About

J. Michael Rhodes is a Five College Professor in the Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests include volcanology, petrology, and geochemistry. Educated initially in England, he began his professional career mapping and studying granites in the outback of the Northern Territory of Australia. He completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 1970, where he used geochemistry and x-ray fluorescence analysis to investigate the origin of granites. Rhodes has extensive experience analyzing lunar samples, having established an x-ray fluorescence laboratory at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and serving as a Principal Investigator in the Apollo Lunar Program. His research focused on volcanic rocks flooding the lunar mare basins. He expanded his work to include the study of ocean floor basalts, including lavas from oceanic spreading ridges and samples from the oceanic crust recovered by the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Since joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1978, he has continued this research and has also studied active volcanoes such as Mauna Loa and Kilauea in Hawaii, Mount Etna in Sicily, and basalts along the Juan de Fuca ridge in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Rhodes runs the university's x-ray Analytical Facility, a leading x-ray laboratory and regional center for geochemical research used by researchers across the country and at the university. His work aims to relate lava compositions and mineralogy to eruption rates and volumes to understand volcanic processes quantitatively.

Research topics

• Geology
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Petrology
• Seismology
• Geochemistry
• Earth science
• Mineralogy

Selected publications

• Accumulated Puʻu ʻŌʻō magma fed the voluminous 2018 rift eruption of Kīlauea Volcano: Evidence from lava chemistry

  Goldschmidt Abstracts · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Geology
  • Geochemistry
  • Petrology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Olivine-Control Trends: A Mauna Loa Perspective

  Goldschmidt Abstracts · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Geology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Identification of the peanut-agglutinin binding pancreatic cancer serum marker in pancreatic tissue extracts

  British Journal of Cancer · 1990-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael O. Garcia

  University of Hawaii–West Oahu

  1 shared

• CK Ching

  Duchess of Kent Children's Hospital

  1 shared

• A. J. Pietruszka

  1 shared