Wooster and Dickinson students team up for geochemistry research [Wooster, OH] – A team of students from Wooster and Dickinson are working together on geochemistry research this summer. We’re using the compositions of Earth materials to understand geologic processes. Our main goal is to study the formation of volcanic ridges that were erupted beneath glaciers in Iceland, but we have a few other projects that we’ll be working on, too. Thanks to Sherman Fairchild funding, we have 8 weeks to learn a lot of different lab techniques and travel to Iceland to get more samples. We began our work with a weeklong marathon of preparing samples for analysis in the Wooster X-ray and Dickinson SEM labs. Kendra and Layali prepared geochemical samples by melting powdered rocks and forming them into glass disks. Marisa is examining samples of volcanic glasses under the microscope, selecting the freshest chips. Kendra and Hannah are in the first stages of polishing the fresh glass chips so that they are perfectly smooth. This will let us analyze their compositions on Dickinson’s scanning electron microscope. We can also use the polished glass chips to measure the water contents later in the project. Layali is tracing images of thin sections. We’ll use the tracings to do some quantitative mineralogical analyses. It looks she is having fun doing all of this hard work! The team has been working so hard that they have needed reminders to take breaks. So what to do on a break? How about a game of lab-bench-dino-mancala?