Rock talker: Robert Bodnar excavates secrets from deep space, deep Earth, deep past

On March 22, 1998, seven boys playing pickup basketball in Monahans, Texas, were jolted out of their game when a football-sized meteorite punched into the pavement.

The meteorite was covered with a black crust and still warm to the touch. Classified later as an “ordinary chondrite meteorite,” the space rock was anything but ordinary to one Virginia Tech geochemist who managed to acquire a piece of it in 1998.

Robert Bodnar, University Distinguished Professor, used a diamond saw to slice his meteorite sample as thin as a human hair and then polished both sides. When he placed it under the microscope, he immediately found what he was looking for: tens of thousands of tiny fluid droplets trapped inside the meteorite's crystalline structure.

And then he saw something else:

“There were vapor bubbles moving inside many of the droplets,” Bodnar said. “And it struck me that these bubbles had been moving around in those tiny water droplets for 4.5 billion years.”

For the last 40 of those years, Bodnar has been teasing out the secrets of ancient droplets like these, whether trapped within minerals from outer space or from deep within the Earth.

For excellence in this original scientific research, Bodnar will be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences on April 26. Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States.

Called “fluid inclusions,” rock-bound droplets like the ones found in Bodnar’s meteorite sample can be thought of as time capsules that preserve a record of the composition, temperature, and pressure of the environment where — and when — the crystals originally formed.

Working with Michael Zolensky from NASA Johnson Space Center and colleagues from the University of Texas, Austin, Bodnar has continued to study the Monahans meteorite to search for organic molecules.

“If we find precursors of life in one of these, this could provide evidence that we’re not alone,” said Bodnar, who is the C.C. Garvin Professor of Geochemistry in the Virginia Tech College of Science.

Along with providing clues to extraterrestrial life, Bodnar’s study of fluid inclusions reveals more about what is going on beneath the Earth’s surface. His work has lead to new methods to predict volcanic eruptions and find new deposits of “critical minerals,” identified by the U.S. government as being vital to national security and economic prosperity.

For example, lithium, an indispensable component of electric-vehicle batteries, and rare earth elements needed for wind turbines, are largely produced outside the United States. To meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies and address supply chain vulnerabilities, the U.S. Department of Energy is ramping up America’s domestic production and supply of battery-grade lithium and searching for domestic sources of rare earth elements.

“When we analyze the fluid inclusions, we can learn about the temperature and pressure conditions at which the mineral deposit formed. This allows us to infer how deep beneath the surface it formed,” Bodnar said. “Then we can look for similar geological conditions elsewhere to find new deposits.”

Matching up mineral formation conditions with appropriate environments has seen Bodnar crisscrossing the globe, embarking on collaborations with researchers from Australia to South America to Japan. He has been elected fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists, the Mineralogical Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geochemical Society, Geological Society of America, the Geological Society of London (UK), and the European Geochemical Union. He was also elected an honorary member of the Italian Mineralogical Association and the Geological Society of India. Bodnar received an honorary degree from the University Naples, Italy, as the only geoscientist to be awarded an honorary degree by the university in its history.

Bodnar’s active work with Italian scientists involves analyzing rocks ejected from the infamous Mount Vesuvius. By investigating the conditions in the magma chamber associated with historical eruptions, Bodnar’s team can fill in the blanks to reveal trends over time — and predict the strength and timeline of future eruptions. He has been working on similar explorations for Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii and White Island Volcano in New Zealand.

But the best part? The thrill of discovery.

“Almost every day, I come into the lab and see something that no one has ever seen before. I talk to my minerals — tell me, tell me where you come from, tell me where you were formed,” Bodnar said.

And, evidently, they tell him.

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