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Mountains rise from forces deep in the Earth, jutting high into the sky and lasting for eons. But water flowing over rocks eventually whittles those mountains into dirt. For more than a decade, geochemist Kevin Rosso has explored the chemical forces that break minerals down from rocks to dirt. Understanding the nuts and bolts of these reactions, such as how electrons moving through minerals remodel surfaces, is key to maintaining good water quality, cleaning up contaminants, and maybe even living on another planet like Mars.

"Everyone's going to agree that having clean and fresh water resources is critical to humanity, and there's pressure from all different directions on our drinking water resources—pressures of overuse, farming, contamination, climate change, and energy," said Rosso. "What we're trying to understand are the mechanics of how things work at the molecular scale, like dissolution or crystal growth. Those things directly impact water quality."

But Rosso's work is not all just minerals and groundwater. It crosses over into corrosion, like when iron gets exposed to oxygen. Similar processes happen in batteries, solar energy cells, and other energy devices.

Rosso is one of the founders of the field of molecular geochemistry, a field that developed with new tools such as scanning probe microscopy and massively parallel supercomputers. In 2019, he was invited to join the Washington State Academy of Sciences. Rosso is on the editorial board for the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, where he can provide insights on Earth-like chemicals on Mars. Formerly, he served as an editor for Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. In 2016, he gave the Mineralogical Society’s Hallimond Lecture. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious Science Innovation Award from the European Association of Geochemistry and received the international distinction of Geochemistry Fellow.

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