[4] Kastner attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1964, where she received a minor in chemistry and a master's degree in geology.
[3] Prior to teaching at Scripps Institution, Kastner worked as a research associate at Harvard University in the department of geological sciences until 1970.
Some believe she has accomplished more work than anyone else among the marine geology community and her publications contain high quality data and ideas that show consistency in addressing the big issues in Earth sciences.
[6] Miriam Kastner's research is primarily based in mineralogy and petrology, though the most important issue pursued in her career is fluid flow at subducting plate boundaries.
[6] Kastner from the SIO (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) situated in La Jolla, California, demonstrated that society had no insight on the subsea vents until the 1980s.
[7] Throughout her long and successful career, Miriam Kastner produced dozens of publications highlighting her key research.
[2] As a female in a once male dominated profession, Kastner expressed that it was difficult to garner support from science-related funding agencies.
[11] With the oceanic sediments she determined that the diagenetic transformations of opal-A to opal-CT and quartz is important to the formation of siliceous marine deposits.
By studying these marine events, Kastner has stated that this can allow for people to be better prepared to predict global warming and have the possibility of avoiding sudden climatic response to anthropogenic perturbations.
[16] In the early 1990s, Kastner produced an experimental result which cast doubt on a thesis about dolomite leaching in dating the Getty kouros statue at the centre of a forgery claim.
By artificially inducing de-dolomitization in the laboratory, a she produced a result since confirmed by Stanley Margolis a geology professor at the University of California at Davis who had previously determined that this process could occur only over the course of many centuries making forgery unlikely.