Lucía Villar-Muñoz is a Postdoc researcher in the Department of Geophysics at the Universidad de Chile, where her focus is to search the energy and mineral resources of the Chilean continental shelf. She has been studying gas hydrates in the margin of Chile for more than 10 years and mapping the areas where to find this energy resource to evaluate its possible escape in shallow areas as a consequence of the increase of temperature in the oceans. She has also spent the last 5 years working on data collection for environmental impact assessment associated with future deep-sea mining, mainly polymetallic nodule mining in the Clarion-Clipperton fracture zone.
Lucia received her Ph.D. (cum laude) at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany where she analyzed more than 150 seismic profiles in the Chile margin to map gas hydrates and understand their relationship with heat flow, in fact, many of these seismic profiles were acquired by herself while embarking on geophysical vessels during her bachelor’s degree.
For this reason, Lucia is returning to sea on the Chile Margin expedition, accompanying the marine geophysics team and her task is to take new heat flow data in the seep areas they discover on this expedition. She hopes that the whole team manages to find seep areas on the platform and hopes to fulfill her lifelong dream, which is to see in situ how methane gas bubbles escape from the seafloor and to gaze at the fauna associated with these escapes.
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