The new proposal for beamtime at the synchrotron Advanced Light Source (ALS)- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was successful! Dyanna and students will be working on “Pathways for water in quartz grains: exploring strain softening along the Willard Thrust Fault” using synchrotron source FTIR.  This allows us to track how water infiltrated quartz grains during deformation along the Willard Thrust Fault.  Colleague Adolph Yonkee (Weber State University) has collaborated on the fieldwork on Antelope Island in Utah.  MS student Chad Martin has collected the first round of successful FTIR data which has made this second proposal possible.  Dyanna and MS student Ryan Tarpey plan to take new samples to the ALS very soon. Hooray!

Chad positions a quartzite sample under the FTIR microscope at the Berkeley ALS synchrotron