Petrology

The Head of the Chair, Professor L.L.Perchuk

The Chair offers a specialization "Geochemistry, Mineralogy, and Petrology". The Chair's graduates successfully work in many research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as in a number of scientific centers in Germany, USA, France and other oversea countries.

The Chair provides all students studying at the Faculty of Geology with the core lecture-based course in petrology. For those students who specialize in some specific areas and need more profound knowledge of some aspects of petrology the Chair offers additional courses such as "Magmatism of Oceans" provided for students specializing in lithology.

Students specializing in the field of petrology are offered courses "Rock-forming Minerals", "Thermodynamics of Minerals", "Formations of Igneous Rocks", "Petrochemistry", "Petrology of Meteorites and Impactites", "Formations of Metamorphic Rocks", "Experimental and Technical Petrography".

Members of the Chair are responsible for organization of two field trainings. The first one is offered for the 2-year students of the Geochemical Division of the Faculty and conducted in the Ilmen National Reserve (the Urals). This field training is aimed at methods of field investigations of igneous, metamorphic and metasomatic rocks. The other one is offered for the 3-year students and conducted in the Laboratory of Experimental and Technical Petrography and a number of laboratories of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This training is devoted to experimental petrography.

Investigations in the field of igneous and volcanic petrology are oriented to paleovolcanological and paleotectonic reconstructions as well as prospecting for different types of metallic deposits including copper-nickel, iron and platinum group elements.

Fluid inclusions in olivine from Kamchatka basalts

Metamorphic Petrology is one of the main topics comprising determination of metamorphic conditions by thermodynamic calculations from the local chemical compositions of coexisting rock-forming minerals. This approach is applied to the Pre-Cambrian and Paleozoic high-temperature and ultra-high pressure metamorphic complexes, in particular, the eclogite-bearing complexes that contain diamond deposits. The results of thermodynamic simulations and experimental studies under high and ultrahigh pressures and temperatures are commonly used for the interpretation of natural data.

Specialists of the Chair of Petrology have close links with a wide range of the leading international scientific centers and universities in different countries (USA, Germany, France). For the last decade a number of scientific projects have been carried out along with specialists from Rand Afrikaans University. This scientific cooperation is aimed at study of the Limpopo and Namaqua metamorphic complexes, their geodynamics and metamorphic histories.