Michael Anenburg

You mean courrectised

It’s antiskarnisation

I do my best 😅

Hope you enjoy it :)

May I interest you in two recent apatite related papers?
doi.org/10.1021/acs....
doi.org/10.1039/D5TB...
Published in chemistry journals so you might have missed them, but very relevant for geoscience.

Camera doesn’t do justice

I should take a video of one of them, aegirine reflects light in a very cool way

Some but not all

Not including another year in a different journal (to be fair, mostly my fault for being slow, NComms were just fine)

Thanks, and it took a while for us to convince the world that it happens. Look at the time gap between submission and acceptance 😅

In carbonatites, alkalis are fluxes that keep melting points low. We discovered that upon reaction with surroundings silicates ("antiskarns"), alkalis are extracted to silicate minerals, solidifying the residual carbonatite magma into crystalline rock.

New paper: we discovered a new way for magmas to crystallise (!), and it also made one of the largest known carbonatite REE deposits.
Out now in Nature Communications: doi.org/10.1038/s414...
#geology @scienceanu.bsky.social

This is just the beginning

#ThinSectionThursday why do these garnets (pink arrows) look like needles? | Michael Anenburg #ThinSectionThursday why do these garnets (pink arrows) look like needles? Because they are not garnets! This is a high temperature experiment from 2021. I have lots of schorlomite garnet Ca3Ti2(SiO4...

www.linkedin.com/posts/michae...

#ThinSectionThursday qeltite marked in pink, together with some gehlenite, wollastonite, nagelschmidtite, magnetite, and kalsilite.
What is qeltite? Good question! See link in reply for the story.

Silica substituted carbonate apatite: synthesis and analytical challenges We use a high temperature experiment to demonstrate a coupled substitution mechanism for carbonate and silica in apatite, namely 2PO3−4 → SiO4−4 + CO2−3, with carbonate substituting for phosphate (typ...

We tried to measure an apatite composition using many different methods and failed miserably, so we wrote a paper about it.
Available at the Journal of Materials Chemistry B: doi.org/10.1039/D5TB...

🚨 #IndustryFellowships #IE25 announcement:

❗️Outcomes announced publicly for Early Career Industry Fellowships 2025❗️

See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ https://rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/Download/Report/a3f6be6e-33f7-4fb5-98a6-7526aaa184cf/276

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Comic. [two people in labcoats look at body pierced with blade draped over bench] PERSON 1: We found him lying uncomformably on the lab bench. I wonder if the iron-rich intrusion in his back is related. PERSON 2 with ponytail: It could be clastic. Maybe a rift opened in his body, and the intrusive material later fell into the hole. [caption] The Geology Department Investigates Their First Murder

Geology Murder

xkcd.com/3112/

Found in my daughter’s workbook

Close to home, this one is literally five minutes away from my parents house…😬

Pro writing tip: When proof-reading a paper before submission or revision, change the font and print it out on paper. Trust me, you will find so many mistakes you had no idea were there, even though you've read the thing a million times on your computer screen.

No, but it misbehaves in many different ways. Paper will be out soon if you’re interested

No, we tried to measure how much carbonate it had using a million different methods and none agreed so we wrote a paper about it

Apatite, but yes:
Very confused!

Got a paper accepted, they asked for a graphical abstract. We made one!

#ThinSectionThursday cathodoluminescence of fluorapatite and REE mineralisation from Nolans Bore, Australia.

Other than being spectacular eye candy, this is very informative and tells quite a lot about the ore. Yay science!

Image taken at CSIRO Microbeam Lab.
@scienceanu.bsky.social

Two papers accepted in one day, wow 🎉

#ThinSectionThursday Accidental platinum crystals, dissolved by calcium chloride flux from a platinum crucible and deposited on the MgO plate it was standing on

Winter in Canberra, I can probably just leave it outside for a bit

My kind of science: They found some forgotten proactinium in a back shelf, tried to make something out of it, got something different instead, and published this in Science Advances lol
doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Self assurance 🤨😁