Ming Tang, Peking University, China
2023 Houtermans Award medallist
Ming Tang is a geochemist at the School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University. Ming grew up in Zhenjiang, a small, quiet city with more than 3000 years of recorded history in eastern China. In 2007, he went to Nanjing University and got his bachelor’s degree four years later. After that, Ming departed for the U.S. and obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2016. For the next three years, Ming worked as a post-doc at Rice University. Ming finished his U.S. journey and returned to China to join Peking University in 2019.
Ming has been working on a variety of topics related to the evolution of continents. During his Ph.D., Ming was supervised by Bill McDonough and Roberta Rudnick and used the Eu anomaly in MORB and the continental crust to understand lower crust recycling. Roberta then introduced Ming to the field of Li isotopes. Ming collaborated with Catherine Chauvel and used Li isotopes to track sediment recycling in the Lesser Antilles. Ming later extended his interest in Li to zircon and collaborated with Maitrayee Bose, Dustin Trail, and Yulia Goreva. He showed that Li diffuses in multiple modes in zircon. Ming’s final project at Maryland was to use terrigenous sediments to track the chemical evolution of the upper continental crust through time. Ming was inspired by the diamictite work by Richard Gaschnig, Roberta’s former post-doc. Ming and Kang Chen built on Rich’s work and showed that Earth’s upper continental crust may have transitioned from mafic to felsic in the late Archean.
During his post-doc, Ming worked with Cin-Ty Lee at Rice University. There, Ming focused on arc lower crust, trying to understand what causes calc-alkaline magmatic differentiation. Ming showed that Fe depletion, which characterizes calc-alkaline magmas, was driven by the fractionations of Fe-rich silicates, particularly garnet, instead of magnetite, as previously thought. This series of works also showed that garnet fractionation causes endogenic oxidation of magmas.
The wide range of training projects gave Ming a research experience with rich flavors and encouraged him to think big. This wasn’t possible if Ming had not worked with many excellent scientists with diverse research backgrounds.
Ming’s enthusiasm for exploration continues. Now funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ming is working with his Chinese colleagues and international collaborators to understand how solid Earth processes influenced hypsometry through time and the consequences on the surface environment. Recently, Ming and his collaborators proposed that Earth may have experienced “orogenic quiescence” in its middle age. Ming also started to look at extraterrestrial materials, including the Lunar samples returned by the Chang’E-5 mission.
Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.