Options for undergraduate student research projects with Russ Colson Jan 2004-Jan 2005

1) There are bubbles in the dark colored rocks that make up the dark face of the man in the Moon. What is the ‘mystery gas’ that has produced these bubbles in Moon rocks? Where did that gas go? Geologists are interested in how this gas might affect the chemical behavior of magma on the Moon and what it tells us about the Moon’s past.

Details of an example project: You can experimentally study the vesiculation of silicate melts during cooling in the presence of C-CO. Is there a significant CO component that exsolves? Is it a function of quench crystallization and/or Ni-Fe metal present?

2) Magma is very different from water in its chemistry. Yet we don’t know nearly as much about it as we know about water. Understanding how magma works, chemically, is important not only for geologists, but glass chemists as well. What can we learn about the basic chemistry of magma that is important in understanding how igneous rocks form?

Details of an example project: You can examine melt activity variations as a function of temperature above the liquidus temperature. Are there phase-like transitions and large molecule-like nuclei affecting melt activities?

3) Ancient people learned how to make clear glass long before they learned what made glass clear. What techniques and methods did ancient people use to create clear glass? What can we learn about their technologies and the cultures in which those technologies developed by looking at how they learned to make clear glass?

Details of an example project: How do Mn and Sb affect the coloration imparted to glass by trace Fe? How does this impact our understanding of the development of technology in early glassmaking?

4) Pollutants naturally partition between air, water, and sediment. Understanding how pollutants partition between different environments is important in undestanding how those pollutants might affect our environment. We can do experiments that forecast for us how a particular pollutant will behave; whether it will go with water or go with sediment.

Details of an example project: What are the solubilities/transfer rates for pollutants such as Cd, Co, Cr between water and various sediment components (clays, other silicates, carbonates, organics) as a function of T, fO2, pH.

5) A great interior ocean once covered our area and extended westward to a shoreline in central North Dakota and South Dakota. Great duck-billed dinosaurs habited that shoreline. The rocks tell their story. The rocks tell what the world was like when those creatures lived and what kind of environment they lived in.

Details of an example project: What is the nature of the Fox Hills-Hell Creek boundary? Is the sequence seen at the Concordia site traceable region-wide? Are Hadrosaurs uniformly associated with this transition? Are these units genetically related (i.e. offshore, shoreline, coastal swamp), or are they separated by a significant regional hiatus?