A department divided

One thing that was apparent at the department christmas do just before the break was the number of people that I didn't recognise.  The hidden half of the department emerged.  And I heard lots of people saying the same thing. As someone who is pretty much always at the departmental seminars, beer and nibbles, and makes it to morning coffee at least once a week I don't think its my fault, it's theirs!
The problem, at least in part lies in the division of the department on two sites (though this doesn't fully explain everybody).  Historically, when the university was first set up many of the subjects were split into a research section (research school) and a section (department), so that those who didn't want to teach didn't have to. The teaching section continued to do some research though.  It lead to a few quirks, not all universities have an experimental petrology group, we had two, working completly independantly in what was effectively two departments.  This of course, is rather silly, so the two sections were united a few years back into one body. But having two buildings, especially when they're reasonably far apart, has created a bit of a them and us approach.  As part of the environmental section of the department, we're especially split between the two buildings, other groups are less so.  LB, one of my best friends in the department is down the hill in the "other" department. But its also the case that the honours students (equivalent of an undergrad masters in Oxford) are also a bit isolated from the hustle and bustle of the larger research school.  However, there are some positives, given that the first year scientists are not yet tied to a department, keeping teaching space close to the other sciences and the undergrad halls certainly increases footfall.

 This is about to change though, with the destruction of one of the buildings which no-one really used anyway (it was old and basically a tin-shed) and the creation of a brand-spanking new 9th building (we have quite a few!) which will contain lecture facilities, undergrad teaching space and office and lab space.  The department will eventually become one on a single site and hopefully the integration will be a little better.

Apparently they want to build this place within a year, erm, really?? I know the old building didn't have foundations so the site was cleared very quicky, but still.  Good luck to them!

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.

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.

The Gender Gap

It was the RSES student conference on Thursday and a chance to find out exactly what everyone else is up to, and hopefully finally work out who everyone is. In order to fit in most of the department's grad population and a few of the honours (aka 4th years) students, talks were limited to just eight minutes, which is nothing.  I trimmed my Pliocene ENSO talk down to what I thought would be suitable, and still only really got through half of it!  As you might expect there were some really good talks and some really dull ones.  The dullness being from the Petrologists in the first session, but it picked up through the Tectonicists (!), Physicists and Environmentals.

There was also a BBQ after, on the departmental BBQ (which I find fantastic!) and then beers on into the evening for those who stayed. Overall it was a good day, but most of the people I kind of already knew, those who hide away, still hide away! Oh well!

What was very interesting to note was that of the 37 talks over the course of the day, 19 were guys, 18 from girls, which is damn good for a science subject.  At grad level in RSES at least, there appears to be no real gender gap.  The corresponding stat though, was that there were only three talks for which the supervisors were female.  Above the post-doc level, the gender gap, especially in this department, is huge. Is this something that needs active change? or will the gender gap grow itself out? or both, of course!

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.

First Impressions

I arrived on Thursday morning, and it wasn't too bad a trip.  Partly helped by the fact I got two seats on the lengthy flight from Dubai to Brisbane, so at least I could spread out a bit and get some sleep.  I've been suprisingly not that jet-lagged, which I'm thankful for.

I'm currently staying with the Aunt and Uncle (ES & JB) of a girl who joined my lab in Oxford last year.  They're really nice people and have certainly helped me settle in.  They have three kids and I'm currently displacing the eldest by living in her room.  I suppose I should move out as quickly as possible!  But the housing market is something I'm attempting to get to grips with this weekend.

So on Thursday I got myself a bank account.  Which was suprisingly easy, just the passport needed.  Though the idea that I can't use any ATM anywhere for free is a bit alien to a Brit! Getting hold of a mobile phone proved trickier. I'm aiming to get a contract phone, but right at the start I'm going to stick to PAYG, which I thought would be easier, SIM card for $10, but it takes 24 hours to activate, which is really annoying when you have no means of your own transport and have to call to get a lift!  Plus there's no credit included in the $10.  That's one of the biggest differences I've noticed so far in Australia, commercial markets are a lot less competitive and so its company driven rather than consumer driven, if there isn't enough choice for consumers then its the company that holds the power.  In the UK you would get a free SIM when paying for phone credit, which would work instantly, and not have to pay to withdraw cash from another banks ATMs simply because if anyone did charge, people would go elsewhere.  Maybe the consumer choice is less in Australia and until one company uses these kind of tactics, none of the others will.  Anywho....

On Friday I ventured in to ANU for the first time.  Canberra has a really good network of bike paths, and the one from Hackett, the suburb where I'm staying to ANU pretty much follows a storm drain for its duration, so its pretty green.  About twenty to twenty-five minutes cycle through the suburbs of Canberra, though then again, this city is nothing but suburbs.  The one thing thats really different about Canberra is the birds, parrots and cockateels and cockatoos and the like. Its really quite cool to have "tropical" birds in a suburban environment.  Though I have been warned about the magpies!!  They're bigger than UK magpies and look decidedly meaner, plus its "swooping season".  Its the beginning of Spring so the magpies are getting a little frisky and the males often dive-bomb passers by, some people even have cable-ties attached to the top of their cycle helmets (supposedly compulsory but not everyone wears one) as the magpies swoop the highest part of the person.

Registered successfully, though I forgot my passport *slaps forehead* so had to cycle all the way back to Hackett and in again, which was fine as I didn't have much to do.  Then I attempted to try and find my new department, RSES, I ended up cycling around the entire campus thoroughly lost.  The campus is a big place, and quite disorientating, but I found it eventually, walked in through the front door, no security, no reception, Canberra is a very safe place, and quite quickly located my new supervisor (MG).  MG seemed nice, as did the rest of his group that I met, much smaller than OceanBug thats for sure, but then how many scientifc groups are bigger than OceanBug?! Spent the rest of the day with MG, getting a tour, introductions etc.  The department is a real warren, and is going to take a long time to get used to, and quite quiet it seems.  Met a couple of Postgrads, before joining the departmental friday night football game, (which apparently wasn't that departmental) before a few "pints" and then back home.