Geoverse

Most of you already know what I’ve been upto lately. But since i’m extremely bored (more on that later) here is a blog post.

I left Canberra on 20 July (Incredible I know!) for a trip to Perth to attend the Australian Earth Sciences Convention (AESC). The conference was held in the Exhibition centre near the river. The flight took over 4 hours. Australia is big!

Bronze statues of kangaroes in Perth.

I quite enjoyed the conference as there were many interesting talks and the fact that several people from RSES came too. I think we went out every night, sometimes to a restaurant or at other times straight to the pub :P.

Exhibition centre (long building in front) and Perth’s skyscrapers.

I tried some of the local beer and found Swan Draught quite alright. I was warned not to try Emu beer. Apparently it’s worse than Victoria Bitter! As for a good lager, Tooheys extra dry is really nice but that’s not a WA beer. The beer that really proved to be a winner is Little Creatures. One night out we took the train to Fremantle (Freo) and headed for the Little Creatures beer brewery. That was fantastic! They served serveral varieties of the beer. I hadn’t tried the amber ale variety and quite liked it. Somehow that night it also became known as “Roger that” beer…heh heh. As a matter of fact, it turned out that there was a beer called Roger but I don’t recall having tried it.

Little Creatures beer brewery in Freo.

On the last day it was my turn to give a talk. I came after my supervisor which in the beginning made me a bit nervous. However, when I went up the stage it was rather convenient actually because it meant I didn’t have to explain the complicated features of the seismic wave attenuation apparatus. So I finished within the allotted time and there were a few questions. Unfortunately, it was the last day and there wasn’t much of an audience left. Not that it really mattered. I got some good praise from my colleages from RSES.

After the conference I remained in Perth/Fremantle for another few days. I met some former study mates from Utrecht and we had some good nights out. On Saturday I went with a colleague from RSES (he was the only one besides me who thought it was a good idea to hang around for a bit to explore Perth) to Rottnest Island. It’s a sandy island just off the coast of Perth/Freo. We only stayed for 4 hours but it was well worth checking out.

Rottnest Island. Perth can be seen in the distance.

On Sunday I had a relaxing day in Freo exploring all that there is to see. Fremantle is an old town for Australian standards. It was founded by settlers in 1829. One of the most interesting things it has to offer is the old Prison. It was in use until as recently as 1991 and is one of Australia’s oldest prisons. The tour was just over an hour and most intruiging.

The old Fremantle prison.

On Monday morning I took the Greyhound Australia coach to Cervantes. This small town (if a collection of summer houses can be called a town) is on the west coast about 3 hours drive north of Perth. The weather was stormy with frequent heavy showers and strong winds. That didn’t mean the sun wasn’t around and I had a great three days there.

The coast and outback near Cervantes.

On the second day I took a tour to the famous Pinnacles. The geological formations were most interesting. Turns out that the pinnacles are remains of precipitated carbonate rocks in a sandy dune environment. Features such as fossilised roots and tree trunks can easility be observed in them. The pinnacles formed underground as water leached through the soil. Due to pH changes the dissolved calcium precipitated at a certain level in the ground along the roots of the trees that grew there. This happened repeately during the various ice ages. Now the trees are all but gone and only scrubs remain.

The pinnacles.

Fossilised tree trunk.

I travelled back to Perth on Wednesday arvo and met up one last time with my mates from the Netherlands. On Thursday midday I flew back to Canberra and arrived in the evening. Back to the cold and rain of Australia’s coldest city. Oh well, I had a great time!

G’day all. It’s almost 5pm and i’m bored so here’s a new post. 🙂

I’ve been slowly making progress my mid-term essay writing. Still got about a month left to get it done and there is still a lot to go through. I’ll manage though. In the meanwhile i’ve been testing the new software for the deformation apparatus. Seems to work beautifully monitoring not only temperature and confining pressure but also the applied force and displacement as the sample is shortened. We did a couple trial runs on an aluminium cyclinder and a Wombeyan marble cut into a cylindrical shape. The aluminium didn’t respond at all to the applied force except elastically. To get it to deform though we are more interested in seeing creep in the material occurring. The aluminium turned out to be re-inforced with titanium grains. The marble on the other hand showed beautiful creep under a load of 20 kiloNewtons at a confining pressure of 50 MPa. We managed to shorten the sample by about 1 mm over 20 mm total length. That’s 5% strain. My supervisor and I will demonstrate the same experiment with the marble next week to a group of masters students. In fact, I’ll be in charge of this demonstration as my supervisor show another demonstration with the other half of the group on seismic wave interferometry. That’ll be fun for sure. This week we are also testing the new furnace and after a little hiccup we had with a shortcircuit, we are now back in business. That means I’ll be ready soon to do some hot press experiments to create more samples.

