While working in the lab on Tuesday, April 3, 2018, and minding my own business, there came a knock on the door. The PhD student who has been supervising my transition to the lab was with another grad student. I thought maybe he had forgotten something in the lab but instead he stood in the doorway and asked me whether I would be willing to talk about my research for the company, Pioneer, that was coming to campus the next day to entice our students to consider them for future employment. I was screaming "No!" inside but they both had agreed to so I nodded that I would. I just couldn't think of a good enough excuse on the fly. That evening I spent a good two hours putting together a slide related to my research so I took some photos of the serial dilution process that I was in the middle of earlier that day
and include one along with several pictures taken off the internet (I hereby credit others above for their wonderful graphics). I spent another couple hours rehearsing what I would say because as a first year PhD student I am still in the middle of classes and have only barely begun to work on my research. Needless to say, most days if you ask me what I'm doing here at NMT I can tell you it has something to do with cosmogenic nuclides and scaling models and argon-argon dating. But here is the lightening talk I gave that hopefully sticks in my head from here on out:
My name is Christine Burrill and I am a first year PhD student in Geology. This November I will be traveling to Erebus volcano in Antarctica to sample lava flows from as many places along 3 km elevation for cross calibrating argon-argon and exposure age dating to determine which scaling model should be used for cosmogenic geochronology. Cosmogenic geochronology takes advantage of supernova that release cosmic rays, which are high energy particles, that impact the earth (like shrapnel) and produce secondary showers of particles in the atmosphere that go on to produce isotopes we call cosmogenic nuclides that accumulate in rocks and soil at the surface. The scaling models are mathematical equations that factor in the rock or soil’s latitude, elevation and magnetic field that influence the production of the nuclides and therefore what we calculate as the age. Previous application of the two competing models to Erebus samples produce exposure ages that differ by up to 25-30% which is important to reconcile given that exposure age dating is becoming very popular and has implications for a number of fields in geology.
Now what I find funny is that I think I was the only person with 1 slide...The other 12-13 graduate students that gave a talk were well into their research and had much more they could talk about and show. However I felt my head spinning looking at multiple slides with multiple graphs and figures. Not to mention our projector is configured in the least helpful way that I think it would be just as easy to try to the slides on the computer itself from across the room. It is a well-known fact that the hardest thing to do is jam pack your research down into paragraph, into a one minute talk, into one slide so I'm hoping to remember this day of not know all the gory details of my project and being able to keep it general and simple and just digestible.