A meteorite week

Besides of my PhD studies I currently have a small tutoring load in an intro geology course for undergraduates. Last week it was all about meteorites. We simulated meteorite impacts and demonstrated fragments of different kinds of meteorites. This was the coolest sample in our collection:

Pallasite. Very rare. Very beautiful. And very expensive.

These kinds of meteorites make up only about 1% of all the meteorite finds. They supposedly come from the core-mantle transition zone of outer space bodies. The green crystals are olivine embedded in a metallic iron-nickel matrix.

(+ one more thing on my “to buy list” after becoming rich – a pallasite necklace).

Every cloud has a silver lining

A meeting with my supervisor after the “unfortunate discovery” (see below):

- “Hmm…ehemm…, so, what exactly I am going to do during the New Zealand’s fieldwork?”
- “Shopping!”

An unfortunate discovery

The last 2 weeks were huge ups and downs in my academic life. I made my very first scientific discovery and I lost my main field area.

Recently I spent much time studying the thin sections from New Zealand, from the place where I have an upcoming fieldwork soon. I was especially looking on samples from shear zones (the sites of intense deformation in the Earth’s crust). I looked on the thin sections under a polarized light microscope and tried to understand how the rocks behave when they get deformed and how the presence of water affects their behavior during the deformation. After a while I started to notice some odd things there:

• Firstly, the minerals in these shear zones got more mixed with increasing deformation. Normally in a highly strained rock I would expect the formation of metamorphic banding defined by layers of softer and harder minerals, as the pockets of soft minerals tend to interconnect during deformation and provide surfaces where most of the slip happens in the rock.

• Secondly, the grain sizes in the center of shear zone where larger comparing to the less deformed rock on the margin of the shear zone. Normally deformation reduces the grain sizes in a rock.

• Thirdly, the grains in the centre of the shear zone showed less deformation structures than at margins of the shear zone.

And then, all these new amphibole grains with their strange crystal faces! The shapes, the occurrence, the size seemed just wrong, wrong, wrong! So I took my samples and went to my supervisor for some enlightenment on the matter.

She told me to do a bit of electron microscopy to get a closer look on the microstructures and check the chemistry in the most suspicious samples. A day in a lab (in a very cold lab) and I got results suggesting that my shear zones contain bits of melt. It was an extremely exciting discovery because nobody of the previous workers has recognized a melt in these shear zones before. At this moment I felt super-cool about myself for picking this up. However my joy did not last long. Very soon my supervisors reminded that I am not supposed to study the role of melt in shear zones. I am supposed to study the role of water in shear zones. And easy as that, my field area got discarded. The melt in the shear zones means that the original structures are modified. It means that much evidence is probably erased. Eventually it makes the system so complicated that it is impossible to recognize the fundamental principles of the processes which I am interested in. A huge bummer for me.

After all I got a permission to tag along for the fieldwork in New Zealand anyway but it won’t be a fieldwork for my project.  And the melt discovery most likely will get handed over to somebody else to work with. As Heidi Klum once famously used to repeat: “One day you’re in. And the next day you’re out” (c)ProjectRunway.

Oh, well, I still have 3 years of my PhD to go. And this is just a beginning.

Some melt microstructures:

Electron backscatter image showing melt microstructures (qtz – quartz, bt – biotite, amph – amphibole, plag – plagioclase). Electron microscopes does not use light therefore images are in a grayscale. In these kind of images the heaviest minerals appears to be brighter while the lightest minerals have a darker colour.

A typical mineral assemblage crystallizing from a leucosome (plag + qtz + K-fsp). Small angle of the plagioclase crystal against quartz suggest the crystallization from melt. The electron image is colour-coded by the abundance of K, Si or Al.

A day in the lab

I had quite a lot of fun last week cutting my samples for thin-sections. Just imagine: a screaming saw going through the rock like butter, a diamond-coated blade sparkling against the strong quartzite, cold water splashing all over the face and dripping onto the shoes, a fearless girl daring her fingers for the cause of science… A theme for an action movie, isn’t it? Oh, just a regular day for a geologist.

A fully equipped lab geologist

Anyway, the rocks I sawed last week come from Australian and New Zealand’s shear zones which I will try to understand during the few following weeks. This time my task was to cut 2×3 cm large pieces out of them which we can send to a thin-section laboratory for further preparation. There they will be polished, glued to small slides of glass and grinded so thin that light can shine through (normally it is about 0.03 mm in thickness).

Samples ready to send out

The fancy little things at the end we call “thin sections” and they are extremely useful for geologists. By using an optical geological microscope we can precisely determine the minerals in the rock, their characteristics and arrangement. That provides a huge amount of information about the Earth’s history. We can infer how chemical reactions occurred, what deformation mechanisms where acting and in what kind of processes the particular rock was formed.

By using the techniques of electron microscopy we can go even further, down to an atomic level, and determine a precise chemical composition of even tiny spots in the section, as well as to find out exact crystallographic structure, defects and mis-orientations on a sub-grain scale.

Thin-sections

It is funny how some years ago when I decided to be a geologist, I was looking on plate tectonics, large scale structural geology, determined if I will do something, I will do something big. And look where I ended up – doing microscopy. However this is not as contradictory to my megalomaniacal ambitions, as it may seem. When you think about it, everything what happens on large scale is eventually governed by these very subtle grain-scale processes. Therefore to understand a mountain belt you have to understand a thin-section.