Besides work not much going on. My Serbian housemate will leave in 2 weeks and we’re looking for a new housemate. No idea yet who it’s going to be but there have been some people coming over already to have a look.

I also finally decided to buy a decent mountain bike! This one kicks arse. For pictures of it check the photos link in the top navigation and go to picasa photos.

G’day peoples,

First the big announcement:

I’m coming to the Netherlands 05-Oct until 23-Oct! So put it in your agenda if you wish to meet me. You can always contact me via email.

Second big announcement:

I finally submitted my masters research manuscript! It will be peer-reviewed for the coming months. I don’t know what my chances are of a publication so wait and see 😉

Work at uni going steadily. Nothing to do yet in the lab so i’m now concentrating on some theory fundamental to my upcoming research. It’s pretty unexplored territory, not even my supervisor/advisors know what result im supposed to get! :-O

I’ve volunteered for co-ordinating this years student fieldtrip to Kioloa at the coast and a destination unknown. When the trip is going to be is also unknown. September doesn’t seem like a good option this year and as you know in October i wont be there. No point worrying about this now though and even if i dont go i can still do the planning for it.

I also launched a project in order to co-ordinate activities and events at RSES in the form of a google calendar that can be shared among friends. Credits go to Alwin for giving me this brilliant idea. So far 7 students have joined, mostly first years. I should send out another reminder because there are supposed to be heaps more grad students. Everyone can put events on the calendar but the project kinda fails if i’m the only contributor. New arrivals probably don’t yet arrange any (big) social events. This is kinda disappointing because RSES really needs more students to get involved in socializing. Even if it is just meeting each other at lunch time. The third years don’t really seem to care about anyone else except each other and are “too busy”. Only a handful of my year try to get some stuff going on and of course the first years are clueless of what is going on.

I feel i’m getting more and more drawn towards to people at RSBS (B = biological) where much more interesting things are happening and where I feel welcome. Last weekend I’ve been to a masquerade party with some of the people there. Needless to say it was a real blast! I’m also addicted to a pretty neat rpg computer game called The Witcher which I borrowed from a mate. 😛

If you remember i’ve been to the Wagga conference on condensed matter and materials. There I submitted a manuscript of my preliminary research. Now, not surprisingly the organisation can’t get their act in gear to get the peer-reviewing done of all the submitted papers. So guess what? I’ve been asked if I could peer-review two papers!! 🙂 Ones are at least a bit related to what I do though since it’s not really an Earth Sciences conference. 😉 I feel pretty excited about doing this. Now I’m a real scientist! I’m also a bit nervous because..well..i’ve got no experience doing this sort of thing what so ever. Anyway I have 3 weeks apparently. I’m sure my supervisor could give me some helpful tips. Currently he is away to a conference in Japan and will be back next week Tuesday. I was going to do a hotpress experiment in the meantime but it looks like the bloody furnace is broken again. This time an open circuit in one of the furnace windings. Real nuisance because we just recalibrated a stable hotzone at 1300C with the furnace. We really need a technician in the lab. The last one left us 6 months ago for a better job. There hasn’t been enough funding for a replacement but maybe we can get a part-time tech.

In other news im about to submit my masters research to the journal Geophysical Research Letters. I’m holding off just a few more weeks because I want my former supervisor, who hasn’t helped me a bit, to reply with a few last comments and feel guilty as hell*.

I’m also in the process of writing a manuscript for GRL about my current research. Once I get this finalized I can make it a part of my mid-term assessment report. I’ll have a chapter on that and a chapter on specimen preparation, preliminary results from the forced seismic wave attenuation experiments / future prospects and feasibility of the phd project. Heaps to do, if only the bloody machines would co-operate.

Oh btw, Happy Easter everyone!!!! 😀

EDIT * It worked. Emails like those are not left unanswered. I always find it more rewarding generally to cause guilt in someone who is abusing me rather than to cause anger. It’s more of a challenge too.