We're hiring
Three year postdoc on geochemistry and petrology of ore-forming systems.
jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/researc...
@manenbu.bsky.social
I make fake rocks & minerals at high pressures & temperatures. Admirer of carbonatites, rare earths, and geological miscellanies. מיכאל.🐪✡️
We're hiring
Three year postdoc on geochemistry and petrology of ore-forming systems.
jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/researc...
Maybe it is legit?
I saw those new Proclamation coins now in our local AusPost… almost but not quite!
Thortveitite for me, thank you very much #MinCup25
31.08.2025 13:08 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Same
31.08.2025 13:05 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0You’d think that “one stop stamp shop” would know its value…
31.08.2025 12:54 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Fun fact, hydration of calcium oxide and calcium silicates to portlandites involves a very large volume expansion at great force, causing all sorts of mayhem in both nature and in my own experiments
20.08.2025 05:47 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Mineral Monday: Oxygen fugacity buffer calculator by Michael Anenburg
Michael Anenburg has developed a graphical oxygen fugacity buffer calculator, available at
fo2.rses.anu.edu.au/fo2app/
#MSACommunications #MineralMonday #mineralogy #oxygenfugacity
How many do you have?
10.08.2025 06:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0You mean courrectised
06.08.2025 21:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0It’s antiskarnisation
06.08.2025 17:17 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1I do my best 😅
06.08.2025 01:56 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Hope 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
06.08.2025 01:04 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0I should take a video of one of them, aegirine reflects light in a very cool way
05.08.2025 18:55 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Some but not all
05.08.2025 18:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Not including another year in a different journal (to be fair, mostly my fault for being slow, NComms were just fine)
05.08.2025 09:13 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Thanks, and it took a while for us to convince the world that it happens. Look at the time gap between submission and acceptance 😅
05.08.2025 09:08 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0In 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.
05.08.2025 08:55 — 👍 13 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 1New 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
24.07.2025 21:29 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0#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.
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
/bot
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
27.06.2025 10:19 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Close to home, this one is literally five minutes away from my parents house…😬
24.06.2025 07:50 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Pro 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.
23.06.2025 12:33 — 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0No, but it misbehaves in many different ways. Paper will be out soon if you’re interested
22.06.2025 08:14 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0No, we tried to measure how much carbonate it had using a million different methods and none agreed so we wrote a paper about it
22.06.2025 07:59 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0