Credit…Suzette Timmerman
The speaker at our January 10, 2020 meeting will be Michelle Wenz, a PhD student from Northwestern University. The title of her talk is “Earth’s Inner Workings Revealed through Mineral Inclusions in Diamond”. She is working on an suite of superdeep diamonds from Juina, Brazil, many of which appear to have come from the 400-700 km depth range. Her research focus is on water, and deep-mantle water cycling. She developed a method using synchrotron radiation (X-rays) from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne to image tomographically the location of inclusions inside the diamonds for single-crystal X-ray diffraction, also using the synchrotron X-rays (many of the inclusions are less than 10 micrometers in size, requiring the brilliant X-ray source of the APS). She also recently co-discovered a new rare earth perovskite mineral, which was named goldschmidtite, KNbO3, also found as inclusion in diamond.
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