GeoNews
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| New Section - Olivine |
| Posted on: 13/03/2010 |
| I have added a new section. See the link 'Olivine' on the left. My intention is to gradually add information about the mineral olivine from scientific literature and my own experiments. This seemingly ambitious project will hopefully sketch a good idea of what experimental geophysicists still need to accomplish in order to fully understand this otherwise well-studied mineral.
Ultimately, the goal is to model the processes that occur in the deep Earth. This is done by not only looking at the deformational rheology of rocks but also their physical material properties such as seismic anisotropy, electrical conductivity and diffusion under deep Earth conditions. A better understanding of our planet will allow us better understand other planetary bodies in the universe. In addition, the techniques developed to carry out sensitive laboratory measurements on rocks at high temperature and pressure may be applied elsewhere in the ceramics and metallurgy industry. Take, for example, the manufacturing of components for buildings, vehicles and other applications. |
| Image gallery updated |
| Posted on: 11/05/2007 |
| If you are keen on seeing the lab where i currently work, head over to the pictures subsection. I mainly use rig 3 for hotpressing of olivine material and deformation. The wave attenuation machine, or rig 2 will be used by me for forced torsional wave attenuation experiments on the same material with varying dislocation densities at different temperatures. |
| The RSES laboratory |
| Posted on: 21/04/2007 |
| Want to know in what kind of laboratory I work in at the Research School of Earth Sciences? I made some photos a while back of some of the apparatuses there. You can check them out here. I use the Green machine for hot-pressing of synthetic olivine pellets into a sample, for deformation and annealing experiments. I use the torsional oscillation apparatus for attenuation experiments on these samples which basically means I apply rotary shear on the sample (on the scale of micrometers) and at the same time I send seismic waves at various high frequencies through the sample. That will give me information of the shear modulus of the olivine material and its internal friction denoted by Q^-1. My olivine samples will have different dislocation densities, obtained by annealing at different times, which should in theory give different results for the shear modulus and attenuation Q^-1 values. |