Outreach: Brooklyn Elementary School Science Fair

This weekend I took the Rock Mechanics show on the road! A family from Brooklyn PS372 ("The Children's School") saw our set up at Open House, got my contact information, and asked me to come to their annual Science Day.

In addition to the rock mechanics table, there were things like electrical circuits, optical illusions, ultrasound, gardening, and making silly putty. We all set up our tables in the gymnasium before the kids arrived.

I figured that some of the kids may have already had some introduction to geology, so I brought a small collection of rocks. Sure enough, when I started talking about the rock cycle, a few yelled "Igneous!" and "Sandstone!" (okay, close enough). I also brought the rock with the strain gauges and goniometer, which is always a big hit.

And of course I brought our slider block demonstration of earthquakes. Though once they figured out how the seismometer app worked it was hard to see the small motions of the block sliding over their stomping and banging on the table. I wish I would have taken a picture or two of the kids in action, but once they started arriving I was doing demos almost nonstop for three hours. It was a fun but exhausting day.

The rock mechanics lab supports the arts!

Meet Denise Iris, a media artist and filmmaker, and our very own "Artist in Residence" at the rock mechanics lab. Okay, not officially, but we claim her as our own now. Denise is working on a multi-screen installation piece about climate change as personified by a lone polar explorer. She shot some great action footage with an actor out in polar bear country in the Arctic and wanted to compliment it with some more controlled shots of ice freezing and melting. She got in touch with us and spent a few weeks in the lab and cold room experimenting with different effects. Below she uses a blow torch to speed up the melting process on a block of ice. You can see a sample of this melting video at her FB page.

She used the microscope in the cold room to capture video of a drop of water freezing. She played around with different freezing surfaces and compositions, but I was too cozy in my warm office to go check on her. So I have no pictures of that.  

She also took an aquarium tank that Ted found on campus and filled it with water and a chunk of our "failed" seed ice (i.e. ice that has lots of tiny bubbles which are terrible for us experimentally, but wonderful for her artistically). 

Our PR department will be doing a more detailed story about Denise's visit and our unusual collaboration in the next few weeks. At the risk of being too meta, here is a picture of Kim taking a picture of Denise taking a picture of ice.

 And here are a couple of examples of what she came up with. These are just the stills. You should see the video that she created. That bubble that looks like a drop of mercury moves around in the most mesmerizing way. I just can't wait to see her final project.

 Gorgeous! Now don't you want an artist to spend time in your rock mechanics lab? You bet you do!

Rock mechanics on TV!

Today I did an interview for a public television program called SciTechNow. I was contacted because of my affiliation with Science Cheerleaders and because the head of that organization was not available for the interview. I talked mostly about that organization and SciStarter, an online citizen science group.  But it also gave me an opportunity to talk a little bit about the rock mechanics lab and about why I got into science.
This morning after dropping off the baby I headed down to 66th and Broadway to the Tisch WNET studios at Lincoln Center. First stop was up to the green room to get my hair and make-up done.

Then I was brought down to the waiting room couch, right there on the corner of Broadway. I was the last in a series of eight speakers.

When it was my turn, I was fitted with a microphone and the make-up artist touched me up, shellacking that stray hair back out of my eyes.

Hari was really nice and easy to chat with. He asked me several questions about Science Cheerleaders and about Sci Starter. I think I was a little like a deer in the headlights on my first question (I sure hope they do some editing) but after I got warmed up, it went pretty well. 

After the interview I recorded two segments for their  "Ask a Scientist" feature. This is where scientists try to provide an easy to understand answer to a science question in one minute or less. I answered "What is tidal heating?" and "How do we know what's inside the earth?"

I don't remember saying much about subduction zones, but apparently it is physically impossible for a geologist to give an interview and not make this hand gesture.

Afterward Hari took a photo with me. Pretty fun way to spend the morning, but I'm happy to be back in my grubby clothes and in the lab getting dirty again.

Reaction driven cracking with Sarah

There's a new experimental project occurring in the rock mechanics lab right now. Sarah Lambart, who is usually over in the petrology labs, is conducting some preliminary desktop studies of reaction-driven cracking that may ultimately be performed in the triax. Below, her sample material sits within a steel cylindrical die and she is using weightlifting equipment to determine if the reaction rate depends on stress (it does!)

 Another test determines the rate of the reaction with warm basic fluid (but without stress).

Strain gages attached to a copper jacket around the sample should capture volume expansion and cracking caused by a reaction of water and calcium oxide. 

 Transducers attached to the sample will monitor cracking. Sarah tests one out and observes the signal.

Cryostat stage 1

Our newest member of the lab is Mike Nielson, who will be doing his senior thesis project working on ice. Specifically he will be troubleshooting and calibrating the cryostat and testing standard ice samples for grain growth or degradation after thermal pulses.  On his first day he already made a big contribution to the ice project. Rather than the duct taped styrofoam contraption that I was envisioning for insulation, he suggested we use expanding foam to get a perfect fit to the cryostat dimensions. 

At home he built a wooden box lined with wax paper. We placed the cryostat inside the box and released two full cans of Great Stuff expanding foam in the area around it. A wooden bar over the top covered the ball bearing sleeve that the piston goes into. The bar also held down the cryostat when the foam expanded.

And did it ever expand!  He taped the sides so that the foam would "grow" toward the center. We actually worried that it wouldn't fully cover the top of the cryostat. Clearly we didn't have to worry. It covered completely and pushed its way out. After it fully dried, he easily removed it from the box,  cut the top off, and cut the insulation into two halves. Eventually we will use duct tape or velcro to make a seam that will hold the two parts together.

He cut a hole in the side to allow for the peltier cooling device and heat sink that I will discuss in more detail later. Shown here is a fan sink. In the next blog installment I will show the circulating liquid sink that we are now using instead. Stay tuned!

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. 

Visitor in the cold room

Early this month Tess Caswell a graduate student from Brown University came to visit us and image ice samples with our brand new, cold room-designated microscope and microtome. She risked strange stares from fellow passengers as she lugged a dewar of liquid nitrogen onto the Amtrak train, through Grand Central, and out to Queens via subway.

In the outer refrigerated room at Lamont, she developed a protocol for breaking off bits of sample and affixing them to thin section slides. She used tweezers and razor blades and worked on top of a metal platform that sat in a small cooler filled with liquid nitrogen

Then she braved the cold (-29degC!!) to spend time microtoming the samples. She first tried transmitted light mode on the microscope and thus needed to shave the samples until they were very thin. Later she tried reflected light and was able to keep the samples relatively thick.

Ultimately the thick samples in reflected light proved to be the best for imaging grain and sub-grain boundaries in her previously deformed samples. Great images, Tess!

She plans to come out again soon and try to also determine orientation of the grains.