My research project was examining samples of garnets and zircons from the Skagit gneiss, a formation that Donna Whitney has spent years studying. Annia and I were looking for inclusions of high-pressure phases in the grains, or other evidence from the grain samples that the rocks they were in had undergone ultra high pressure metamorphism. We used the electron microprobe to identify the elements of the inclusions exposed by grinding and polishing in combination with Raman spectroscopy to collect spectra and match them to the minerals.
The most interesting results so far is the abundance of rutile inclusions in the garnets and zircons, and the fact that zircon samples taken from the same location show two distinct groups in terms of inclusions. The rutile was identified first by electron backscattering, and the Raman spectrum does not match exactly with the one we found online, for reasons still unknown. Furthermore, the spectra of different rutile inclusions are fairly consistent, meaning that whatever is causing the irregularities is present in all of the sampled inclusions. The two main zircon samples presumably came from the same outcrop; however, when viewed in the microprobe, the zircons from one sample had inclusions, while the zircons from the other sample did not.