Wei-Li HongAssistant professor of Geochemistry

About me

"Geologist in the core and geochemist in the soul"

I am a geochemist and marine geologist by training. I apply numerical models to quantitatively describe the geochemical observations in pore fluids, sediments and authigenic minerals. I am currently involved in the follwoing projects. I am always looking for self-motivated PhD students and post-docs. Various oppertunities available (scroll down for details). 

1) Silicate alteration in marine sediments: Chemical weathering and reverse weathering involving silicate minerals in terrestrial environments are likely the most important processes controlling the long-term CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and thereby, green house forcing. It is much less understood whether similar processes occur in marine environments and what is the scale of such processes.
2022-2023 Swedish Foundations' starting grant fellow-Ragnar Söderbergs stiftelse (info)
 2023-2028 ERC Consolidator grant (info)
Suggested reading: 
Hong, W-L., Torres, M. E., and Kutterolf, S. "Towards a global quantification of volcanogenic aluminosilicate alteration rates through the mass balance of strontium in marine sediments." Chemical Geology 550 (2020): 119743.  
Torres, M. E., Hong, W.-L., Solomon, E. A. et al. "Silicate weathering in anoxic marine sediment as a requirement for authigenic carbonate burial." Earth-Science Reviews 200 (2020): 102960.

2) Glacial-driven Submarine Groundwater Discharge (SGD): Submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) has been known for decades as an important process that, in addition to rivers, transports solutes from land to ocean. Ice sheet dynamics have been put forward to explain the SGD observed from places with past ice sheet coverage such as the Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America  as well as the present day Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. What about the Fennoscandian ice sheet (FIS)? Is it possible that FIS also induced SGD in the past? Is there any trace left today to answer these questions?
2020-2024 GRIEG- EEA Grant and Norway Grant (info)
2022-2025 Swedish Research Council (VR).
Suggested reading:
Kim, Ji-Hoon, Jong-Sik Ryu, Wei-Li Hong, Kwangchul Jang, Young Ji Joo, Damien Lemarchand, Jin Hur et al. "Assessing the impact of freshwater discharge on the fluid chemistry in the Svalbard fjords." Science of the Total Environment 835 (2022): 155516.

Hong, W.‐L., Lepland, A., Himmler, T. et al. "Discharge of meteoric water in the eastern Norwegian Sea since the last glacial period." Geophysical Research Letters 46, no. 14 (2019): 8194-8204.

3) Methane dynamics in Arctic Ocean seeps: Emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from cold seeps to overlying ocean has been a topic of interest in the Arctic region. I study the geochemical singals in pore fluids, seidments, and authigenic minerals to understand the mechanism, time scale, and consequence of methane emission. 
Suggested reading:
Hong, W.-L., Torres, M. E., Carroll, J. et al. "Seepage from an arctic shallow marine gas hydrate reservoir is insensitive to momentary ocean warming." Nature communications 8, no. 1 (2017): 1-14. 

4) Fluid flow and gas hydrate dynamics: Fluid flow and gas hydrate deposits commonly appear along continental margins. What can we learn from the pore fluid geochemistry? 
Suggested reading:
Hong, W‐L., Torres, M. E. , Portnov, A. et al. "Variations in gas and water pulses at an Arctic seep: fluid sources and methane transport." Geophysical Research Letters 45, no. 9 (2018): 4153-4162.
Peszynska, M., Hong, W.-L., Torres, M. E. and Kim, J.-H. "Methane hydrate formation in Ulleung Basin under conditions of variable salinity: Reduced model and experiments." Transport in Porous Media 114, no. 1 (2016): 1-27. 

Potential Postdoc funding:

Wenner-Gren postdoc fellowship: https://www.swgc.org/postdoktorsstipendier-sverige.aspx (in Swedish only)

Fullbright Scholar Program (for Americans): https://www.cies.org/country/sweden

Schmidt Science Fellows: https://schmidtsciencefellows.org/

FORMAS Mobility Grant: https://formas.se/en/start-page/archive/calls/2020-03-04-mobility-grants-for-early-career-researchers-2020.html

MCIF: https://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/actions/individual-fellowships_en