NEW YORK — The MINERALS Project at Columbia University will host Resolving the Earth’s Mantle Composition, a two-day international workshop bringing together mineral physicists, seismologists, geodynamicists and geochemists to confront one of the most consequential open questions in the Earth sciences: what the planet’s mantle is actually made of.

The workshop takes place December 3–4, 2026 at Columbia University in New York, and is convened by Prof. Renata M. Wentzcovitch, Principal Investigator of the MINERALS Project and a professor at Columbia’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The mantle accounts for the overwhelming majority of Earth’s volume, yet no sample of it has ever been recovered from depth. Everything known about its composition is inferred — from seismic waves that pass through it, from laboratory experiments that recreate its crushing pressures and temperatures, and, increasingly, from quantum-mechanical simulations that predict how minerals behave under conditions no experiment can yet reach. Each of these approaches produces a partial answer, and the answers do not always agree.

Resolving those disagreements has consequences well beyond the deep interior. Mantle composition governs how heat escapes from Earth’s core, how continents move, how volcanoes erupt, and how the planet has evolved chemically over 4.5 billion years. It also anchors our understanding of what makes a planet habitable — a question now being asked of worlds far beyond our own.

The workshop is designed to be small and deliberately interdisciplinary. Nineteen invited participants from institutions across North America, Europe, Asia and South America will present current work and spend structured time on the points where their fields diverge.

Invited participants

• Jamison Assunção — Universidade de São Paulo
• C. Alberto M. C. — Universidade de São Paulo
• Laura Cobden — Utrecht University
• Arwen Deuss — Utrecht University
• Edward Garnero — Arizona State University
• Damanveer Grewal — Yale University
• Kei Hirose — University of Tokyo
• Christine Houser — Earth-Life Science Institute, Institute of Science Tokyo
• Shun-ichiro Karato — Yale University
• Tomoo Katsura — University of Bayreuth
• Jun Korenaga — Yale University
• Jung-Fu (Afu) Lin — University of Texas at Austin
• Maureen Long — Yale University
• William F. McDonough — University of Maryland and Tohoku University
• Robert Myhill — University of Bristol
• Kaveh Pahlevan — Carl Sagan Center, SETI Institute
• Keith Putirka — California State University, Fresno
• Jessica Santos Rego — Universidade de São Paulo
• Paul Tackley — ETH Zürich

They will be joined by members of the MINERALS research team at Columbia and partner institutions.

The meeting is organized under the MINERALS Project — Modeling Earth from Atomic to Global Scale — a multi-institutional research effort led from Columbia and supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. MINERALS works across an unusually wide range of scales, from the behavior of individual electrons in iron atoms to the convection of the whole mantle, and the workshop reflects that span.

Recent work by the MINERALS team illustrates the approach. The iron spin crossover — a quantum-scale rearrangement of electrons within iron atoms under extreme pressure — changes how seismic waves travel through the lower mantle, meaning a phenomenon measured in angstroms leaves a signature detectable from the surface of the planet. Connecting effects at those two scales is precisely the kind of problem the workshop exists to address.

The workshop is by invitation. Further details, the program, and participant abstracts will be posted here. 

About the MINERALS Project

MINERALS — Modeling Earth from Atomic to Global Scale — is a collaborative research project led by Prof. Renata M. Wentzcovitch at Columbia University, spanning Columbia’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and partner institutions. The project develops and applies first-principles computational methods to determine the properties of Earth-forming minerals and to link them to global-scale geophysical observations. MINERALS is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Media Contact

Vishal Manve (Vishy) former Project Coordinator, The MINERALS Project Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University vbm2109@columbia.edu