June 8, 2017
This blog post by co-founder and co-editor Emily Cooperdock will likely be her last, as she has just graduated (jealous!). Her husband, Sol Cooperdock, is also a Science Y'all co-editor and frequent contributor who has also just graduated. Bye Emily and Sol, good luck on the East Coast!
A confluence of ~ 70 geologists, anthropologists, biologists and material scientists descended upon Austin June 6-8th for the first ever ToScA (Tomography for Scientific Advancement) meeting in North America. This is a group who really likes to 3D print and make fancy rotating, reconstructed 3D videos for their powerpoint presentations. After two days looking at X-ray scans of Lucy’s broken bones, parasites within lizards, carbonado diamonds, and ancient seed pods, I discovered that I am in a community that stretches far beyond my Lithosphere and Deep Earth/hard rock community here at the Jackson School. Why are we all here? Because UT is home to a very special lab in the basement of JGB – the UT High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography Laboratory (UTCT), an NSF multi-user facility that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
If you’re not familiar with CT – it’s the cousin of the medical CT scanners that are used to detect tumors and broken bones in patients at hospitals. The CT scanners you find in university science departments are adapted with a higher energy X-Ray source to produce high resolution, 3D, nondestructive images that can penetrate rocks, fossils, and soft tissue biological samples.
CT’s ability to produce nondestructive, high resolution 3D data has very clear benefits for studying rare and valuable samples (e.g., fossils and meteorites). In addition, it has many uses for scientists that need a fast view within a sample or 3D measurements. That’s why I’m here. Without CT my PhD work would not have been possible. For my research, I analyzed the age of mineral grains, but I needed to ensure that my grains were pure – meaning they were free of inclusions, fractures or intergrown foreign material inside. The issue is that the minerals I study are opaque, which means that you can’t see through it with plain light to check for internal homogeneity. Enter my 3D X-ray goggles – CT scanning – which imparts the super human power of being able to see through the grains that I study and easily pick out the unsatisfactory ones.
My work with CT is an example of a simple application of this high-level technology. A piece of low-hanging fruit that improves the scientific technique that I use. There are certainly more low-hanging fruit out there that can improve the scientific workflow for folks in the geoscience community who are studying rocks and minerals with traditional 2D methods. As CT scanners become more common in institutions, I look forward to seeing this community grow in time for the next North American ToScA conference.
Header image: CT scan of a Komodo dragon skull, by UTCT Facility Manager Jessie Maisano.
