Kristalloflex

Having spent a couple of afternoons drilling pieces of stalagmite to send off to Melbourne to be dated, we've also collected some pieces to have a look at the structure of the stals. Basically we're having a look at the crystal structure of the stals, whether they're calcite or aragonite (two of the forms of calcium carbonate).  Both are ok, but a mixture is a nightmare to work with.  Anyway, this is done using X-ray diffraction, basically firing x-rays at a randomly orientated powder of the sample and measuring at what angles the strongest X-rays are diffracted at.  Its quite a simple and easy process and involved using this new machine, the Kristalloflex:

Its located in the geology building on the other side of campus and so was my first trip down to the other half of the department (basically when first founded most of the subjects were divided amongst two departments, a research one and a teaching one, they're reuniting them now, and so whilst now officially the same department, we occupy two sites, up until they finish work on constructing a new building to bring them all up the hill to us).

I'm off on field-trip for the next week to Eden in New South Wales, I'm demonstrating on the first-year residential field-trip.  It should be good fun, hopefully!  I'll be away for a week so there probably won't be any blog-posts until next Sunday, but you never know.  Speak to you soon.

Dog on the Tuckerbox ??!!

So on the road to Tumut, five miles south of Gundagai sits this famous statue of a dog on a tuckerbox (lunchbox or equivalent). Its a monument to the pioneers of Australia, those who first travelled into the bush, though quite why a dog on a tuckerbox is a bit of a mystery.  Like all good folk-lore, the story varies from person to person whilst the actual origins are all a bit vague on the issue. The original poem by Bowyang Yorke gives little away about why the dog is sitting on the tuckerbox so I'll recount the various stories I've heard. Back in the day the pioneers were crossing a muddy creek south of Gundagai when the wagons got bogged downed, and in an attempt to get them out, the yoke on the wagon broke and poked out the leader's eye (who the leader is I don't know, maybe it was Bullocky Bill, the dog's owner).  Anywho, the dog ends up sitting on the tuckerbox, some versions imply that he did worse things to it, some versions say that guarding tuckerboxes was the duty of the dog, and that the dog stayed loyally guarding his master's lunch, even though he was killed, until his own death.  Its all a bit strange really, but charming none the less.

Its also fruit growing country, so we picked up some big bags of really fresh apples for not too much.  Delicious!

Stal Cutting

The stonemasons in Tumut

I've spent the last two days in the little countryside town of Tumut, located an hour and a half a way to the west of Canberra.  It actually takes almost three hours to get there as you have to go north around the mountains to get there! Located in Tumut is a good stonemasons, and its here that we get our stalagmites cut, for fear that if we weren't getting professionals to do it, we'd muck it up! And they are very good, with some impressive machinery. As is the pace of Science we were there to get the stalagmites collected during the 2009 field-season cut, first into manageable sections, then to get a 2cm or so thick slab cut from the middle of the stal (such that the growth axis also lies in the plane of the slab, even if it moves about - it definitely helps to have a brain that works in three dimensions here) from which we do our analyses.



A box of stals, w cut three very heavy boxes worth

Our stals were cut by Jamie, who was very good at controlling the blade (1m diameter or so, they have one which must be three metres or so).  The machine is quite big, and makes the stals look small in the photograph, they're not! Bloody heavy too, its deceptively dense pure calcite.

Big cutting machine!

It takes a reasonable while to cut a stal, but we were kept busy, marking up the stals to be cut, drying cut sections, labelling them, and wrapping them in bubble-wrap so that they can survive the journey home.  Plus of course some impromptu analysis, some of the stals look very exciting, a couple are of superb quality, a few of merely good quality, and a nice aragonite one which should be interesting.  Though as ever, there were a few duds!



The first cut on Havana, one of our most promising stals, a nerve-wracking time. The stals all have names to go with their codes, to make them easier to remember and identify, this one is Havana, because it is cigar-shaped.  Or rather more cigar shaped that stals usually are!

