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ARC Centre of Excellence for Core to Crust Fluid Systems (CCFS)

Core to Crust Fluid Systems (CCFS) Logo

Welcome to the ARC Centre of Excellence for Core to Crust Fluid Systems 

Official Launch!

On behalf of the Collaborating Partners, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at Macquarie University, Professor Jim Piper, officially launched the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Core to Crust Fluid Systems on November 11, 2011. Our special guest for the afternoon was Professor Margaret Sheil, Chief Executive Officer of the ARC. We would like to thank Margaret Sheil, Jim Piper, Stephen Thurgate, and all those who were able to join us to celebrate this momentous occasion.

CCFS Launch

 

Simon Wilde, Suzanne O'Reilly, Margaret Sheil, Campbell McCuaig and Jim Piper
Photographed by Effy Alexakis, photowrite

 

 

More photographs of the launch are available here


Centre Context

Water is essential for human existence, indeed for life’s beginning. The deep circulation of water and other fluids lubricates the deep-seated dynamics that keep Earth geologically alive, and its surface habitable. Several oceans’ worth of water may be present inside Earth, and the exchange of water and other fluids between the surface and the deep interior plays a crucial role in most Earth systems, including the evolution of the surface and the hydrosphere/atmosphere/biosphere.

Until recently, a real understanding of the workings of Earth’s deep plumbing system (from the surface to 3,000 km depth) has been tantalisingly out of our reach. Now, rapid advances in geophysics are producing stunning new images of physical properties such as seismic velocity and electrical conductivity in the deep Earth, but interpretation of these images requires new kinds of data on deep-Earth materials, and especially on the effects of deep fluids and their circulation. The CCFS CoE will integrate previously disparate fields - geochemistry, petrophysics, geophysics and numerical and thermodynamical modelling - to reach a new level of understanding of Earth’s dynamics and the fluid cycle(s) through time.

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