Post date: Jul 12, 2012 12:42:47 AM
Although officially in the realm of geochronology, work in the lab of Kim Blisniuk has centered around a few steps in the long processes that comprise her research.
Initially, my jobs around the lab were focused around the hundreds of plastic bottles that fill the room. They would be used to leech – a process of soaking material and dissolving the unwanted parts – several samples of rock that had been ground into fine sand. The leeching steps involve several day-long soaks in HCl, HNO3, and HF. Not surprisingly, this relatively small lab manages to go through several tens of gallons of these potent acids a week.
Another step that I participated in was a process called magnetic separation. This sand would be run through a large electromagnet, which would separate the magnetic particles from the non-magnetic ones. Although arduous, this process is an important one, and is especially rewarding when you end up with a bag of light, non-magnetic sand and a smaller bag with black, magnetic sand. All of these steps were focused on leaving behind pure quartz, from which Beryllium-10 could be measured, giving an accurate measure of the age of the sample.
A second, somewhat unrelated part of what I have done so far involves computers. Using high-resolution LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) images of the topography of fault lines. I would tile these images together, use several mathematical equations designed by Kim and her colleagues to highlight the fault scarp areas, and then overlay them onto Google earth images. This could be used to aid in the analysis of fault formation, and through more detailed work, could be used to estimate age.