The great expectations

If you are wondering how I am settling into the new place – no worries (as aussies use to say). I am as enthusiastic and happily ignorant as any of the other PhD-newbies.

In this post I want to share the thing we did with my supervisor during the first days of my project. She asked me to write down what I want to achieve during the next 3 years at Macquarie and what are my understanding about her and my roles as a supervisor/student in this project. She did the same and after discussing it we signed an agreement about our future collaboration

I think this is a very nice way how to start a PhD. Of course it looks a bit idealistic on the paper and will crush with a reality at some point in future, however there are huge benefits of the conversation we had. Firstly, it opens a very honest communication where I feel that every problem can be negotiated and my opinion will be heard out. Secondly as a student I do not have to doubt if I am acting as I am supposed to or not. I clearly know what is expected from me and I know what to expect from my supervisor. Makes life more simple.

Here are some fragments of my contribution to the deal. The final contract was longer, but who would bother to read that.

My expectations for PhD

I started this PhD because I want to do research in future and work in academia after finishing. Therefore the most important thing for me  is to learn as much as possible, acquire the skills to be a good researcher and a base of knowledge for a further work in the field of metamorphic petrology/structural geology.

My responsibilities

• To make time for regular meetings (at least once a week)
• To deliver results when they are expected/keep the deadlines
• To be prepared for meetings with supervisor, talks, conferences, fieldworks
• To keep supervisor informed about the progress of the project
• To follow the directions of supervisor but think independently and develop my own vision and ideas about the project
• To keep positive attitude towards the supervisor and the project even during difficult times

Responsibilities of the supervisor

• To make time for regular meetings (at least once a week)
• During the initial stage, help with focusing the topic, planning the project, also recommend literature
• To read my drafts and provide straight-forward feedback
• If I have to learn a new technique, where it is possible, provide an information or introduce with somebody who can assist
• Inform me about the practicalities of the project (organizing fieldworks, preparing papers for publishing, handing in thesis, managing my project money, etc) or direct to the person who can do that
• To keep positive attitude towards me and my project even during difficult times

Guess where I will spend the next three years!

So this is official now. After finishing my Master’s degree I left Europe and moved to this beautiful country to pursue a PhD. Who knows, maybe there will become a scientist out of me eventually.

The next three years I will be working to understand the interaction between 3 principal agents - fluid, deformation and chemical reactions – operating in deep crustal environments, in conditions you get beneath the mountain belts when two continents collide. The project includes fieldwork, microscopy, experiments, and probably a bit of numerical modelling (depending if I’ll wake up my sleeping maths-genius). Also it looks like I am going to move around a bit as we do not have all the advanced equipment for my experiments on the place.

So guess the country and the city I am in now! As a hint, there is a logo of my new university at the right side of this post.

The winner will receive a limited-edition calendar for year 2013 featuring a collection of the best of my geology fieldwork pictures.

Update: The challenge is finished. The winner is B. Nelson

Thesis in MS Word

Last week I gave a workshop to some PhD students at the University of Latvia on how to write thesis in MS Word. It maybe does not sound a thing you need a workshop for, because who does not know MS Word? However most people use it on a very basic level and spend way too much time on formatting – something that should be completely done by Word itself.

Everybody knows – you should put off at least 1 or 2 days for formatting thesis before handing in + many hours during the writing when something is changed or added. However it is possible to escape this pointless activity if the automatic functions of Word are used properly and systematically during the writing process. This way, my master thesis was finished at the same moment I put the dot after the last sentence in “Conclusions” section. No need to go over the styles of formatting, check numeration and references to images, no need to spend 2 days swearing on Word.

How to do that:

• All of the chapters should be written in a single document. Nowadays computers are powerful enough to handle 100- and even(!) 200-page documents. Having all the parts in one file, firstly allows to constantly overview the structure and progress of the document and secondly, to save the time on formatting when separate parts are added.
• Everyhing should be defined centrally and automatically – fonts, indentations, space before and above (no need to press Enter 2x), numbering of headings, table of contents, numbering of captions, references to images, etc. No formatting should be done in the page. Every single piece of the written word should be defined as a “style”. And every style should be modified through Styles/Right click/Modify. Then every change you will need to make will take only seconds of time to implement for the whole document. When I start to write a new document, I find it useful to create and define 5 styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Normal, Figure, Caption. Could be few others depending on the needs. The usage of styles also allows to create all kinds of lists – table of contents, automatic numbering of headings, navigation pane.
• Document map/Navigation pane is a really useful feature. In Word 2000 and 2003 it can be found by View/Document map in Word 2007 and Word 2010 – through View/Show/Navigation pane. It opens a window on the left side of the page where all the headings are listed in a similar way as in table-of-contents. Something will appear only if it is  defined as a Heading. This is a fantastic feature because, first, it allows to overview the structure of the document and, secondly, breaks you free from the infinite scrolling. Whenever specific part is needed, just click on the heading in the navigation pane and you are there faster than you can say: “Navigation pane”.
• Take time to learn it! There is a huge amount of information about the usage of MS Word online. Googling the version of the Word + any problem you need to solve, for example: “Word 2007 heading numbering” will give plenty of great materials with excellent descriptions, explanations and print-screens.

Recently many of my friends have abandoned Word to become huge LATEX (an alternative text-editing software) supporters. I think it mostly arises from the fact they never learned to work with Word properly. It does not matter which program you use LATEX or MS Word, in order to save time, time should be invested in learning it properly.