Geology Open Night

One hour toward professional development is available for teachers and professional geologists attending the Geology Open Night lectures.

Uncommon behavior of a common mineral lends new insight into the  ancient lunar crust     Hanna Nekvasil   7:30  PM Friday  January 29, 2016 ESS 001 Our interpretation of lunar history is strongly intertwined with the model of a lunar magma ocean in which plagioclase began crystallizing late and floated and accumulated to form an anorthositic crust. However, to date, the search continues for direct evidence of a deep origin of minerals that make up the anorthosite that could validate this fundamental model. Such evidence has been elusive as laboratory investigation of nominally equivalent terrestrial minerals has shown that these minerals do not change their crystallization behavior over the pressure range of the lunar magma ocean and therefore, are poor indicators of pressure. With new investigation of a long standing enigma regarding the compositional invariance of plagioclase in lunar anorthosite, we have shown that plagioclase of the highly calcic composition of the lunar anorthosite is not only sensitive to pressure but shows evidence for a high pressure origin. This provides the first diagnostic means of assessing the possibility of a lunar magma ocean source of the Highlands anorthosite. Hanna Nekvasil is a Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University. She received her B.A from Cornell University in 1979 and her Ph.D. from Penn State in 1985. She has been a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook since 1988, where she has focused on understanding the igneous history of the Earth, Moon, and Mars primarily through simulating, in the laboratory, the conditions of crystallization on these planetary bodies.  Recently, her group was the first to identify a mineral on the Moon that contained water and showed that the Moon was not as dry as first thought. Today she will report on their new results that provide the first definitive criteria to assess whether a lunar magma ocean actually existed in the Moons past.

TBA Joel Hurowitz 7:30 PM Friday February 19, 2016 ESS 001

TBA Donald Weidner 7:30 PM Friday March 25, 2016 ESS 001

TBA Lianxing Wen 7:30 PM Friday April 22, 2016 ESS 001

 

You may also be interested in the following lectures: Astronomy Open Night, The World of Physics and The Living World These lectures are usually held in ESS 001 at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays during the academic year. Professional Development letters are available for teachers and geologists for attending these lectures.

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