Joshua Davies

The work of my group typically follows this workflow, where samples are characterised petrologically and geochemically, after that the minerals of interest are extracted using a wilfley table, heavy liquids and a franz isodynamic separator.  Minerals are then hand picked under a binocular microscope.  For analysis there are two different streams, high precision or high spatial resolution, for high precision work, zircons undergo chemical abrasion before dissolution, elemental separation and TIMS analysis, whereas baddeleyites, monazites, titanites and apatites are just dissolved before elemental separation and TIMS analysis.  For high spatial resolution, and high throughput work, grains are mounted in epoxy and sampled by a laser for measuring in an ICP mass spectrometer.  We can measure U-Pb ages, trace elements and Hf isotopes in the grains.

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We are interested in developing and improving all stages of the analysis, and also data interpretation.  Efforts so far have concentrated on developing tools to interpret complex detrital zircon U-Pb or complex isochron datasets.