Barringer award to Anna Barbaro
The Barringer Family Fund for Meteorite Impact Research has been established as a memorial to recognize the contributions of Brandon, Moreau, Paul, and Richard Barringer to the field of meteoritics and the Barringer family’s strong interest and support over many years in research and student education.
Each year, the Barringer Family Fund awards a small number of competitive grants to support MA, PhD, and postdoctoral students as they carry out field research at known and suspected impact sites around the world. The Barringer Crater Company and its scientific advisors endorse efforts to make the field of Meteoritics and Planetary Science more welcoming to a diverse array of talented scientists. The Barringer Crater Company has a strong interest in encouraging and supporting scientific exploration and research within the field of meteoritics for women as well as men, and expects all associated scientists to treat their colleagues and students with mutual respect.
This year among the recipient our fellow PhD student Anna Barbaro from the Fiorenzo Mazzi Laboratory of experimental mineralogy, Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e dell’Ambiente has been awarded a research grant to carry out a project to characterize carbon phases of five ureilite samples from Frontier mountain (Antartica) with increasing shock degree.
The project is titled “Investigation of CaRbon phases in Ureilitic meteorites with increasing SHock dEgRee, comparison between ureilitic and terrestrial diamond” (CRUSHER) and aims to characterize the carbon phases from Frontier Mountain ureilites, Antarctica, with increasing shock degree (from unshocked to S5-6) using a multimethodological mineralogical-crystallographic approach that Anna has been developing in the framework of her PhD project . She will compare her results with those obtained for terrestrial impact cratering carbon phases.
The investigation of carbon minerals in ureilites will contribute to constrain the petrogenesis of such meteorites, while the comparison between diamonds from ureilites with different shock degree and those by a terrestrial impact crater will help to understand the impact processing involving their ureilitic parent body.