September meeting

How Did the Earth Get its Oceans?

This is a joint meeting with the Rhode Island Section of the American Chemical Society.

7:00 pm Light Refreshments 

7:30 pm Featured Speaker: Adam Sarafian, PhD candidate at the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Joint Program in Marine Geology and Geophysics. He is a NASA Jenkins Graduate Fellow. He received his BS and MS in geology from the University of Georgia. 

How Did the Earth Get its Oceans? 

This is a very old question. Two theories exist. Either our water came from inside the Earth, stored during its early formation or the water came from comets or other wet bodies hitting the Earth much later in its history. 

Oddly enough, the answers lay in solid rocks and not our liquid water. The team at the Institute have obtained and extracted evidence from rare samples of ancient meteorites that have fallen to Earth. 

Adam and his colleagues have analyzed the isotopic ratios of hydrogen in these rocks, as this ratio varies in different parts of the solar system. We will find out how this difficult analysis was conducted and what answers it has uncovered. 

9:00pm Observing the skies through the 138-year-old Alvan Clark Refractor at Seagrave Observatory. Mars, and the nearly Full Moon will be visible (weather permitting)