Research Interests:

Dr. Elisabeth M. Hausrath is an aqueous geochemist and astrobiologist, and the overall theme of her research program is to investigate interactions between water and minerals, and the impacts of life on those interactions. Dr. Hausrath and her group use a combination of field work, laboratory experiments, and modeling to investigate signatures of aqueous alteration and life, the rates at which these reactions occur, and how they differ on Earth and on other planets such as Mars.  This work helps understand chemical weathering, nutrient release, the formation of soils, and biosignatures on both Earth and  Mars. 

Dr. Elisabeth Hausrath and her lab group works to understand chemical weathering, nutrient release, water composition and quality, the formation of soils, and biosignatures on both Earth and  Mars. 

Hausrath Research Group

In field projects, Libby and her lab group have examined weathering profiles that show that mineral persistence records the pH, temperature and organic acids in solutions interacting with basaltic rock (Hausrath et al., 2008a ; Hausrath et al., 2008b,  Hausrath et al., 2011) and the solution pH and impact of Fe-oxidizing bacteria in solutions interacting with serpentinite rock (Baumeister et al., 2015).  They also use field experiments in which they place minerals in natural environments such as arctic soils (Hausrath et al., 2008) and fumaroles (Hausrath and Tschauner, 2013) to examine changes in the surfaces with alteration. 

Dr. Hausrath’s lab group performs laboratory dissolution and precipitation experiments, to examine the rates at which minerals dissolve, the impacts of the dissolution on mineral surfaces, to determine the conditions that are preserved in secondary minerals, and examines conditions that are difficult to find in natural terrestrial environments (e.g. experiments that are relevant to Mars). They have examined the dissolution of nutrient-rich phosphate minerals (Adcock et al., 2013 ; Tu et al., 2014); clay minerals found on Mars (Gainey et al., 2014), and dissolution in brines relevant to Mars (Hausrath et al., 2010; Steiner et al., 2016). 

Experiments conducted also demonstrate the environmental conditions, such as oxidation state and solution chemistry, that can be preserved in clay minerals (Gainey et al, 2017). They also include both microorganisms and the biological products of organisms such as organic acids to examine the effects of biological processes on these reactions (Hausrath et al., 2007  ; Hausrath et al., 2009; Harrold et al., 2018; Bartlett et al., 2018)

Dr. Hausrath’s lab group uses kinetic and thermodynamic numerical modeling to answer scientific questions that cannot be answered in a lab or field setting.  They have examined weathering of basalt relevant to both Earth and Mars using reactive transport modeling (Hausrath et al., 2008), and examined the implications of dissolution of carbonate (Hausrath and Olsen, 2013), phosphate-rich rocks on Mars (Adcock et al., 2015), and leached layer formation on Mars (Hausrath et al., 2018) as well as the behavior of selenium in terrestrial environments (Devitt et al., 2014). 

Proposed Projects

Dr. Libby Hausrath is currently looking for students to work with at both the M.S. and Ph.D. levels. Listed below are some potential projects – if you are interested in any of these, or have a project in mind, please contact: Elisabeth.Hausrath@unlv.edu. I am also currently looking for a postdoctoral scholar – please see the ad here.

• Field work, experiments and modeling to help interpret interactions between water, biota and minerals, with implications for astrobiology and the history of liquid water
• Analysis of data from Mars missions to interpret water-rock interactions on that planet
• Examining the behavior of nutrients in natural environments with implications for habitability
• Dissolution and precipitation rates of minerals in soils, including field, laboratory, and modeling components, and examining implications for water quality

Selected Publications:

For complete publication list please see the Hausrath Research Group website:
(* indicates student author; ^#  indicates postdoctoral author)

Hausrath, E.M., Ming, D.W., Peretyazhko, T.S., and Rampe, E.B. (2018) Reactive transport and mass balance modeling of the Stimson sedimentary formation and altered fracture zones constrain diagenetic conditions at Gale crater, Mars. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 491, 1-10.

^# Harrold, Z.R., Hausrath, E.M., *Garcia, A.H., Murray, A.E., Tschauner, O., Raymond, J.A., and Huang, S. (2018) Bioavailability of Mineral-Bound Iron to a Snow Algal-Bacterial Coculture and Implications for Albedo-Altering Snow Algal Blooms. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 84(7).

*Gainey, S.R., Hausrath, E.M., Adcock, C.T., Tschauner, O., Hurowitz, J.A., Ehlmann, B.L., Xiao, Y., and *Bartlett, C.L. (2017) Clay mineral formation under oxidized conditions and implications for paleoenvironments and organic preservation on Mars. Nature Communications, 8(1), 1230.

*Baumeister, J. L., E. M. Hausrath, A. Olsen, O. Tschauner, *C.T. Adcock, and R. V. Metcalf (2015). Biogeochemical weathering of serpentinites: An examination of incipient dissolution affecting serpentine soil formation, Applied Geochemistry 54: 74-84

*Adcock, C.T., E.M. Hausrath, Forster, P. (2013) Readily available phosphate from minerals in aqueous environments on early Mars, Nature Geoscience 6: 824-827. This paper was featured in the News and Views section of Nature Geoscience (Pasek 2013).

Courses Taught:

Undergraduate:
GEOG 103: Physical Geography of Earth’s Environment
GEOL 100: Natural Disasters
GEOL 110: Global Warming
GEOL 330 Introduction to Geochemistry
GEOL 425: Principles of Geochemistry
GEOL 478: Hydrogeochemistry
GEOL 491: Seminar

Graduate:
GEOL 625: Principles of Geochemistry
GEOL 678 Hydrogeochemistry
GEOL 703X: Topics in Advanced Geochemistry
GEOL 796: Aqueous Biogeochemistry