So after my grand experience in New York City I took a train to New Haven to pay a visit to Yale University. With the aid of my supervisor in Australia, I was invited to give a seminar and meet the geology and geophysics research group.

I arrived on a Sunday afternoon and got a taxi to the Lawn club where my accommodation was arranged. Strangely enough the lady behind the window didn’t have any record of my arrival until she found a card with an odd name written on it. It turned out the reservation was made under the name of the professor, Shun Karato but was misspelled so badly it didn’t make any sense – Saikaraateman. She said she’d get it sorted out and I didn’t have to worry about it. The room had everything I expected, a double bed and tv with an adjoining bathroom. The place looked interesting too. It looked pretty old and was clearly a gentlemens tennis club. The tennis courts were out back.

I spend two exhausting days at the Geology and Geophysics dept at Yale. I met Prof. Shun Karato and he showed me around the place. I didn’t have my presentation until 4pm on Monday so after discussing some of my research with him, I set out meeting some of the other students and post-docs in his group. The seminar went well and lasted a good hour with questions in between. The following day I met the professor again and we brainstormed some of the issues of my research that he wasn’t sure or convinced about. Since i do high temperature experiments on synthetic, rather than natural rocks the rheology (flow behaviour) is quite different. In the end, we worked out a possible theory that I will be testing when I get back to ANU. In fact, he was so excited that he asked to be a co-author for a paper that I will write on dislocation recovery in olivine. Remember that this is the one that i tried to submit before but got rejected.

Here are some photos of Yale:
http://picasaweb.google.com/robertfarla/YaleMinnesota

On the Wednesday I caught a train back to NYC and a plane back to Minneapolis. Never giving myself a moment rest, I decided to visit the lab again here at the uni of Minnesota to see what was going on. By luck, I saw Prof David Kohlstedt there who told me there would be a bbq at his house that night since he accepted two new phd students from Beijing University, China. So I was picked up from my accommodation here and spend a wonderful evening eating tasty sausages and drinking some popular American beer (Summit and Leinenkugel’s amber ale). It was a good way to meet the research group as well.

I will be starting my experiments on Monday, when the lab technician will have returned from holidays. In the mean while, time to kick back and relax and enjoy the summer here. In other news, Lynn told me there is a Typhoon wreaking havoc in Shanghai and along the east coast of China. Sounds like nasty weather and she’s now in bed with a fever. I wish her all the best.

Rex out.