Earth Science

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder Most rock units exhibit some form of planar surfaces or linear features. Examples include bedding-, fault-, fracture-, and joint-surfaces, and various forms of foliation and mineral alignment. The spatial orientation of these features form the critical raw data used to constrain models addressing the origin and subsequent deformation of rock units. Although now over 100 years since its invention and introduction, the Brunton...

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder Topographic maps are "plan-view" representations of Earth's three-dimensional surface. They are a standard type of map-view that provides an overhead, or aerial, perspective. Among the defining features of a topographic map are the contour lines that indicate locations of constant elevation. The elevation interval between the contour lines is dependent on the level of detail provided by the map and the kind of topography present.

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder Geologic maps were first made and utilized in Europe, in the mid-to-late 18th century. Ever since, they have been an important part of geological investigations all around the world that strive to understand rock distributions on the surface of the earth, in the subsurface, and their modification through time. A modern geologic map is a data-rich representation of rocks and rock-structures in a two-dimensional plan view. The...

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder The physical properties of minerals comprise various measurable and discernible attributes, including color, streak, magnetic properties, hardness, crystal growth form, and crystal cleavage. Each of these properties are mineral-specific, and they are fundamentally related to a particular mineral’s chemical make-up and atomic structure. This experiment examines two properties that stem primarily from symmetric repetition of...

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder The physical properties of minerals include various measurable and discernible attributes, including color, streak, magnetic properties, hardness, crystal growth form, and crystal cleavage. These properties are mineral-specific, and they are fundamentally related to a particular mineral’s chemical make-up and atomic structure. This video examines several physical properties that are useful in field and hand sample mineral...

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder Igneous rocks are the products of cooling and crystallization of magma. Volcanic rocks are a particular variety of igneous rock, forming as a consequence of magma breaching the surface, then cooling and crystallizing in the subaerial environment.  Magma is molten rock that typically ranges in temperature from approximately 800 °C to 1,200 °C (Figure 1). Magma itself is produced within the Earth via three primary melting...

Source: Laboratory of Alan Lester - University of Colorado Boulder Igneous rocks are products of the cooling and crystallization of high temperature liquid rock, called magma. Magmatic temperatures typically range from approximately 800 °C to 1,200 °C. Molten rock is, perhaps luckily for humans, an anomaly on planet Earth. If a random and imaginary drill hole were made in the Earth, it would most likely not reach a region of truly and totally molten material until the outer core, at nearly...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst Throughout this series of videos, natural samples were extracted and purified in search of organic compounds, called biomarkers, that can relate information on climates and environments of the past. One of the samples analyzed was sediment. Sediments accumulate over geologic time in basins, depressions in the Earth into which sediment flows through the action of fluid (water or air), movement, and gravity. Two main types...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst Throughout this series of videos, natural samples were extracted and purified in search of organic compounds, called biomarkers, that can relate information on climates and environments of the past. One of the samples analyzed was sediment. Sediments accumulate over geologic time in basins, depressions in the Earth into which sediment flows through the action of fluid (water or air), movement, and gravity. Two main types...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst The material comprising the living "organic" share of any ecosystem (leaves, fungi, bark, tissue; Figure 1) differs fundamentally from the material of the non-living "inorganic" share (rocks and their constituent minerals, oxygen, water, metals). Organic material contains carbon linked to a series of other carbon and hydrogen molecules (Figure 2), which distinguishes it from inorganic material. Carbon's wide valency range...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst Every lab needs standards that track the performance, accuracy, and precision of its instruments over time to ensure a measurement made today is the same as a measurement made a year from now (Figure 1). Because standards must test the performance of instruments over a long period of time, large volumes of the standards are often required. Many chemical standards can be purchased from retail scientific companies, like...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst The distribution of a group of organic biomarkers called glycerol-dialkyl glycerol-tetraethers (GDGTs), produced by a suite of archaea and bacteria, were found in modern sediments to change in a predictable manner in response to air or water temperature1,2. Therefore, the distribution of these biomarkers in a sequence of sediments of known age can be used to reconstruct the evolution of air and/or water temperature on...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst The product of an organic solvent extraction, a total lipid extract (TLE), is often a complex mixture of hundreds, if not thousands, of different compounds. The researcher is often only interested in a handful of compounds or, if interested in many, may need to remove unwanted constituents that are"in the way" or co-eluting. For example, the concentrations of individual compounds in a sample are often determined on a gas...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst The product of an organic solvent extraction, a total lipid extract (TLE), is often a complex mixture of hundreds, if not thousands, of different compounds. The researcher is often only interested in a handful of compounds. The compounds of interest may belong to one of several classes of compounds, such as alkanes, ketones, alcohols, or acids (Figure 1), and it may be useful to remove the compound classes to which it does...

Source: Laboratory of Jeff Salacup - University of Massachusetts Amherst As mentioned in previous videos, the product of an organic solvent extraction, a total lipid extract (TLE), is often a complex mixture of hundreds, if not thousands, of different compounds. The researcher is often only interested in a handful of compounds. In the case of our two organic paleothermometers (Uk'37 and MBT/CBT), the interest is in only 6 compounds (2 alkenones and 4 isoprenoidal glycerol dialkyl glycerol...