OnTrackThe electronic newsletter of the international thermochronology communityOntrack 34 - June 2010 (Vol 17, Issue 2)
Obituary
Geoff Laslett (1949-2010)
The fission track community will be very sad to learn of the untimely death of Geoff Laslett from cancer in January 2010. To many of us he was a highly respected colleague and good friend. His contribution to fission track analysis was immense. Practically everyone working in this field will be routinely using ideas, methods and practices that derive directly from him.
Geoff was born in Mount Gambier, South Australia in 1949, and attended numerous schools around the state, as a result of his father’s work as a Methodist Minister in various rural parishes. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with first class honours and after completing his PhD in Statistics at the Australian National University, Geoff joined CSIRO (the Australian government scientific research organisation)...Read More >>
Thermo2010
Please send all articles, news items, job advertisments and any other content for the next issue of Ontrack to the editor before April 15th...Read More >>
Thermo2010
The provisional timetable for Thermo2010 can be downloaded here: timetable.pdf , or can be seen online here
...Read More >>
Conferences and Meetings
Advances in reliability of pressure-temperature-time information retrieved from orogens and in sophistication of numerical modeling studies make this session timely for those who integrate multiple techniques to understand orogenesis at extreme pressure or temperature.
Conveners: Michael Brown, Fraukje Brouwer and Nigel Kelly Keynote speakers: Philippe Agard (PUMC, France), Ethan Baxter (Boston, U.S.A.) and Dave Kelsey (Adelaide, Australia). Abstract deadline is August 10th (go to: http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2010/techprog.htm) Further information about the GSA Annual Meeting at: http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2010/ Since the millennium, there have been significant advances in our ability to extract pressure, temperature and time information from orogenic belts that culminate in high-pressure or high-temperature metamorphism. These advances include: the ability to recognize, date and understand the significance of inclusion suites in refractory minerals in metamorphic rocks, particularly those in dateable minerals such as zircon and monazite; improvements to robust thermobarometry; and, the wide use of thermodynamic modeling to identify trajectories of P–T evolution. By linking trustworthy age information with reliable P–T information we are able to define well-constrained P–T–t paths, and to...Read More >>
PhD Theses
Thermal history of the eastern sector of the Sierra de Cameros: constraints from fission track analysis and other geochronological tools (U-Pb SHRIMP and (U-Th)/He)
Pedro Del Río
PhD from the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Now at Dpto. de Ciencias de la Tierra. Universidad de Cádiz, 11510 Puerto Real (Cádiz), Spain.
Supervised by Luis Barbero and Antonio Casas-Sainz (defended December 21st, 2009)
The Sierra de Cameros constitutes part of the northwestern zone of the Iberian Range. It is bounded by two Tertiary basins: the Ebro basin to the north and the Duero basin to the south. Two Palaeozoic massifs, the Sierra de la Demanda and the Sierra del Moncayo are located to the northwest and to the southeast respectively....Read More >>
Laboratory Profiles
(U-Th)/He, Fission Track, and Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratories at the University of Tübingen Germany
Todd Ehlers started last fall as a full professor at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Tübingen (Germany). The existing thermochronology facilities at Tübingen were updated and are now part of the Earth System Dynamics Research group (ESD). The thermochronology and cosmogenic isotope (10Be, 26Al) facilities are overseen by Drs. Eva Enkelmann and Mirjam Schaller, respectively.
The Helium lab is equipped with Leica M205c and Olympus SZX12 stereomicroscopes for (U-Th)/He grain picking. A refurbished Patterson Instruments extraction line with a quadrupole mass spectrometer, upgraded diode laser, and automated 25 sample xy stage are used for degassing of apatite and zircon. The apatite and zircon fission track laboratories are completed and include a Struers polishing machine (TegraPol-31 and TegraForce-5), a x-y-z...Read More >>
MC4-IT