Hey Everybody,
Here's an update on my research into the mysteries of the pyrite framboid.

As of last week the pyrite dust (framboids) has been successfully extracted from the shale dust with the LST heavy liquid so genously given by Paul. That same week the SEM at SUNY Oswego was installed, and I was given a quick rundown by the lab tech. Luckily, it being a JEOL and I having used a JEOL at SUNY ESF, has given me a head start with the understanding of this new SEM.

As of now some of the SEM's instruments are still be installed. Meaning that I'm just biding my time until the SEM is ready for me to use it. Then I will finally be able to see if this method yields fruitful results.

Till next time, CJ

Geo Field trip fall 2011

Hey guys,
Just got back from the joint GEO 330/310 field trip (which was great) and want to share some people pics (not rock pics) that I took however there are only a couple...
-CJ

Pyrite Framboids-Fall Semester

Hello again,
It's been a busy semester so far and I apologize for the delay in posts, but I'm here now to make up for it now.

Well the poster symposium on Sept. 9th in Sheldon hall went well and many curious enthusiastic spectators read and asked a variety of intuitive questions.

As for my Devonian extinction research (framboids) we are currently waiting for the new on-campus SEM to be installed, it arrives tomorrow! In the meanwhile I'll be exploring a new framboid collection methodology, which will hopefully make collection times substantially quicker for this methodology. However, there are many things yet be learned, so cross fingers.

Once the SEM is installed this new method will be tested. If it is unfruitful we will still pursue more research in the Devonian shales, possibly with a microstratigraphic study.

Wish me luck!
More updates to come -CJ

Week Five

Hello loyal followers....
So this week (five) I have been compiling my pyrite framboid diameter data after measuring them with the "imagej" program. The samples I did take BSE images of, totaling seven, were put into histograms with % of frequency on the y axis and framboid diameter in the x. I also made box and whisker plots for the same samples to compare the two graphs and see which one I happen to like better, histogram wins--at least with me (ahem...Diana). Ill post an example(s) histogram on the blog.

After I make the graphs I had to make some observations. So what I first did is I used the excel program to find max framboid diameter, mean diameter, and standard dev. I also had to find the inchofabric indexes of some of the samples that had none. So now that I had that info and the histograms I found that with increasing inchofabric index(ii) (i.e. increased bioturbation) that framboid size indeed does increase, just as many of the paper I've read predict. I was also evident that with increasing ii the distribution of the framboid size does increase, you can see this on the histograms I put up below.

The next step of this data analysis was to plot the mean framboid dia. vs. the ii, to see if there is any relationship--look below to see for yourself!
The rest of the week consisted of me preparing some more samples to go down the SEM with. I'll be looking at ten samples next week...hopefully the instrument will be nice this time.

Next week also being the last week of summer I'll be preparing the poster for the summer scholars poster symposium the first week of classes, so stop by! And also I'll being looking at my images for the last samples and will take notes of type-2 framboids (not type-1 like before) and the populations of pyrite xls compared to framboids, to see if there is any interesting relationships.
Here are the histograms: sample BM-68 has a mean fram. dia. of 5.45 microns and an ii of 5, sample BM-59 has a mean fram. dia. of 4.29 and an ii 1, also note how the distribution changes. The other graph is rough I admit but it get the point across, there is definitely a relationship (linear?) to mean fram. dia. and ii. Alright till next week! -CJ

Rare find at Roaring Brook

Hello again All,

Last Friday Diana and I went out to look at several localities that CJ and I had previously visited.  At our first stop, a section of the Roaring Brook river about a half mile downstream from Whittaker Falls, while looking at one of the rock shelves I noticed an exceptionally long piece of Crinoid stem. Now Crinoid stems are usually no more then a few segment pieces long because of how fragile they are, so I decided to take a closer look.  As I moved in closer I realized that at one end of this six inch long section of Crinoid stem was in fact its actual head.  I was ecstatic, and after calling over Diana to show her we quickly worked it free from the shelf and stored it safely in the trunk of Diana's car.

For those who don't know the Crinoid is a member of the Echinodermata phylum, the same phylum as starfish and sea urchins, and look a lot more like flowering plants then an animal.  Crinoids are still alive today and date back all the way to the Ordovician, making them a living fossil along side Coelacanths and several varieties of sharks, among others.  To find a Crinoid this well articulated is rare because, as I said before, they are very fragile creatures, modern Crinoids have been known to complete break apart within 24 hours of dying, so in my opinion this poor fellow was most likely rapidly buried in some kind of storm event that, luckily for us, allowed it to be so beautifully well preserved.

Below are two photos the lovely Crinoid, the first has a penny for scale and shows the entire length of the fossil from head to the end of the stalk. The second gives an overhead view of the fossil.  You may note that the section with the Crinoid has a slightly green tint to it, that is from some biological material that I have yet to remove for fear of damaging the specimen.

