As a bachelor geology student I have brought mineral fractions of rocks from sedimentary basins of different ages (Kragujevac area) with the aim of learning the preparation methods for thermochronology analysis, and include the knowledge and the results into my BSc thesis. As a guest researcher, I was walked through the whole process of preparing the samples and choosing apatite crystals for said analysis. I was shown the preparation methods with example samples and then I applied the same methods with our own samples.
Since the samples have already gone through crushing, cleaning and electromagnetic separation in Serbia, the steps that have been done in Salzburg were sieving, heavy liquid separation and apatite picking.
The CEEPUS mobility program has enabled me to better understand the process of sample preparation and the thermochronology method itself. We hope that data collected from these methods in the future would be used for reconstructing the geological history of sampled regions, understanding the rates and timing of geological processes, and making deductions about tectonics, erosion, and thermal evolution with the aim of defining a more precise hypothesis for our project and my bachelor thesis.
Filip Rajković
