whaaat

How do you get copper in post-subduction porphyry deposits? You flush ancient sulfide cumulates with deeper oxidised magmas! New paper out now with Shiwei Wang from Hefei UoT as lead author: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

No matter how far you zoom in it's all sharp corners. Any finite stretch along the x-axis becomes a terrible mouth lined with infinite teeth. Every pointed sliver opens up into a thousand hungry little razors. Mathematicians were aghast. (5/n)

And he then *asked himself a question* which he then answered for a further 3-4 minutes before finally getting off the stage. I can't even remember what the talk was about. What an ass.

from my slides about the grant writing process lol

Sounds like me

We're hiring Three year postdoc on geochemistry and petrology of ore-forming systems. jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/researc...

Thortveitite for me, thank you very much #MinCup25

Mineral Monday: Oxygen fugacity buffer calculator by Michael Anenburg Michael Anenburg has developed a graphical oxygen fugacity buffer calculator, available at fo2.rses.anu.edu.au/fo2app/ #MSACommunications #MineralMonday #mineralogy #oxygenfugacity

New paper: we discovered a new way for magmas to crystallise (!), and it also made one of the largest known carbonatite REE deposits. Out now in Nature Communications: doi.org/10.1038/s414... #geology @scienceanu.bsky.social

#ThinSectionThursday qeltite marked in pink, together with some gehlenite, wollastonite, nagelschmidtite, magnetite, and kalsilite. What is qeltite? Good question! See link in reply for the story.

We tried to measure an apatite composition using many different methods and failed miserably, so we wrote a paper about it. Available at the Journal of Materials Chemistry B: doi.org/10.1039/D5TB...

🚨 #IndustryFellowships #IE25 announcement: ❗️Outcomes announced publicly for Early Career Industry Fellowships 2025❗️ See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/276 /bot

Geology Murder xkcd.com/3112/

Found in my daughter’s workbook

Close to home, this one is literally five minutes away from my parents house…😬

Pro writing tip: When proof-reading a paper before submission or revision, change the font and print it out on paper. Trust me, you will find so many mistakes you had no idea were there, even though you've read the thing a million times on your computer screen.

Got a paper accepted, they asked for a graphical abstract. We made one!

#ThinSectionThursday cathodoluminescence of fluorapatite and REE mineralisation from Nolans Bore, Australia. Other than being spectacular eye candy, this is very informative and tells quite a lot about the ore. Yay science! Image taken at CSIRO Microbeam Lab. @scienceanu.bsky.social

Two papers accepted in one day, wow 🎉

#ThinSectionThursday Accidental platinum crystals, dissolved by calcium chloride flux from a platinum crucible and deposited on the MgO plate it was standing on

My kind of science: They found some forgotten proactinium in a back shelf, tried to make something out of it, got something different instead, and published this in Science Advances lol doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Self assurance 🤨😁

Canberra!

#ThinSectionThursday This isn't outer space—this is a reflected light image of silicate glass at ×100 magnification with immersion oil. Bright dots are nanonuggets of mostly silver, but also other elements such as platinum, palladium, and bismuth. Their colour correlates with crystal size.

#ThinSectionThursday Exsolution and alteration of Fe-Ti-Mn oxides from a weathering horizon of carbonatite in Western Australia

I made some apatite

#ThinSectionThursday Experimental synthesis of REE-apatite and britholite in silicate glass by an Honours student here at @scienceanu.bsky.social. Apatite is bright pink, glass is mildly pink, and britholite is almost not luminescent at all.

Plutonic and (sub)volcanic rocks make excellent footpaths @pavementgeology.bsky.social

Google Scholar congratulated me for 1000(+1) citations 🎉🥳

Scanning a defocused 500 nA beam on a zircon 😍

A nice schist with muscovite, kyanite/sillimanite, chlorite, and twinned plagioclase. #thinsectionthursday #geology #science #minerals #rocks

Please enjoy this 15 kg single crystal of hexagonal apatite

fO2 calculator app, now with geotherms! #Geology fo2.rses.anu.edu.au/fo2app/

Addressing reviewer comments during manuscript revision

Not a pleasant thing to see on my ride to work today…

YES! C + mixed CO2–H2O fluid buffer is finally finished🥳 This has been on my to do list for at least two years now… Duan & Zhang 2006 model, implementation by Yoshimura 2023. At xCO2 = 0.999 agrees within 0.25 log fO2 with pure CO2 from Li et al 2021 🥳 fo2.rses.anu.edu.au/fo2app/

I just pasted this photo into a powerpoint, and the #AI-generated AIt Text is "A person drawing a fish on a rock". 😂 Pretty accurate description! #geology

Never got to see a gang gang cockatoo up close before, and here’s one having a bath outside the earth science building at @scienceanu.bsky.social

58 of #365Minerals Xenotime: - A rare-earth phosphate mineral - Uranium and thorium impurities can make some specimens slightly radioactive - Its name comes from the Greek words "κενός/kenós" (vain) and "τιμή/timē" (honour), because the yttrium in it was thought to be a new element #minerals

Nice seeing a pair of F35 up close

Now AI can make fake thin section images www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Adding H2-CO2 to my fO2 app. Interesting result - for a 50:50 mix of both gases, it plots exactly between H2-H2O and CO-CO2. Could have guessed it to be honest, but interesting to see it in action! Will be up on the online app later today.

Some synthetic yttrium calcium silicate phosphates made by an Honours student for #ThinSectionThursday

PSA: do NOT put pure magnesium flakes into your bath, unless you want to bathe in fireworks. (This one is actually the perfectly safe magnesium chloride)

🧵You know that your core has PGE (platinum group elements). Question is, where are they and in what exactly? New paper out in Australian Journal of Earth Sciences! doi.org/10.1080/0812...

fO2 app now has Cr-Cr2O3 for you weirdos who love very reducing conditions: fo2.rses.anu.edu.au/fo2app/

On the other hand, I had some bugs in R-Shiny code and it solved them immediately...

Interesting experience with ChatGPT today. Tried to do some simple calculations of various molar volumes and unit cell sizes. I had to tell ChatGPT it is wrong, several times, until I was able to get it to tell me what the correct answer. 1/2

doi.org/10.1007/s001... interesting - salt melts are probably the future of igneous petrology