The AGU Fall Meeting 2018 will take place in Washington, DC from December 10-14. Many staff members and postdoctoral associates from the Geophysical Laboratory will attend this year.
Check here daily for live updates on each day's science presentations; or follow along on Facebook, Twitter, YouTubeand Instagram. For a live stream of conference photos, click here or follow along below!
Monday, 10 December
Posters
Carnegie Fellow, Peng Ni, discussed his poster on understanding Cu isotope data in tektites & the behavior of Cu isotopes during evaporation. He conducted a series of laser levitation experiments to simulate the process of tektite formation & the accompanying Cu isotope evolution.
Talks
Alex Goncharov, staff scientist, addresses the challenges in determination of the heat transport properties at extreme conditions of the deep Earth through conductance and radiation. He and his team performed direct measurements of thermal conductivity of deep Earth materials using pulsed laser techniques applied to samples in a laser heated diamond anvil cell, which generate the relevant pressure-temperature (P-T) conditions at his talk on Monday.
Tuesday, 11 December
Talks
Bob Hazen, staff scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory, got things started on Tuesday with his talk about A New Approach to Mineral Classification, where he discussed that his group is trying to understand the diversity and distribution of minerals on Earth, comparing it to other planets, and understanding the co-evolution of Earth's geosphere and biosphere.
Posters
Shaunna Morrison, postdoctoral associate, presents her poster, "Predicting Multi-Component Mineral Compositions in Gale crater, Mars with Label Distribution Learning" to the crowd.
Olivier Gagné excites the crowd at his poster as he explains his completed survey of bond lengths from the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) for all atoms of the periodic table of elements bonded to S2-, Se2- and Te2-. This new parameterization allows better inference of the oxidation state of constituent ions in sulfide and sulfosalt minerals (particularly redox-active transition metals), which may be used as a proxy to study Earth’s changing near-surface conditions through deep time.
Wednesday, 12 December
Talks
Amanda Lindoo, GL postdoc, presented her talk about investigating the interaction of CaCO3 with silicate mantle to understand the role of CaCO3 in carbon remobilization in subduction zones.
Posters
Postdoctoral associate, Jing Yang, wants to understand how much carbo there can be in Earth's core at her poster session on Wednesday.
Thursday, 13 December
Talks
Yingwei Fei presents his invited talk about narrowing down the composition range of the Earth's core using laser heated diamond anvil cell techniques.
Bob Hazen, staff scientist, discusses how he and his team look at minerals that preserve the history of our planet, compare them with other planets and moons, and examine the co-evolution of the biosphere and geosphere during his talk on Thursday.
As the Deep Carbon Observatory heads into its 10th and final year, Craig Schiffries reflects on all of the incredible work that the decadal project has produced during his talk today at #AGU18.
Posters
GL alum, Abhisek Basu, presents his poster about his work on the melting temperature and thermal conductivity of iron at AGU on Thursday.
Ron Cohen, staff scientist at GL, discusses recent work highlighting that thermal conductivity of iron in Earth's core is low enough to support thermal convection at his poster on Thursday.
Friday, 14 December
Talks
Carnegie fellow Teresa Fornaro presented her work, "Multi-Technique Analysis of “Synthetic” Extraterrestrial Analogs as Test-bed for Detection of Molecular Biomarkers in Planetary Contexts" on Friday morning at her #AGU18 talk.
Zack Geballe, research scientist, presented the results of direct measurements of thermal conductivity of single-crystal and multi-phase assemblages of lower mantle minerals at similar conditions using transient laser heating in a diamond anvil cell at his #AGU18 talk on Friday morning.
Andrew Steele, staff scientist, discussed his discovery that secondary fluid alteration of Martian basalts can generate organics through the electrochemical reduction of aqueous CO2. He noted that this process is well known and constrained in experimental systems, although has never been witnessed in natural samples before.
Posters
Dionysis Foustoukos, a research scientist at GL, presented his poster explaining a series of hydrothermal experiments he conducted at temperatures ranging from 150 °C to 450 °C at 500 bars to constrain the effects of aqueous alteration and thermal metamorphism on the N chemical and isotopic systematics in altered insoluble organic matter (IOM) from primitive chondritic meteorites.
GL postdoc Svetlana Shkolyar closes out #AGU18 with her poster, "Constraining elemental trends in Raman spectra of terrestrial and extraterrestrial insoluble organic matter samples."
