Wim van Westrenen
Professor in Planetary Evolution, Department of Earth Sciences , Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).
Welcome to this pretty terrible but hopefully mildly informative website. My knowledge of html dates from approximately 1999,
when cell phones were the size of your shoes, and books were still being printed on paper. So embedding a video counts as a major achievement, watch:
Fast Facts: Full Moon from Fast Facts.
My research field is planetary evolution. I am interested in the
chemical and physical properties of planetary materials at the high temperatures and pressures found in the inside of rocky planets and moons, and in how these lead
to large-scale differentiation processes such as core formation and magma ocean solidification. Research into our neighbours in the solar system, and their exotic counterparts in other solar systems, can help to provide more insight into the history and evolution of our own planet.
I consider myself a generalist geochemist, and deeply enjoy collaborating with geophysicsts and astronomers.
In my high-pressure , high-temperature laboratory we determine physical and chemical properties of the silicate materials and metals that are found in the Earth, our Moon, Mercury, Mars, asgteroids, and rocky exoplanets.
We combine high-pressure experiments with major, trace, and isotopic abundance analysis to constrain element and isotope partitioning systematics required to understand
increasingly accurate and precise measurements on natural samples. Our laboratory will be accessible to non-experts via Transnational Access in the EUROPLANET-2024 Research Infrastructure Initiative.
Last modified February 14, 2020