For more information on Crinoids the page on the Kansas Geological Survey web site @ http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Extension/fossils/crinoid.html

More Photos

Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY















SWEET PYRITE VEINS
Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY












Wall before removal
Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY
















Sweet Brachiopods
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY

photos from localities

Diana's finger with lingulid













Awesome Burrows!!!
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY











Fallen Tree by our work area
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY















Pipe Creek in West Falls, NY
















Diana Boyer for scale
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY














Pipe Creek
West Falls, NY

















Pipe Creek Formation at Irish Gulf Creek
Boston, NY














Emily Wooton with her Bestie, the frog
Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY















Irish Gulf Creek
Boston, NY

A High Resolution Paleontological, Ichnological and Chemostratograpic Study of Late Devonian Mass Extinction

How's it going?
I am the shorter of the two Emilys, aka New York Emily, and play assistant to the tall, dark, and handsome California Emily. We have been traipsing around creek beds of western New York in New Oregon, Eden, Evans/Derby, Silver Creek, Boston, West Falls, Java, Sheldon, Hume, Geneseo, Livonia, Mount Morris, and Portageville and stealing glances at an exposure at Dunkirk Beach. We have been collecting shales, be they black or green/grey, hoping to find interesting trace fossil and biomarker trends around the Frasnian and Famennian boundary, through the Upper Kellwasser black shale, all the way to the time at which the Dunkirk Formation was deposited. We recently have also been looking at the Middlesex and Rhinestreet black shales and were treated to a guided tour of some localities of these horizons by the great Dr Jeff Over of SUNY Geneseo. He has been aiding us in accessing these localities, as well as those in Java and in Sheldon, so a great amount of appreciation is owed to him.
Dr Diana Boyer also aided us in Java, by guiding us around the locality on our first traverse up there on the 8th after we (Emily, Diana, Jeff, Charles Spath, John Lohan and myself) all shared a drizzly tour of the Ithaca area by the Museum of the Earth and its participating paleontologists. After Diana's tour, Emily and I worked in the area and were treated to some lovely WNY weather, which included some strong downpours and a tree falling 20ft from our collection area, which was made up for by the collection of some very neat burrows and some brachiopod fossils.
At many of our localities, Miss Emily and I have been fortunate in finding some very neat pyritized burrows and some pyritized banding (found today at our Middlesex locality, super excited), as well as some fossils of sorts and other hip treasures.
this is the New Oregon locality, which is along Eighteenmile Creek on New Oregon Rd. This is after we removed fissile rocks but before collection

Week Three and Four

Hey Y'all,
So it is currently approaching the end of the fourth week and I'll be heading home soon for a couple days so figure I'll keep you all updated.

Week Three
This was the week I first went to SUNY-ESF in Syracuse to use their SEM, very exciting! I went Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, all for about four hours each day. This particular model was the Joel 5800 SEM which works particularly good for the SEM imaging mode, but most definitely not the BSE compo mode, the contrast and brightness knobs were especially frustrating, I'd like to thank Rob Smith, the SEM technician for helping me out with those difficult moments. I have gotten around twenty pics for each sample (there are seven samples) and had about 5 framboids in each BSE image...so I have my work cut out for me counting and measuring in excess of 700 framboids! That weekend John, Dr. Boyer, Emily, "California" Emily, and I went to the annual Museum of the Earth Symposium in Ithaca and spent the day with Dr. Carl Brett, a prominent paleontologist, touring the finger lakes area looking at Devonian age outcrops. It was a blast and a great learning experience, my thanks to Carl Brett. Finishing that weekend off, John and I went back to Witaker Falls State park to collect samples for his research. We stayed overnight at the campsite there and collected some more sample upstream of the falls the next day.

Week Four
Monday John and I were finishing up collecting samples at Witaker Falls. Tuesday I was able to get started on the analysing of the Framboid images using the Jimage program I downloaded through the NIH website. I've all ready went through three samples and have made histograms of them! And I plan on finishing up the rest of the samples today! Oh also on Tuesday John, Dr. Boyer, and I went to present for the Math club in Mahar, the presentations went well and I hope they learned something. All right I'm off to go look at those framboids...here's some for you...

Fossil communities of the Trenton formation

 Hello all,

My name is John Lohan, I'm an incoming Junior at SUNY Oswego studying geochemistry.  Currently I am working with Dr. Diana Boyer on the different fossil communities seen throughout the Trenton formation.  The Trenton formation represents a 4-5 million year range during the late Ordovician when New York state was covered by a epeiric sea.  The Trenton formation is broken up into into six member which, starting from the oldest, are the Selby, Napanee, Kings Falls, Sugar River, Deny, which is broken up into the sub-members Poland and Russia, Rust, and the Stueben.  Each of these members are exposed via multiple outcrops all throughout Trenton area in upstate New York, of which almost all are sections exposed by rivers such as the Deer and Black river.

