This summer, I worked with Marc Hirschmann and Travis Tenner studying igneous petrology. My project, "The effect of water on melting in the mantle", was an experimental approach to determine the effect of increasing temperature of mantle peridotite at a fixed water content and pressure. This data can be applied to melt fraction calculations in subduction zones as well as in areas with lower water contents such as ridges, back arc basins, and ocean islands.
The project is not yet completed, and Marc and Travis will continue to perform research on this project until enough data is collected to submit a formal paper. That being said, the results which we did get were still significant. We were able to use collected numerical data to calculate the melt fraction of experiments done at various temperatures. By comparing these data to experiments done with anhydrous material, we were able to see that the addition of water affects melt fraction in subduction zones by as much as 200% in some cases. More work needs to be done on this project to see a meaningful trend in the data, and confirm these results. This data will also contribute to estimating the effect of water content on melt fraction in areas with lower water content like ridges, back arc basins, and ocean islands.