Tumut itself is a very pretty town, located in a valley near the snowy mountains, it helps the countryside is so green at the moment but it seems like a very nice place to live, provided the jobs exist of course. And its finally, for the first time here since I arrived, actually somewhat hot, rather than warm, two degrees of which due to altitude all things being equal, but none the less really nice. Though the Chinese meal we had during the evening was suspiciously shiny.

LA marks up one of the side-offcuts

Next step is to polish and photograph the stals, XRD the bits that might be aragonite, thin-section other interesting bits, and take samples to send off to be dated.  Then maybe, just maybe, we can start analysing them!  Its a long process this, a very long process!

Removing a slab from a stal section

Trouble In Indonesia

Being in a research group who's current main priority is paleoclimate and the interactions of climate and natural disasters on carbonate systems in Indonesia, its reasonably understanding that we've been rather excited about whats been happening in Indonesia over the last couple of weeks.

At first it wasn't the volcano that gripped the group but rather the tsunami. The Mentawai Islands where the earthquake struck hardest are part of the group's coral field-area.  Which is reasonably distressing when you come into contact with the locals there reasonably regularly. In pure science terms, its a great opportunity and the likely located of the group's 2012 field-trip. There'll be a new PhD student arriving early next year to the group, also from the UK(!) whose job it'll be to see if the corals in the area record a record of these tsunami generating earthquakes.  Its an exciting project, and I'll guess we'll know the answer in four years time!

As time has gone on though, the Mt. Merapi eruption has got more and more severe, and the exclusion zone has widened and widened and we're seeing widespread covering of the local vegetation in ash.  Whilst not in my field-area, how this ash, and the vegetation destruction leaves a chemical signature in the groundwaters and consequently speleothems in such an area is very much what I'm working on.  Exciting, if dangerous times!

And whilst these disasters are always tragic, they do make the science more exciting and hopefully our work will go a small way to helping in the future.

More weather

At the risk of writing too much about the weather here, it has been awesome today.  Instead of the series of tame drizzly lows that have characterised the last month (its been so wet here recently, the wettest spring for decades probably) its warmed up a bit, now above twenty and the rainy lows have turned into epic thunderstorms. We've had three today, the first at five-thirty in the morning, waking pretty much everyone up.  The other two were this evening and involved some pretty serious cloud-bursts.  I was caught in the final cloudburst of the day cycling home, it was epic, and I was only about two minutes from home.

But I've only got myself to blame. Between the final two storms there was this fantastic light, a dark matt grey sky, with bright clouds where the sun shone between them.  The whole city was in that strange post-thunderstorm orangey glow that looks so awesome, like someone had turned up the brightness of all the colours.  It was really cool, so I stopped to take some photos (although being a camera phone they don't quite do the scene justice) and ended up getting caught by the fast approaching storm, damn!

The race that stops the nation

Its Melbourne Cup day, the country's greatest horserace, held on the first Tuesday of November every year. Its quite a symbolic and historic event for the entire country and its such a big event that traditionally its been a public holiday. Unfortunatly not this year as in ACT they decided to change it to a random Monday a few weeks ago which meant we got bank holidays in consecutive weeks, which is pretty stupid.  Its still a bank holiday in Victoria though.  Anyway, a lot of people no doubt took the day off work today to watch, and gamble and drink, and go to various Melbourne Cup social events, dressed up, and with fancy hats and the like.

In the department everyone stopped work for half an hour and watch in the seminar room, there was a sweepstake and the like, and a few of the girls in the department were wearing hats! Its a two mile long-race, flat and handicapped. Basically its a bit like the Grand National, but half the length, with fewer horses and no jumps, so really its not actually as good, but it holds a far greater place in the Australian psyche than the Grand National, over 100,000 attend and almost the entire country watches so its possibly the greater prize.  To be fair I thought it was a bit anticlimactic (if there's one thing I've learned its that the Australians love a good hype when it comes to sport and heritage (which are somewhat the same thing in this country)), maybe I need to get more into it next year.