Geoverse

I’ve just come down to the lobby in New York’s biggest International Hostel YHA and possibly the world. Yeah, it’s pretty big. I constantly have no idea what time it is and I believe it’s now a Friday night. After having travelled through so many time zones, time ceases to be meaningful. Thankfully I am a creature who lives by the sun cycle. It must be past mid-night now but my dorm room got invaded by a bunch of Thai people on a mission to do some kind of rally tomorrow. I didn’t quite follow what they were going on about but im sure my Belgian colleage would pick up a thing or two.

So lets see… things are pretty good here. I havent done any sight seeing yet but I’ve met some nice random people. As soon as I arrived on Tuesday night I was nackered. The flight from Sydney – Fiji – Los Angeles was long, boring and exhausting. But thankfully, my accommodation in Minneapolis is perfect. A nice room to myself and wireless internet for free. The following day I immediately went to the Uni of Minnesota to drop off my samples and the Furnace. That on its own is a whole different story. In short, the border and security guards were curiously interested what the object was. Luckily I had good documentation to prove it was (mostly) harmless.

I did some exploring on the uni campus. It is unbelievably big! Maybe two times the size of the ANU campus with heaps of big old buildings, some even featuring greek pillars. Yeah i liked that a lot. I went to the Pillsbury hall where I found Prof. David Kohlstedt. I immediately liked the old guy and he showed me around a little before we went to another building on the other side of the campus to show me around the rock deformation lab. Not much bigger than at RSES but nicely packed with stuff and the apparatus i will be using to deform my rock specimens in torsion.

Then the following day (Thursday) I was supposed to fly to New York (La Guardia) but after waiting for like 6 hours my flight got cancelled. It turned out the plane needed servicing and thus was send back to Atlanta…sigh. Luckily tho’ us NYC people got compensated with free accommodation at a nice expensive hotel with a free meal and a free return flight coupon with AirTran airways. Interestingly one of their flights goes to Cancun, Mehico! Sadly tho, i have no time and it expires in a year. So if anyone is interested, let me know!!!

Anyhow, today I did get to NYC and I will do some sight seeing until I move on to New Haven on Sunday arvo. Then on Monday I will present my research at Yale in front of the Geology and Geophysics department. It will be huge so im pretty anxious but also excited.

Cheers all

My colleague from Boston has carried out a successful defomation experiment this week. The result is shown in the figure below. The deformation occurred at 1300C and 300 MPa confining argon pressure on titanium and calcium bearing synthetic olivine (fine-grained). Compressive differential stress (upwards force) was up to 315 MPa / 33 kN in the dislocation creep field. The transition to this form of power law creep deformation occurs at around 200 MPa and higher depending on the type of olivine material that is deformed. At lower stresses diffusion creep is dominant. In the figure you can see a typical barrel shaped specimen that was originally longer and a straight cylinder in shape. The higher compression direction compared to the uniform confining pressure comes from the sides. The specimen will be sectioned and imaged to determine the microstructure using the scanning electron microscope (SEM). The remainer will be precision ground to 10 mm in diameter and put back in the apparatus for another deformation experiment.

The most important result from the experiment will be a new flow law that predicts how this type of material deforms under high temperature and pressure comparable to upper mantle conditions in the Earth (100-400 km deep). However, whether the data trend can be extrapolated to geological time scales and coarser grain size remains debatable.

Fig. 1 Deformed fine-grained olivine (original length 20.8 mm) sandwiched between two alumina loading pistons.

I figure i might start blogging again now that i have a neat little netbook that i recently bought. For those interested, it’s the Samsung N110 with a 10″ screen and battery life up to 6 hours.

Lately the weather has been freezing in Canberra. Today I even saw snow on the mountains around the city. Tonight it will be the coldest night yet of -3C. It wouldn’t be so bad if the houses here were properly insulated but alas. Swine flu is rampant too with the state Victoria reporting the most cases whereas elsewhere in the world the danger has long since passed. Anyhow, I got sick twice in a row now. I don’t reckon it’s swine flu but a nasty cold virus.

As for work, today we finally had a successful deformation experiment down in the lab. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my rock sample but my colleague’s. Still, it was pretty exciting. Group meeting tomorrow to discuss my project that could use some good luck by now. Time is getting short before my trip to the US where I’ll be doing labwork amongst other things. The labwork at the Uni of Minnesota will be equally challenging.

Rex out.

This blog is totally RIP.

Anyway go here to see the photos of my recent trip to Matsuyama, Japan. It was really amazing and I loved it. The reason for travel was a Symposium called TANDEM which stands for something like Asian Network for Deep Earth Mineralogy. There was one day of talks from professors from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan ofc. The following day we had a sight seeing tour which was really great! The conference was the first of its type. The next one is in two years in China. I hope to attend again. With new developments sintered diamonds can now be created in the lab that are even stronger than natural ones. Very fascinating! Maybe I’ll take a post-doc project related to the deformation of diamonds by diamonds he he.

Japan was a very unique experience. Luckily I had my trusty Japanese phrase book 🙂

If you want to know more, please drop me an email.