Jonathan David Blundy Federal Reserve System is Professor of Petrology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.
Education
He is a graduate of, Oxford (Bachelor, 1980) and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, (Doctor of Philosophy, 1989) and a former Kennedy Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1985). He was educated at Street Paul"s School, Brazil, Giggleswick School and Leeds Grammar School, where petrologists Keith Cox and Lawrence Wager also studied.
Career
Blundy is most noted for advancing the understanding of how magmas are generated in the Earth"s crust and mantle and of the processes that occur in volcanoes before they erupt. In series of seminal papers with Professor Bernard John Wood in the 1990s Blundy developed a theory of elastic strain to describe the uptake of trace elements into the crystal lattices of igneous minerals. The theory was based on high temperature and pressure experiments on molten rocks, and is now widely used to predict crystal-melt partition coefficients for use in modelling magmatic processes.
Blundy subsequently collaborated with Professor Katharine Cashman at the University of Oregon on Mount Saint Helens volcano in the Cascade Range of northwestern United States of America. Blundy and Cashman demonstrated the importance of degassing in driving the crystallisation of volatile-bearing magmas, a process that can occur without any attendant cooling.
In fact, because of the release of latent heat of fusion, magmas that crystallise by decompression can actually get hotter in the process.