Francis Albarede

About

Francis Albarede studied natural sciences at the University of Montpellier in the 1960s. He defended a graduate thesis in geochemistry in 1972 at the IPGP, the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris, under the supervision of Claude Allègre, and remained there for several years as a teacher-researcher. In 1976, he defended a state thesis on isotopic geochemistry and spent two years in the United States. He was promoted to professor at the National School of Geology in Nancy in 1979, where he remained for 12 years. In 1991, he joined the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he has become an emblematic figure, heavily involved in teaching and research in the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon - Earth, Planets and Environment (LGL-TPE). He has contributed to the acquisition of advanced analytical equipment, such as the first commercial multicollection plasma-source mass spectrometer in the mid-1990s. Since 2015, he has held the title of professor emeritus at ENS de Lyon and remains an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Rice University. His research areas include trace elements, radiogenic isotope geochemistry, geochronology, deep Earth geochemistry, origin of continents, planetary geochemistry, nuclear geochemistry, early Earth, origin of life, and the study of stable metal isotopes in biology, medicine, historical, and archaeological artifacts. In 2018, he was awarded the inaugural Nemmers Prize in Earth Sciences for his fundamental applications of…

Research topics

• Geology
• Geochemistry
• Chemistry
• Astrobiology
• Mineralogy

Selected publications

• A search for life in Palaeoproterozoic marine sediments using Zn isotopes and geochemistry

  Earth and Planetary Science Letters · 2023-04-26 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Sediments from the 2.1- to 1.9-billion-year-old Francevillian Group in southeastern Gabon include centimeter-sized pyritized structures suggestive of colonial organisms (El Albani et al., 2010), some of which may have been motile (El Albani et al., 2019). However, these interpretations were largely based on morphological and geochemical characteristics that lack metabolic clues and/or can be explained by abiotic processes. To move this work forward, we describe other centimeter-sized specimens,…

  PublisherDOI

• Provenance of lead ores used for water pipes production in the ancient Roman Gaul (Vienne, France)

  Quaternary Science Reviews · 2025-02-05 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Salt, silver, and gold: early innovations in precious metal refining

  npj Heritage Science · 2025-07-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study explores Egyptian and Persian silver artifacts from the Louvre Museum to trace the origins and development of gold and silver refining methods. While conventional theories attribute the emergence of gold parting through salt cementation to Lydia in the Iron Age, our findings indicate that this technique was already in use during the Middle Bronze Age. Lead isotope and elemental analyses reveal two distinct silver sources: (1) Aegean silver, characterized by positive lead model ages, a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Continental Emergence and Ocean Chemistry: A Pathway to the Great Oxygenation Event

  2025-01-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Zinc Isotopes in Miocene Plant Fossils at Andance, France: Implications for Biogenicity Criteria

  2025-01-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Janne Blichert‐Toft

  École Normale Supérieure de Lyon

  823 shared

• Philippe Télouk

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  417 shared

• Vincent Balter

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  216 shared

• Aline Lamboux

  Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon : Terre, Planètes et Environnement

  163 shared

• Emmanuelle Albalat

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  161 shared

• Toshiyuki Fujii

  Furukawa Electric (Japan)

  120 shared

• Frédéric Moynier

  Institut de physique du globe de Paris

  116 shared

• Hugo Delile

  Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean Pouilloux

  107 shared

Education

• PhD (Docteur d'Etat), Physique du Globe

  Université Paris Diderot

  1976

Awards & honors

• Nemmers Prize in Earth Sciences (2018)

Similar researchers at Rice University

• Rajdeep Dasguptah-58
• Andrea Isellah-57
• Carrie Masielloh-55