Constraining Archean pCO2 With Micrometeorites
When: November 13, 2018 3PM PST
This talk is the culmination of my research rotation with Don Brownlee (UW Astronomy department) and Roger Buick (UW Earth and Space Sciences department). The goal of this project was to find iron micrometeorites in Archean sedimentary rocks and analyze their composition. Metallic micrometeorites melt when entering Earth’s atmosphere and Archean samples could provide a record of the Archean upper atmosphere, in which they were molten and readily reacted with the surrounding gases. This talk will focus on the lab techniques I learned and used to look for micrometeorites as well as the modeling effort needed to constrain atmospheric composition based on the micrometeorite measurements.