruption.
Ubide used a refinement of this method (40Ar/39Ar ) — in which rocks are irradiated in a nuclear reactor to convert the 39K atoms to 39Ar — so that she only had to measure Ar isotopes to get the same result.
She discovered that the Bay of Biscay on the northern Spanish coast started to open 85-105 million years ago. She also found evidence of the eruptions, 79 million years ago, that eventually led to the rise of the Pyrenees, the mountain range between Spain and France.
Mars volcanoes beckoned in 2014, for a postdoc exploring planetary volcanism. Based at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, with Canada the stand-in for the red planet, she looked at volcanoes that grow after meteorite impacts.
Major advances in her laser technique, initially a side hustle for generating maps of crystal chemistry, began to produce “really nice results”, she says.
But further testing needed to be done on active volcanoes, so it was off to Mt Etna on the east coast of Sicily.
Mt Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes and a UNESCO World Heritage Area, is also one of the best-studied and monitored volcanoes in the world.
A storied mountain since ancient times, Etna was thought to be the home to the Greek goddess Aitna, mother by Zeus of the Palici, gods of geysers and hot springs; the burial place of the Titan, Enkelados, whose restlessness was blamed for the frequent earthquakes and lava flows; and the site of the forge of Haphaistos – god of fire, smiths and craftsmen.
Ubide’s laser techniques began to reveal the actual, albeit slightly less colourful, processes behind Mt Etna’s now more frequent eruptions.
Crystals gave answers to questions such as: “What type of reservoirs feed eruptions? How deep are they? How much time do we have from magma mixing and depth to eruption at the surface?” she says.
Associate Professor Teresa Ubide doing fieldwork in the Central Andes, Chile, 2022. Credit: UQ
The longest chain of hotspot volcanoes on Earth
In 2016, Ubide landed a lectureship in igneous petrology and vulcanology at the University of Queensland in far-off Australia.
“UQ has wonderful labs where we have developed so many techniques to interrogate the rocks and the crystals, and we have access to the Pacific Ring of Fire: New Zealand, the Philippines, Tonga, Indonesia. Also, it’s not far from Chile; the western side of the Americas [is] so interesting. And the mostly-extinct eastern Australian volcanoes.”
Critical minerals for decarbonisation
Ubides’s research focus has changed in her 8 years at UQ, with her rise from lecturer to Associate Professor. Exploring how volcanoes accumulate critical minerals for decarbonisation has replaced interpreting and forecasting eruptions.
“We need to better understand why they accumulate. Most copper, for example, accumulates in hydrothermal systems beneath volcanoes where tectonic plates move towards each other, like in the Pacific Ring of Fire.”
Each electric car uses more than 50kg of copper, she says.
“So, I’m just trying to understand when these magmatic systems accumulate copper will hopefully inform future exploration. We use similar approaches to find rare earth elements, like niobium and zirconium which are very important for renewables.” Rare earths are more common in ‘inter-plate systems’, where you have a hotspot.
Australia is not on a plate boundary but has the longest chain of hotspot volcanoes on Earth.
Hotspots are places where plumes of molten magma rise from deep in the mantle, force their way up through cracks in the overlying crust and erupt on the surface.
Roles to play
Ubide’s research team is thriving.
Encouraging diversity is the key to a successful research team, she says.
“I have a very diverse team, not only men and women, but people from everywhere around the world: the Philippines, Chile, Australia, Colombia, Indonesia. And visitors from New Zealand, Italy, and France.
“I think diversity is so important because in our team, lots of the new ideas come from the fact that people have different backgrounds, identities, histories. That’s super important to tackle challenges and problems and find solutions, because people tackle things differently, and that’s when the innovation comes through.”
“Boosting diversity is all about changing the system”, she says, “not the women or minorities. We are all part of ‘the system’ and therefore have a role to play. So, it is not only about leaders changing policies but all of us leading change.
“This could be supporting colleagues (particularly women and minorities) to build inclusive work environments, mentoring and championing them to apply for that job, promotion, talk, etc. to pass on opportunities that may be of interest, to nominate them for awards, etc.”
“We are all part of the system and therefore we can all lead change, even if it is in small steps.”