ESP's Eric Brown, and PhD students Hannah Bobrowski and Ole Skursch, led a three day short course teaching participants from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Aarhus University how to apply various thermodynamic modeling programs to igneous systems.

The course focused on applications of the MELTS family of programs (MELTS, pMELTS, rhyoliteMELTS, and alphaMELTS; Ghiorso and Sack, 1995; Asimow and Ghiorso, 1998; Ghiorso et al., 2002; Smith and Asimow, 2005), which models phase equilibria in magmatic systems by minimizing system energy, and REEBOX PRO (Brown and Lesher, 2016), a compiled stand-alone application that simulates adiabatic decompression melting of passively or actively upwelling mantle containing up to five distinct lithologies.

Brown, Bobrowski and Skursch gave lectures explaining the thermodynamic basis behind each model and their possible application to igneous systems. They also provided step-by-step guides to installing and using the different models, and assigned problem sets to demonstrate the models' capabilities.