Associate Professor Druhan received the exciting news that NSF will fund a new 1M collaborative research grant entitled “Collaborative Research: Concentration - Ratio - Discharge (C-R-Q) Relationships of Transient Water-Age Distributions”. UIUC will lead the project, together with PIs at The University of Arizona and Cornell University. The multi-disciplinary research team will combine measurements of isotopic tracers of mineral-water interactions with well-constrained hydrologic transit time distributions to develop a reactive transport model of basalt weathering reactions at the hillslope scale. Specifically, the project will pair silicon isotopes (d30Si) and germanium-silicon ratios (Ge/Si), which are each uniquely sensitive to the rate and nature of secondary mineral formation in weathering systems. This research will be conducted at the Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) facility, which consists of a replicated set of three highly-instrumented convergent, basaltic hillslopes constructed within the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2.