SHRIMP

For two days last week I got some time on SHRIMP II, one of the department's more interesting random number generators/wiggle matching device. SHRIMP stands for Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe and is a pretty cool machine involving firing a beam of caesium atoms at a target material and collecting what comes off in using a mass spectrometer style magnets and flight tubes to analyse the secondary ions you want to look at.  It can be used for isotopes or concentrations but I was "merely" measuring absolute counts of sulphur in a 12kyr stalagmite.  It was a bit of a recce operation with HSG, one of my groups postdocs to explore whether this technique actually works and we can find what we were looking for, but the results are reproducible and looking very interesting with distinguishable anomalies and background rate, so hooray!!  Its actually pretty good that after just three weeks of my PhD I've been driving the SHRIMP and getting good quality reproducible data, scratch that, its amazing, a very good start to the PhD.

SHRIMP is big: and takes up an entire room, or rather three of them take up a huge room! When building the building they had to build in a crane into the structure of the building so that if the machine ever needed to be moved out you only have to knock down one wall rather than the entire building. The original, SHRIMP I, as the machine used to date the oldest rocks in the world, which is extremely cool.  Plus I quite like having three control screens in order to drive the thing and get results, its really good fun, but like all geological type machines, it takes up a lot of time, an all-day job and is quite tiring.  Thankfully it can be set-up automatically to run overnight so that you can run coarse resolution overnight automatically then go back and high res the bits that look interesting during the day.  Also, we only had two days on it because its really expensive, more than my scholarship is worth (apparently).  Allegedly I may get some more time on it in December!

I have a house, hooray!!  I'll be living in Lyneham, one of the more studenty districts of Canberra.  I move in on Wednesday, should be fun.

Its a bank holiday Monday here so a good time to relax, and sort out the next big jobs on my list now that accommodation is sorted: a new bike.  Plus my supervisor is away for the next two weeks so I'll probably have very little to do during the week as well.