Dr Frances Cooper
BHP Billiton Lecturer
PhD (2008) “Exhumation of the northern Snake Range metamorphic core complex, Nevada”
1) The Twitter challenge: Describe your PhD in 140 characters (if you can remember it)
I tested different models for how the metamorphic rocks of the northern Snake Range were brought to the surface from the middle-lower crust.
Ailsa Craig is an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. Formed from the plug of a Paleogene volcano, the landmass reaches over 330 m height and ~ 3 km length, and can easily be seen from the Scottish mainland. The island comprises three types of granite: Ailsa Craig Common Green, Ailsa Craig Red Hone and Ailsa Craig Blue Hone (pictured below). The distinctive colouration of the latter type results from the presence of riebekite and arfvedsonite, two amphiboles rich in sodium and iron.
The island of Ailsa Craig is most famous for being the source of material used to make most of the world’s curling stones. These unusual igneous rocks are particularly prized for their low thermal conductivity, impermeable fabric and relative elasticity, lending the stones unrivaled impact resistance. Watch out for these remarkable granites in Sochi; the stones for this year’s Winter Olympics have already been manufactured in Ayrshire and were shipped to Russia last year.
Left: South end of Ailsa Craig, South Ayrshire, Scotland, as viewed from the air. Right: Ailsa Craig Blue Hone (riebekite microgranite). Both images from the British Geological Survey National Archive of Geological Photographs (P000709 and P521397).
If you’ve ever wondered how curling stones are made (and I’m sure you have), then this video should sate your curiousity.
Mel Auker is an Earth Sciences PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. A mathematician by trade, Mel’s PhD uses numerical approaches to better understand past, present, and future global volcanic hazard and risk.
Kawah Ijen volcano forms part of the Ijen volcano complex situated at the eastern end of Java, Indonesia. Kawah Ijen is topped by a 1 kilometre-wide, 200 metre-deep, crater lake. The lake is bright turquoise in colour, and as well as being incredibly photogenic, is one of the most highly acidic lakes in the world and the site of a huge sulphur mining operation.
The summit of Kawah Ijen complete with acidic crater lake and sulphurous fumeroles. Photo credit: Richard Arculus
The Boston Globe has featured Kawah Ijen and its sulphur mine in two of its “The Big Picture: News stories in photographs” in recent years. The articles and accompanying stunning photographs can be found here and here.
The images depict the sulphur in its various, colourful states. Firstly, red, liquid sulphur condenses in stone or ceramic pipes that have been constructed to cap the volcano’s gas-emitting fumaroles. As this sulphur cools, it moves down the pipes and condenses to form yellow deposits. It is these solid deposits that the miners extract and carry in loads of up to 70kg to the weighing station, dubbed “Camp Sulfutara”. To enable them to earn more money, many miners work at night, illuminating the volcano by torch light. As the torches drip, they ignite the sulphur and it burns bright blue – the last of the primary colour trio.
‘Tis the season of thesis writing! Well, in my office of fourth years (!) at least. By this stage of PhD life, most of us have our own ‘toolkit’ of computer applications that we’ve settled upon to complete the task, but in the first year or two, it’s a case of trying lots of options and finding the one that works best for your PhD and style of working.
Here, I’ve listed my top ten freely downloadable computer apps and accessible websites that have proved invaluable so far. I should mention that although I use a Mac, almost everything listed below has an equally useful Windows version (some entries are specific to petrology, so if you’re a non-geology PhD student, you can probably skip those bits…).
Click on the links below to go to each section
1) LaTeX
2) Detexify
3) Bibdesk
4) PDF to Word
5) R
6) Textwrangler
7) Tetlab/Trinity
8) Georoc database
9) Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)
10) MELTS
