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The rock and ice mechanics lab at Lamont-Doherty is led by PIs Christine McCarthy and Ben Holtzman. Now, more than ever, we are in the process of growing our lab and building our experimental program. Along with a team of postdocs, undergrads, grads, techs, and longtime staff engineer Ted, we are rehabilitating and revamping some of the old equipment and building and buying new rigs for exciting new experiments on both rock and ice. You can follow along with our progress here.

Saturday, 25 October 2014

Open House 2014

On October 11th, Lamont held its annual Open House, during which our doors were open to the public. Most labs or research group put together a booth or presentation to highlight what they do as well as entertain/educate our guests. Despite the rain, we had a huge turn out this year. In the Rock Mechanics lab we had a constant stream of excited kids and adults come enjoy our presentation called "Bending, Sliding, Cracking, Squeezing Rocks". 
 A slider block pulled along by a motor demonstrated stick-slip events that were monitored by a transducer and displayed in real time on a computer screen.
Heather demonstrated reaction driven cracking with a piece of calcium oxide submerged in water.

Hannah discussed similar cracking occurring over longer time scales in expanding mortar within cored sandstone...
…and in naturally occurring peridotite samples.


 I used a rock that Ted had rigged up with strain gages to demonstrate how to squeeze rocks and watch the dial on the analog meter move. 
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