1999 zoomed by in the probe lab. We zapped, imaged, mapped and quantified lots of interesting objects, ranging from Baraboo pipestone, zircons and quartz grains from Skye and Yellowstone, pseudotachylytes from Norway, to siltstone from Wyoming and anhydrite from Mt. Pinatubo. Characterization of specimens being analyzed for study by other high tech equipment seems a consistent thread: are the grains one or more generations? Where is the ___(fill-in-your-element here) in my sample? "Hot" elements for geologists seem to be K and U. For a researcher from Material Science, the element was Pb in cast iron (there at the ppm level). I continued to work in the Mo-B-Si system with folks from Material Science and finally solved some puzzles, thanks to the new software (below). I'm applying some of these techniques to geological problems, i.e. attempting to develop an analysis for every element in tourmaline (except the impossible Li).
The year ended with a long awaited upgrade in November of the microprobe software by Advanced Microbeam of Vienna, Ohio. I had been increasingly frustrated with the limitations of the original software, particularly given the myriad of capabilities of the Cameca SX51 itself. Probe for Windows, written by UC-Berkeley probe lab director John Donovan, is a step above the usual 'one-size-fits-all' probe software and permits the researcher to do many things hitherto difficult if not impossible. For example, we now can make a backscattered electron image of a complete thin section in four minutes; for glass analyses, we now can apply a rigorous correction for element loss/gain based upon the count vs time curve of the element; we have a sophisticated background modelling capability, included curved backgrounds, important particularly for Boron analysis; and we can make irregular shaped x-ray maps of non-rectangular objects. But the learning curve is very steep, and it took 2-3 months for me to feel comfortable with the basic operations.
I continued to work with two students doing senior theses. Andrew Klatsch has been chemically characterizing the glass from Andean volcanoes, which is a byproduct of a Master's thesis here recently by Bruce Jackson, who studied cores from a lake in western Argentina. Ryan Jakubowski has been applying a variety of techniques to volcanic anhydrite from Pinatubo, with co-collaborators Sue Welch and Jeff Swope (Purdue). This has resulted in the first ever X-ray determination of volcanic anhydrite, which Ryan presented in a poster at GSA in Denver.
This year, I helped initiate a Departmental Oral History project, with the collaboration of the University's Oral History project. The goal is to try to interview all of our emeritus professors. I interviewed Dave Clark before he left for sunny California, and set up plans to interview Bob Gates early in 2000. I continued my Aleutian mapping-geology-geophysics oral history project and interviewed a couple of dozen of the principals, including UW alumnus Bill Bryan.
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