Tobias Fischer

From the mountains you can stand above the city and catch sight of the Rhine, viewing the University of Freiburg in an abyss of greenery. Tobias Fischer, studying here, imagined the geological minefield abundant and distant in the southwest of the United States. Fischer, who grew up in Germany, travelled many times during his childhood to Africa, venturing to various spots on the continent with his parents, avid travelers, in the early 1980s. “I was fascinated by the natural beauty, the rocks, the sand dunes,” he recalls.

While an undergraduate student, Fischer seized the opportunity to study abroad on a scholarship, choosing ASU.

“The geology of that region [the Arizona desert] always interested me,” he stated. Once at ASU, Fischer, under the guidance of Lynda Williams, a research professor in SESE, began doing laboratory work focused on geochemistry. Through Williams, Fischer was able to get in contact with Professor Stanley Williams, who Fischer would later work with during his career as a doctoral student at ASU.

Fischer graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1991 with a bachelor’s
degree in geology and then began his graduate work at ASU. He graduated in 1999 with a Ph.D. in Geology, focusing his dissertation on volcanic gasses being emitted from subduction zone volcanoes, and also, looking at the chemical composition of the gases to determine how their geochemistry relates to eruptive activity. He has been a professor at the University of New Mexico for the past ten years, focusing his work on active volcanoes.

Fischer has ventured to a multitude of places most people can only imagine, seeing maybe on a hand-sized photo. As a volcanologist, one of the places he has visited on many occasions is Central America, along the Ring of Fire, where he travelled to study volcanic emissions and the composition of volcanic gasses, looking at the global cycle of carbon, nitrogen and water, relating the volcanic emissions to the amount of carbon and nitrogen subducted into the subduction zones.

He also examined the global cycles of elements at subduction zone settings, studying at the Izu-Bonin Mariana Volcanic Arc (which lies along the eastern margin of the Philippine Sea Plate in the Western Pacific Ocean), near the deepest cut in the Earth’s surface – the Challenger Deep. Additionally, he has studied the 2003 eruption of Anatahan (part of the Northern Mariana Islands, about 200 miles north of Guam). Fischer travelled to Iceland, host to highly geologically active grounds, to look at the sources of nitrogen, carbon and noble gasses in hot spot magmas to determine their relationship with the processes that occur in the deep versus shallow Earth.

Nearly 2,000 meters above the floor of the Rift Valley in Tanzania, sits the world’s only erupting carbonatite volcano, Oldoinyo Lengai. Fischer has been here on many expeditions, working to understand the relationship between carbon dioxide and volcanic activity. Noting the very high carbon dioxide content in the mantle, producing the carbon dioxide rich magmas, he seeks to determine the way in which the carbonatite transitions from an intrusive lava flow activity to an explosive eruption.

Most recently, he began working in the northern part of the East African rift, at Erta Ale in Ethiopia, source of the longest existing lava lake, observing sulfur isotope fractionation during magma degassing, trying to determine whether sulfur isotope fractionation can be utilized to better understand past eruptions in hopes of discovering the amount of sulfur released during them. Also, it will assist in determining the impact it had on climate. This can be applied to the Mars sulfur cycle, facilitating the prediction of the sulfur isotope composition degassing from Mars volcanoes, and also, the kind of deposit that would be left behind on the Martian surface.

Fischer is currently doing field instrumentation development. He is using instruments to measure the carbon dioxide released by volcanic plumes to better control the carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes. Fischer’s research is closely related to the work he began doing while earning his Ph.D.; however, he has expanded it geographically and also, in terms of technique.