The newest member of the Melbourne Thermochronology Research Group
It's with great pleasure that we welcome Matthew Winefield to our research group, as he pursues his MSc in Geology at the University of Melbourne.
Matthew's MSc research project will focus on Australia's greatest rift valley, the Otway Basin, which formed during the breakup of ancient Gondwana and separation of Australia and Antarctica. There, Matt will use deep borehole samples from the Early Cretaceous sandstones of the Eumeralla Formation to perform the first geological tests of laboratory-based fission track annealing models for apatite mineral grains of significantly different compositions. Employing a range of advanced analytical geochemical techniques, including electron probe microanalysis, laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass spectrometry, automatic fission track imaging and analysis, and artificial intelligence machine learning, the project aims to test how mineral composition effects the thermal sensitivity of the apatite fission track system. In addition to bettering our understanding of this widely used analytical technique, the fission track results will provide new insights into the thermo-tectonic evolution of the Otway Basin.
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