Skip Palenik Invited to Speak at Heavy Mineral Analysis School in Milan

This week, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy is hosting a School of Heavy Mineral Analysis. From February 20th to 23rd, students and other scientists around the world have come to Milan to learn about “heavy mineral identification and provenance studies of sediments and sedimentary rocks.” Microtrace founder and senior research microscopist Skip Palenik is an invited speaker at the school. Using real case histories, Skip will discuss useful and effective analytical techniques from classical optical methods to cutting-edge Raman microspectroscopy.

This School represents the second gathering of scientists in Milan for the study of heavy minerals. Skip was also an invited speaker at the first School of Heavy Mineral Analysis in 2013.

For more information about the School of Heavy Mineral Analysis, click here.

2nd School of Heavy Mineral Analysis

The purpose of this school is to introduce young people (audience: PhD, post-Doc students, industry researchers) worldwide interested in heavy mineral identification and provenance studies of sediments and sedimentary rocks carried out with classical optical methods. Students will be showed how long standing problems concerning the appropriate identification of detrital minerals can be solved.  After detailed analysis of most groups of heavy minerals, we will illustrate a wide range of examples from real case histories from different geological settings in different areas of the world.

The course aims at improving student’s capability to extract information from detrital sediments and to collect accurate quantitative mineralogical data.

We will also explain how to tackle problems related to hydraulic sorting, chemical weathering in hot humid climate, and diagenesis.

Finally, we will illustrate how Raman spectroscopy allows us to correctly identify any mineral in grain mounts or in thin sections. By using this innovative technique we can also assess chemical variability within each heavy-mineral group and compare their diagnostic chemical signatures with different source rocks.

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