Geoverse

I got back from Wagga Wagga on Friday. The 3 day conference was a blast!
We stayed at the Charles Sturt uni so I didn’t really get to see Wagga.
I was incredibly nervous before I had to do my presentation in front of
about 100 top ranking professors and officials. Luckily I was the third
candidate to give a presentation on the first day. Thanks to some
rehearsals I did with my supervisors it went pretty well. Still, I was
talking quite fast which led to a question on something I though I
explained quite clearly. But that was alright because that meant I
scored that one 😛 . The other question was more about the general
context of my research which wasn’t too hard to explain either. I
suppose that since the conference was really a physics one, no one could
really challenge me. Other talks were about superconductivity, carbon
nanotubes, thermoelectric/ magnetic materials and quantum computing.
Waaay above my intelligence ha ha. Nonetheless, after a while the talks
that were on the same subject, I could at least make some sense of.
Besides listening to presentations, the first night we had a conference
dinner and the second a trivia quiz. The trivia quiz night was crazy! By
then I had acquainted with the students there (just a handful), most who
just finished their honours. So we were at one table. Knowing that we
had no chance of winning we called ourselves the Naieve Stoodunts. In
the end though, surprisingly we came third last and not last! The trivia
questions were pretty general in categories like sports, geography,
politics and history. Three groups tried in first place which caused
some commotion but in the end all three would receive a plaque on the
winners cup. I bought some nice wine from the winery on the campus as we
left. Apparently if you want to learn to make wine, that’s the place to
go! Here are the photos of the uni at Wagga Wagga and the convention centre. The town/ railway in the photos is Wagga Wagga itself.

The following night (Saturday) I went to a cool pool party with my German housemate. It was good fun. I stayed until 2 am by which time I got bored / tired so I cycled back home.

I don’t have anything special planned in the next month or so except a gig in Sydney next week where I’ll go and see Iron Maiden live! That’s next Saturday. More on that later.

I’ve just handed in my annual plan and thesis proposal review with signatures and all. So overall i’m making good progress which is always nice to hear. I also carried out my first real experiment that lasted for about a week. The deformed olivine specimen was finally loaded into the seismic wave attenuation apparatus and all the gas leaks were fixed.

The experiment consisted of numerous runs starting at the highest temperature of 1100C and ramping down by 25C with every new set of experimental runs. Basically the first run takes 5 hours or 9 hours depending on the time of the day. A 9 hour run is more thorough. This is the forced torsional oscillation run whereby the olivine specimen gets twisted on the micrometer scale at fixed seismic frequencies. If the specimen is fully elastic, an immediate response is recorded at the displacement transducers. However, under higher temperatures there is a visco-elastic component and therefore the material exhibits a phaselag and a change in the shear modulus over longer timescales.

In addition, microcreep test runs were performed for 10,000s and later 5,000s. These tests show in more detail at what temperature olivine becomes elastic in response. They also provide a check on the creep function fitted to the data during data processing.

All in all, it was pretty intensive. Before and after each experiment run I had to do calibrations. I had to come in at 8 am, keep an eye on the experiments/start new ones and each evening I had to come in to get an overnight experiment going. So that meant staying in the lab until midnight! As a result I was a bit sad that I couldn’t stay long at a farewell party of a graduating phd student at RSES.

Anyways, I now have to way clear to process the data from this other side project i’ve been working on, on dislocation annealing kinetics in synth olivine. Then from there I can write a draft paper maybe by the end of this year but that depends on me working through the Christmas holidays.