CONAN Division
Carbonates, Organic-rich mudrocks, Natural fluids, Ancient basins, and Natural resources
Geologic Crucible
CONAN is the Washburn CHAOS Lab’s geologic systems division, focused on the rocks, fluids, pressure, heat, and deep-time violence that built Earth’s environments and created the conditions life has been dealing with ever since.
This division investigates carbonates, organic-rich mudrocks, migrating fluids, ancient basins, and natural resources, treating the geologic record less like a quiet history book and more like the aftermath of billions of years of tectonic collisions, buried oceans, toxic fluids, environmental collapse, mineral transformation, and planetary-scale chaos.
CONAN integrates petrography, mineralogy, isotope geochemistry, organic geochemistry, fluid analysis, and geochronology to reconstruct ancient environments, track fluids moving through the subsurface, investigate resource systems, and understand how geology controls the chemistry and environmental conditions surrounding modern biological systems.
Before there were microbiomes making weird chemistry or ecosystems trying to recover from disturbance, there was geology. CONAN investigates the ancient Earth systems that built the environments our microbes now inhabit and the chemical battlefields they are still adapting to today.
CONAN Research Projects
Coming Soon
Project 1
Coming Soon.
Project 2
Coming Soon.
Initiate Communications
Want to collaborate on geologic systems, critical minerals, environmental reconstruction, carbonate systems, or buried worlds with complicated histories? Reach out to the CONAN Division. We are always interested in new field opportunities, new partnerships, and rocks with enough unresolved issues to require isotopes.
