EAST TENNESSEE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

May 2014 Meeting


Monday, May 12, 2014
6:00 - 7:30 pm

Pellissippi State Technical Community College
10915 Hardin Valley Road, Knoxville
J.L Goins Administration Building, Cafeteria Annex


MAY PRESENTATION

Award-Winning Student Presentation

Insights from Regolithic Meteorites and a Discussion of Meteorites from Antarctica

Nicole Lunning, PhD Candidate
Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee

We hope you can join us to help celebrate Nicole's award and to have a social meeting, with free snacks and drinks, before the summer break.

Each year the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at UTK offers a course on Professional Presentations (Geology 596) to provide a formal opportunity for students to develop their oral communication skills. This one-credit course involves writing an abstract and preparing, practicing, and delivering a 15-minute professional presentation on any geological topic of interest, usually a portion of their thesis/dissertation research. The students present their talks at a departmental seminar and are ranked by the faculty. This year ETGS has partnered with UTK to further broaden this valuable experience by recognizing the best Masters- and best Doctoral-student presentations and inviting them to reprise their talks at our May meeting.

The winners this year were St Thomas LeDoux (best Masters presentation) and Nicole Lunning (best Doctoral presentation).  Unfortunately, St Thomas cannot attend our May meeting because of a prior commitment. However, he has agreed to do an ETGS talk in the Fall.  Nicole can attend and will give an expanded version of her award-winning presentation. The abstract of her talk are given below.  

Abstract

Regolithic meteorites represent the lithified soil of their parent asteroids or planets. These meteorite soils are breccias that contain clasts of numerous lithologies including fragments of some rock types previously unrecognized in meteorite collections. Nicole will discuss her research on meteorites that sample the soils of Mars and the asteroid 4 Vesta. These meteorites contain fragments of new rock types, which provide insight into the evolution of Mars and Vesta. Nicole will also discuss the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET), which collects meteorites in Antarctica every year. She will talk about her experience classifying those meteorites at Smithsonian and working in the National Meteorite Collection prior to coming to UTK.


 

Page updated May 26, 2018