Thursday 3 July 2025

A scientific breakthrough, and recently published in Langmuir, has been led by Irish academic Joseph Mooney – a Sir Bernard Crossland Symposium scholar – at MIT and sheds light on a long-standing mystery in materials and environmental science. 

Mooney is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at MIT and a graduate of the University of Limerick.

The study – 'In Situ X-ray Microscopy Unravelling the Onset of Salt Creeping at a Single-Crystal Level' – is the first to directly capture how salt crystals begin to grow and spread on surfaces beneath a droplet of liquid.

Using powerful real-time X-ray imaging at MIT.nano, we visualised a process known as salt creeping, revealing how a single crystal anchors to a surface and kicks off a cascading growth sequence.

"This work was carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during my time as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, and it was a collaboration between the University of Limerick, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Cornell University – with Ireland playing a central role in both the leadership and execution of the study," said Mooney.

Link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.langmuir.5c01460

Though subtle, this phenomenon has wide-reaching implications for global industries:

• Desalination and clean water technology;
• Mineral extraction and resource recovery;
• Separation science and filtration membranes;
• Anti-fouling coatings and corrosion prevention;
• Art and cultural heritage preservation.

"I hope that this might inspire other young people in college to aim high in academia. Funnily enough I'm using similar techniques that I pitched at the Symposium to find these phenomena," said Mooney.