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I was awarded the Ramsden Research Fellowship for the summer 2025 to work on an independent project under the guidance of my PI, Francis Macdonald, and graduate student Ellery Renger. I continued this project during the academic year and ultimately presented my findings at the 2026 GSA Cordilleran Section. The goal of my work was to develop a protocol for analyzing carbonate major element compositions using a hand-held XRF instrument, which is cheaper, quicker, and non-destructive as compared to the traditional method of using a mass spectrometer.

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Introduction

I participated in the CIERA REU during the summer of 2026, where I worked under my mentor, Elvira Mulyukova. My project focused on modeling salt diapirism on Europa, with the goal of estimating the contribution of salt diapirism to material transfer of Europa's icy shell and its relationship with observed dome surface features. To do this, I considered both a continuum scale model of density-driven flow as well as microphysical creep models of crystalline materials in order to model the upwelling of ice in the shell. My work focused on the scenario where the ice shell is undergoing a period of growth due to periodic orbital variations in Europa's eccentricity, which cause new ice to freeze out of Europa's salty subsurface ocean. A key assumption made is that differences in ice growth rates have cascading effects on the physical properties of the ice (such as basal layer thickness, ice grain size, and density contrast), which then effect the shape and size of diapirs.

Results

The results show that diapirs rise occurs on geologically relevant timescales, which supports previous studies that claim salt diapirism as a potential driver of the production of dome surface features. Additionally, exportation of coupling relationships between ice growth rates and physical properties of the ice across a range of parameter values show that there exists an upper limit on the size of diapirs, a conclusion that can be directly tied to observations of dome size as well as how much material can be transferred by salt diapirism in Europa's ice shell.

Presentations

I presented the initial results of my work at the end of the CIERA REU in three separate sessions: at the Adler Astronomy Conversations poster session, at CIERA, as well as a final zoom presentation. I plan on continuing this work during the fall, and will present my additional findings at the 2026 AGU meeting in San Francisco, CA, as well as the 2026 AAS meeting in Salt Lake City, UT.