Most of what I have been doing up until this point has been finding and evaluating various exposures of the Trenton formation in order to create a final list of localities to work on.  CJ and I would take a day and go through a list of 4-6 different potential sites.  Our directions were based on road logs from various field trip guides.  They were good directions but CJ and I defiantly got lost on more than one occasion and one or two localities seemed to have eluded us.  At the better localities we visited CJ and I collect 1-2 one gallon bags worth of samples, to be looked at and assessed back in Oswego.  The most common fossils seen were brachiopods and cephalopods, as well as crinoids and some rugose corals.  From the initial sites we visited a list of about 5 final localities has been made from which CJ and I shall sample heavily this upcoming weekend.  More about how that will go, and more, soon.

These are some photos taken at several different localities that CJ and I visited in search of fossils.  The lower two pictures are from the lower section of the roaring brooks, the left photo shows a rather large cephalopod orthocone in which you can see several of the cone's inner body chambers, and the right showcases CJ standing under one of the many different deformation structures observed at the site.

Second Week of Research--Samples Completed

Hi everybody!
Well its been a slow start to the blog as this is the first of my entry and it is almost into my third week of research. But as the old adage goes, better late than never.

Week One

So the first week the daily meeting with Dr. Boyer and John helped me get onto the metaphorical boat with research. I'll try to sum it up as briefly as possible.

Throughout the geological history of the earth—some 4.57 billion years—there has be five major extinction events, one of these such events is the Late Devonian extinction. This event took place in the geological period of the Devonian (416-359 Ma) around 374 million years ago at a boundary that marks the beginning of the last stage of the Devonian, the Frasian-Famennian boundary. It has been said by many this is perhaps the least understood of the extinction, and indeed it is shrouded in a veil of mystery, with ranges for this extinction taking between 500,000 to 25,000,000 years or whether this event was one or several distinct catastrophic pulses. Along the same lines the processes that caused this event are equally unknown. The most prevalent among these theories is a global oceanic anoxia event, simply meaning that the ocean’s water column had little too no oxygen. This is the theory that I wish to test in my research project. Previously collected black shales, typical indicators of anoxic or even euxinic events, were the center of my project. Within all black shales is authigenic pyrite or “fool’s gold” ranging in mineral habit from euhedral crystals to rounded “lumps” of pyrite. The one variety of pyrite I am using is characterized as type-1 pyrite framboids, as described in Wignall and Newton (1998). Type 1 framboids are raspberry-like, densely-packed, spherical aggregates of equigranular, microcrystals of pyrite (see images blah blah). Although framboidal pyrite can form in a number of conditions the most common environment is in organic rich sediment butting an anoxic water column. The main aspect of my research is to determine if framboid diameter, and to a lesser extent, size distribution and pyrite type can be a useful tool in the determination of anoxia in these past environments—mainly the Devonian. A range of samples were acquired from the black shales, and the particular layers I was using had the ichnofabric index determined along with geochemical data, both are other proxies for anoxia. My samples where taken from a variety of indexes, from non-bioturbated to bioturbated (1 being nonturbated and 5, you guessed it, turbated). These are to be compared with the framboid diameter to see if there is any correlation between the ichnofabric index, and in turn the relative state of anoxia in the water.

As you can see a lot to take in after being on summer vacation for two and a half months! But in conclusion the first week was full of discussions, deciding what black shales to run the SEM on, and just getting all around organized. Oh also I went out in the field with John to aid in his own research.

Week Two

The second week was all prep. work. After all 14 samples were decided on, most had geochemical data to go along with it (and ichnofabric index data also) that was researched by an alumni of SUNY Oswego, Ellen Wilcox, who is off to graduate school now.

All of the shale samples were previously collected by Dr. Boyer and her colleagues in 2010. Most were wrapped in duct tape to thwart the fissile nature of shale in order to preserve the meticulous stratigraphic measurements taken upon the sampling. So as I said before the samples were decided based on the presence of geochemical data and variety (i.e. ichnofabric index). With each duct-taped-wrapped sample there are individual layers that had been geochemically analyzed. I then had to hammer, chisel, and cut pieces of the said layer out, being very careful to maintain the layer and orientation I needed. I would take a decent sized chunk out approx. 3x3 cm which would then have to polished with first a 400 grit sand and then 800 grit sand on a LAP machine, essentially a potters wheel. That is when I cut these chunks of often irregularly shaped layers into 1x1 cm squares using the small rock saw in our Geology Student Research Lab (see the pictures).

So that is where I'm at right now. On Monday, if I'm not mistaken I will travel down to to the SUNY ESF scanning electron microscope (SEM) facility in Syracuse, maybe with John, to get a rundown of the SEM. And over the next week will be taking shots of the polished black shales looking for the infamous little pyrite framboids so that I may measure them at a latter date. But more information about that to come!

Here's some pictures. Going from the top and from left to right: The rock saw I used; the LAP I used to polish the samples; an incomplete organizer box with semi-prepared samples; a typical shale sample I need to prepare, WC-the location, 7-15 (cm)-the stratigraphic range of the same from some base point, and the circle with a dot meaning the "up" direction; and another view of the previous sample, not the layers of shale within the sample.