REE Software Workshop

Monday, 22nd February, 9.30–11.30 am (GMT), hosted on zoom.

This workshop was organized by Eimear Deady, Chair of the Applied Mineralogy Group.

There was no charge to attend and 270 delegates attended from 27 countries.

Marc-Alban Millet of Cardiff University opened proceedings by giving a quick refresher on REE geochemistry.

Michael Anenburg of ANU Canberra (Australia) discussed a new method and interactive online app to quantitatively describe rare earth elements patterns using lambda coefficients. He discussed the tetrad effect, and showed some applications of the method. Michael is currently working on various magmatic-hydrothermal processes that lead to the formation of ore deposits of rare metals, including the REE (La-Lu), Y, PGE (platinum group elements), etc. He is particularly interested in the behaviour of these metals in carbonatites and related systems.

Also presenting was Morgan Williams of CSIRO Mineral Resources (Perth, Australia) who has developed python packages that work with big geochemical data sets. He discussed this data-driven approach and provided some examples of how to use pyrolite to interpret data.

Video recordings now available

Marc-Alban Millet: What are rare earth elements and why do geochemists use them?

Michael Anenburg: Quantitative description of REE patterns

Links

  • ALambdaR – Lambda shape coefficients to REE pattern
  • BLambdaR – REE patterns to shape coefficients

Morgan Williams: pyrolite: Python for geochemistry

Link:

Q&A session

Note that the speakers offered to respond to enquiries about their respective softwares and that it is all freely available for anyone to use.

The Society is grateful to all of our speakers.