Dr Anouk Borst

Biography

As a Research Fellow at St Andrews, she will continue to work on alkaline magmatism and REE transport in South Greenland as part of the NERC funded SoS RARE consortium. SoS RARE aims at bringing together mineralogists, geochemists and metallurgists to understand the mobility and concentration of Nd and heavy REE’s in natural systems, and to develop environmentally friendly and economically viable ways to exploit such resources. The Gardar province provides a particularly suitable natural laboratory to address these issues, as it is one of the best preserved rifts in the world and hosts some of the world’s largest critical metal deposits. She is particularly interested in how hydrothermal fluids modify magmatic REE deposits, and how they affect extraction methods. She will use radiogenic isotopes to fingerprint the source of critical metal enrichment, and a variety of mineral chemical techniques to characterize primary and secondary REE-minerals in some of the most evolved and enriched Gardar intrusives. Other fields of interest include planetary geology and exploration, mantle petrology, sub-continental lithospheric processes and the origin of carbonatites, kimberlites and diamonds in relation to the mantle carbon cycle, fuelled by various research projects completed during my BSc and MSc studies at the VU University and at the European Space Agency.

Research Interest

petrology and geochemistry of peralkaline igneous rocks and associated rare metal deposits.