Profile: Denton Ebel

I went to undergraduate at a liberal arts college and took a lot of different kinds of courses, I liked Geology quite a bit. I took a couple of years after school and worked in work construction, it was the early eighties it was a recsession at the time and I hung around so to speak at Berkeley where they were lectures in geology. This guy came visiting from Perdue university and he needed somebody to do experimental work. He said apply to a Ph.D program there so i did. That was where I to started doing hard-core science. I'm a geochemist and iI look at the elements, the abundences of the elements where they're distributed among minerals and I look at the isotopes that are in the rocks and how they've been fractionated one from another and how they have in the case of radioactive elements how they have decayed over time, so this gives us chronological information it tells us how things crystallized how fast they crystallized. This is aplicable over a wide, wide range of disciplines. It's applicable to planetary science, to the field petrology and mineralogy as well and it's also course applicable to meteorites and that's my forte that's what I do most of my work on, is meteorites and the earliest earliest rocks formed in the solar system. Meteorites are the leftovers of the formation of the solar system their composition is a lot like that of the sun without all the gases and they even contain bits and pieces of other stars, little grains that were formed in the atmospheres of other suns before the sun, our sun, formed. What we're trying to do is figure out how planets form around stars that's the fundemental problem in the origin of of life. What planets become habitable? Which ones have water? Which ones don't? Why do they have water? Why do they not have water? And this is something we really don't understand very well especially about our own star, we have a lot of data, but we don't quite have the right dynamical framework to place it in. My work is highly collaborative, I work with scientists from all over the world and I'm very lucky in being able to have really smart people to help me understand what I'm doing, and hopefully I can help them understand what they're doing. Being intellectually curious is the most important thing i think in science generally. You can become good at something, but unless you're curious about extending it to other things you really don't have the passion that you need to to do it interesting and creative and new work and I hope I have some of that. I think that it's very important for people in a position like mine to think really hard about passing on the things we know how to do, the things we've learned to the young people coming up behind us and that's becoming more important to me as i get older. And of course I'd like to write the definitive paper on the origin of the solar system uh... that's a tricky business and that'll have lots of co-authors