Internship letter from Beijing - Emil
I am writing this from Beijing as I am currently a bit more than halfway through a one-month internship together with Anton Filippov in China where we’re collaborating with the China University of Petroleum-Beijing and the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS). I am here for a project aimed at finding the date of kimberlites from Kalix in Sweden using U-Pb dating of perovskite grains that we brought to Beijing.
First, it should be mentioned that a few unfortunate obstacles have been encountered during this project. The main obstacle has been the Chang’e 6 lunar mission that took place earlier this year. This is because the nearly 2kg of moon rock they obtained during the mission is being analyzed right here at IGGCAS, and the laboratory was therefore not accessible to foreigners. For this reason, the mounting of the perovskite grains had to be done at a different facility. When we brought the perovskite samples to this facility it was quickly discovered that the samples weren’t properly sorted and contained much more than just perovskite. Due to this, the samples had to be sent to a company to be resorted before mounting could take place. The remaining perovskite grains were not that many and a few samples became useless due to not having enough perovskite grains. Later, while checking the mount with SEM it was found that some samples did not have perovskite grains at all. After all of this, the result was a grain mount with only 2 useful samples instead of the 8 that were originally brought from Tromsø. Luckily these two samples seem to be enough to complete the project. Currently the Chang’e 6 samples are still being analyzed with the SIMS machine that we are supposed to use for the U-Pb dating, and we are waiting to see if it will become available before the internship ends.
Now, even with all the obstacles the internship has been very rewarding. My first experience with the project is learning that grain mounting is not a job for someone with shaky hands… e.g. myself, when the grains being mounted are just a few tens of micrometers.
Due to some extra time on our hands while waiting for the samples being sorted, we were assigned the task of data collection which is basically where you scour the literature for relevant data and put it into an excel spreadsheet. For this work, the experience in reading and finding relevant scientific geological papers, gained in large part from writing my bachelor’s thesis last year, has been invaluable. Also, my skills with Excel have in the past been terrible, and after working with the data collection here I now feel as though I am finally gaining some confidence in using Excel. There is no doubt in my mind that this experience will come in handy countless times in the future.
As a fourth-year student of geosciences at UiT who has only studied within a department with no more than ~150 students, I can with certainty say that Beijing is… very different. First, the city is gigantic and so is the university with 25 000+ students compared to UiT’s ~16 000 students, and the university is, as the name suggests, mostly focused on petroleum unlike UiT which is spread across very many disciplines. The work-ethic people have in China puts the Norwegian work ethic to shame as well, and it inspires me to work much harder. Everyone I have met so far has been extremely welcoming. The first day in Beijing we were greeted to a large meal of the famous Beijing cuisine “Peking Duck” by four of the students here. They also helped us get new SIM-cards for our phones which would have been extremely difficult without their help due to the language barrier. The day after one of the students spent many hours with us showing us around the institute and the surrounding areas. The list of helpful things people have done for us here goes on and on and it is hard to express just how much I appreciate it.
In Beijing there are tons of tourist attractions. So far, I have been to the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Olympic park, a Ming Dynasty grave site, and the oddly shaped CCTV headquarters building. Hopefully I can manage to visit Tiananmen Square and the Temple of Heaven before the internship ends. For many of these places the students here helped us out with buying tickets, and to the Great Wall one of the students even came with us which added to what would have been an already great day. After the grain mounting the mounts need to dry for three days. During this time, I took the high-speed train to Shanghai and spent a couple of nights there. Seeing the 632 m tall Shanghai tower was unbelievable for me who had yet to see a building taller than 200 m.
At the end of last week, the China University of Petroleum-Beijing hosted a cultural exchange meeting where we got the opportunity to present Norway, Tromsø and UiT and talk about our customs and day to day life. We also got to see two of the students there give their own presentations to us. One student presented the Mid-autumn festival which at the time of writing is ongoing, and the other student presented the important place teachers hold in the Chinese society and culture. Made me realize that maybe we should respect our teachers a little (or a lot) more in Norway as well. At the end of the cultural exchange meeting the students had us try Chinese calligraphy. Anton did very well according to all the students. Me however, not so well… But oh well, fun experience either way. They also gifted us a quite expensive looking box of mooncakes (a type of cake eaten during the Mid-autumn festival). Chinese people really strike me as extremely welcoming, and I have never experienced anything quite like it.
During my remaining time here, I will cross my fingers that the opportunity will open up to do trace and major element analysis of our samples before the internship ends. Either way, I will not have a problem with enjoying my time here as all the great people here make that very easy!
Best regards
-Emil Ladefoged