LPI Seminar Series
LPI seminars are held on most Fridays at 3:30 p.m. in the Lecture Hall at USRA, 3600 Bay Area Boulevard, Houston, Texas. Refreshments are served at 3:00 p.m. For more information, please contact Justin Filiberto (phone: 281-486-2118; e-mail: filiberto@lpi.usra.edu) or Michelle Kirchoff (phone: 281- 486-2116; e-mail: kirchoff@lpi.usra.edu). A map of the Clear Lake area (PDF format) is available here. The Acrobat Reader 8.0 is available from Adobe. This schedule is subject to revision.
See also the Rice University Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquia and the Department of Earth Science Colloquia pages for other space science talks in the Houston area.
October 2008
- Friday, October 17, 2008 - Lecture Hall, 3:30 PM
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Shouliang Zhang, Johns Hopkins University
Application of TEM to Characterization of Earth and Environmental MaterialsThis talk mainly addresses TEM equipped with a Gatan Image Filter (GIF) as a powerful tool in mineralogy field to examine crystal structures, analyze chemical compositions, and probe the elemental valence state on a nanometer scale. Chemical and structural variations at deformation twinning boundaries in pyroxene minerals, mineral constituents of quartz sand coatings in aquifer environment, and quantification methods using electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) for determination of manganese valence will be detailed.
November 2008
- Friday, November 14, 2008 - Lecture Hall, 3:30 PM
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Christian Koeberl, University of Vienna (40th Anniversary Seminar Series Speaker)
Continental Scientific Drilling and the Study of Terrestrial Impact Craters: The Bosumtwi Crater in GhanaDrilling allows obtaining information on the subsurface structure of impact craters, provides ground-truth for geophysical studies, and delivers samples of rock types not exposed at the surface. Recently the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) has supported projects to study impact craters. The first ICDP study of an impact structure was at the subsurface Chicxulub impact crater, Mexico, from late 2001, which reached a depth of 1511 m and intersected 100 m of impact melt breccia and suevite. Between June and October 2004, the 10.5 km Bosumtwi crater, Ghana, has been drilled with ICDP support. It is a well-preserved complex impact structure with a pronounced rim and is almost completely filled by the 8 km diameter Lake Bosumtwi, which is a closed-basin lake that has wide paleoclimatic significance and a detailed paleo-environmental record. In terms of impact studies, Bosumtwi is the best preserved young complex craters known, and is the source crater of the Ivory Coast tektites. Drilling also allows correlating all the geophysical studies and provides material for geochemical and petrographic correlation studies between basement rocks and crater fill in comparison with tektites and ejected material. Sixteen different cores were drilled at six locations within the lake, to a maximum depth of 540 m. Borehole logging as well as vertical seismic profiling (to obtain 3D images of the crater subsurface) were done in the two deep boreholes. About 2.2 km of core material was obtained. This includes ca. 1.8 km of lake sediments and 0.4 km of impactites and fractured crater basement (in the deep crater moat, and on the central uplift). Analyses of samples and geophysical data published in 2007 by several different research groups.
- Friday, November 21, 2008 - Lecture Hall, 3:30 PM
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Jon Friedrich, Fordham University
To be announced
December 2008
- Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - Lecture Hall, 3:30 PM
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Renu Malhotra, University of Arizona (40th Anniversary Seminar Series Speaker)
To be announced
