Congratulations! Prof. Rongfeng Ge receives the Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award

Congratulations! Prof. Rongfeng Ge receives the Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award

Recently, the list of recipients of the 2026 Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Awards was officially announced. Prof. Rongfeng Ge from the School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Nanjing University, has been awarded the Earth Sciences Award in recognition of his original achievements in the field of "the origin and tectonic evolution of Earth's early continents."

The Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Awards were established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to recognize young scientists under the age of 40 who have made outstanding contributions to original scientific and technological innovation. The awards are among the most influential honors for young scientists in China, emphasizing the originality of research outcomes, international impact, and their role in advancing disciplinary development. Prof. Ge received the award for his work in exploring the major scientific question of "how the first continent on Earth formed," providing new clues and perspectives for research in this field.

Earth has undergone a long evolutionary history of approximately 4.6 billion years. Geological records from its early history are extremely scarce and highly metamorphosed, making the study of the material composition and formation mechanisms of early continents a long-standing challenge for the Earth science community. Focusing on this frontier issue, Prof. Ge carried out extensive field geological investigations. In the uninhabited region of the Tarim Craton in western China, he discovered Eoarchean rocks dating back to about 3.7 billion years ago, covering an area of 16,000 square meters, representing the largest Eoarchean rock exposure discovered in China to date. More importantly, through detailed geochemical analyses, he demonstrated that these rocks are the oldest known high-pressure TTG (Tonalite-Trondhjemite-Granodiorite) rocks in the world, providing a crucial "anchor point" for exploring the earliest formation of continents.

Facing the global challenge that the water content and redox state of magmas preserved in ancient rocks are difficult to determine precisely, Prof. Ge developed a novel approach and innovatively established a "zircon oxybarometer-hygrometer." This new method combines two oxybarometers based on zircon trace elements, enabling the simultaneous and accurate reconstruction of the oxygen fugacity and water content of magmas during zircon crystallization, thereby overcoming the bottleneck in the quantitative analysis of water content in granitic magmas. Using this new method, he systematically constrained the physicochemical properties of Archean granitic magmas worldwide for the first time. The results show that these magmas are remarkably similar to island-arc magmas formed in modern subduction zones, being both water-rich and relatively oxidized. This discovery provides key geological evidence supporting "the existence of subduction processes on the early Earth."

Based on these discoveries and methodological innovations, Prof. Ge further proposed a new model for the origin of continents: the "arc accretion-water-fluxed melting" model. According to this model, primitive island arcs on the early Earth underwent melting under the influence of water, efficiently generating the felsic rocks that constitute the main body of continents. These island arcs were subsequently assembled through accretion, ultimately forming stable early continents. This model successfully explains the intrinsic connections among continental crust, large-scale liquid water, and subduction tectonics, and is of great significance for understanding the early geodynamic evolution of the Earth, the formation of a habitable environment, and the mineralization potential of early continents. His work contributes to our understanding of the origin of the ancient continents beneath our feet and offers insights into how Earth became a habitable planet.

Prof. Ge's research results have been published in leading international journals such as Nature and Science Advances, receiving high recognition from scholars both domestically and internationally. His work has not only opened new directions for research on the formation of early continents, but has also been widely applied in fields such as mineral exploration. He has previously received support from the Excellent Young Scientists Fund (2019) and the Distinguished Young Scientists Fund (2024) of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and has been honored with multiple awards including Top 100 Outstanding Academic Papers of Natural Science of Jiangsu Province. Prof. Ge's receipt of the Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Awards not only recognizes his personal achievements but also highlights the strong research capabilities and sustained innovation of Nanjing University in fundamental research in the Earth sciences.