Credit...Suzette Timmerman
The speaker at our January 10, 2020 meeting will be Michelle Wenz, a PhD student from Northwestern University. 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.
