Category: geology

Categories
geology pictures

Geology photos for you…

It’s been a long, long weekend. I am only slightly sunburned, but my brain has melted. Have some photos:

Core photos:
Orchard Core
Almond Core

These are the two cores that were the final project for the facies analysis class I took last semester. Lots of pretty sands and muds.

Snowmastadons – these are pictures I took of some of the fossils recovered in Snowmass. I had the privilege of seeing them while I was at the Bighorn Basin Coring Project meeting at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The pictures really don’t do these amazing remains justice. For more information, please see the Snowmastodon Project at DMNS. There are a lot of absolutely amazing pictures of the dig site and more fossils there.

The Amazing Kung Fu Adventure in Moab – the Shaolin Hung Mei Kung Fu School went to Moab this Memorial Day weekend to perform at the Moab Arts Festival. While we were there, we spent a few hours at Arches, and I got some beautiful pictures. I love Moab so much.

Categories
geology petm

Magnetic Bacteria Fiesta on the Proto-Potomac

I met with my advisor last week, and she asked me to do some background research for her on a couple of papers she’s working on. So I spent the last week-ish doing a lot of searching across the internets for papers, and then reading of papers. Considering how I feel about reading most papers, this was no small task. My schedule pretty much ran like this:

Wake up
Read papers until brain melts
Lunch break
Read more papers until hysterical giggling starts
Afternoon walk
Read papers because we live in a godless universe of pain
Mike gets home, incoherent gibbering commences

But I got this round done, and my advisor is pleased with my results so WOOOOOO GO ME. And here’s a tip for my fellow newb grad students – get yourself a copy of the John Williams Superman theme song. Play it while you’re writing, and then it feels like not only are you doing science, you’re SAVING THE GODDAMN WORLD OH YEAH.

So anyway, I wanted to share with you all my favorite paper I read over this last week:
An Appalachian Amazon? Magnetofossil evidence for the development of a tropical river-like system in the mid-Atlantic United States during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (Kopp et al 2009)

I don’t think you’ll be able to read the entire paper without an AGU membership (or without using a university library computer), but if you can give it a read. It’s a fun, fun, fun, and cool paper. The summary goes like this:

1) At the PETM in the Salisbury Embayment (which runs from northern Virginia to southern New Jersey on the Atlantic sheld) there’s a clay layer called the Marlboro, which is “…the thickest single-domain magnetite-dominated sedimentary unit yet reported in the literature.”

2) The magnetite is all from magnetofossils produced by bacteria and other organisms that need crystals of magnetite for their own nefarious purposes.

3) The conditions necessary for that kind of bacterial block party are pretty specific, since it’s got to be conducive to the little critters being able to live and make their magnetite.

4) Hey, in modern day, the best example of these conditions are tropical river shelves, like the Amazon shelf. So what if the Potomac during the PETM was like that?

Of course, there’s a lot of really fascinating detail from the paper that I’m leaving out. But even just the concepts are awesome and interesting.

Categories
geology geomorph

Slow Motion Landslide

This is just awesome:

The flow looks like it’s really cooking along… until people make an appearance in the video and you see just how much it’s been sped up. The flow is actually moving at around 50 cm per hour, which to us fast-living humans makes it practically solid ground.

More info over at the AGU Landslide Blog.

And I totally agree with the first commenter over at the post. This thing needs some Benny Hill music, starting right when the first person pops into the frame. WIN.

Categories
geology writing

Spec Tech Article Online

When I first joined the SFWA, I admitted on their forums that I’m a geology sort of person. This eventually led me to being contacted by the wonderful lady that runs the Clarion Foundation Blog and offered the chance to write the occasional bit about geology. My first piece is now up over there:

The Making of Mountains

It’s a basic overview of the tectonic processes that are involved in creating most mountain ranges – and what those mountain ranges generally look like on maps. Which I hope will be helpful for people who are worldbuilding.

Not that I’m implying anyone making a map for a fantasy world is at all interested in realism, or ought to be. If your mountains are that way because the god that created the world wanted them there, good for you.

But I’ll admit, there’s been a time or two where I’ve looked at a map for a fantasy world and giggled – I’m looking at you, Mr. Tolkien. Which is silly, I know, since this is fantasy. But what can you do, I guess we each have a little item or two that just destroys the suspension of disbelief. It’s the same reason I can’t look at maps from WoW without snickering – I could practically write a book about how silly they are.

Categories
geology oil and gas

Hydrocarbon Formation at Depth

I think this got mentioned on this week’s Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe in the science or fiction. I thought it might be the fiction, but wasn’t all that surprised when it turned out to be science:

Hydrocarbons in the deep earth (press release…?)
Stability of hydrocarbons at deep Earth pressures and temperatures (PNAS article)

And this of course ties back in to my previous linking and random ruminations about abiotic oil.

Mostly, I think this article is interesting, but not something explosive in terms of what we know about the formation of petroleum. I actually found this PNAS article via a post with the faceplam-worthy title “Oil and Gas Forever?“1 on the website of The Global Warming Policy Foundation – which is apparently supposed to be “devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change.” I do think that if you just check the front page of the site (The GWPF’s, not the Daily Mail’s), the axe they’re grinding is evident. Though maybe it is with the Daily Mail’s too, I wouldn’t know.

But I digress.

Despite the murky chain of links I followed to find the little PNAS article, I think it’s interesting. And will probably be horribly misused by excited people who think “Oil and Gas Forever” sounds like a lovely concept in general. The article itself is about computer simulations run to see if methane could form in to longer hydrocarbon chains at deep pressures and temperatures, and according to the simulations, the answer is yes. Which can be considered a point in the camp of abiogenic oil, but I would add the following cautions:

1) Whether long hydrocarbons can form abiogenically or not, that doesn’t in any way mean that all hydrocarbons – or even the majority – form in that way. Please see the bit about kerogens in my previous post.

2) This doesn’t really address any of the other questions important to developing hydrocarbons, such as: What’s the migration path, and how long does it take to get there? (And many more…)

3) It’s also not necessarily a realistic simulation. Quoting the first article:

“Our simulation study shows that methane molecules fuse to form larger hydrocarbon molecules when exposed to the very high temperatures and pressures of the Earth’s upper mantle,” Galli said. “We don’t say that higher hydrocarbons actually occur under the realistic ‘dirty’ Earth mantle conditions, but we say that the pressures and temperatures alone are right for it to happen.“

Emphasis mine. So, like much science that gets slapped with melodramatic headlines, this is more of a, “Huh, that’s interesting,” than anything else.

1 – Actually, it’s not what you’d imagine out of an article with that title… it’s just the LLNL press release, and a C&P from a blog post that also pretty much emphasizes that there’s not really evidence for this being a major source of hydrocarbons, but that this is just sort of interesting.

Categories
climate change geology skepticism

Climate Change and Plate Tectonics

My awesome mom found the following article on Alternet and sent it to me, with the question “Plausible or wingnutty?” : Scientists Find Link Between Global Warming and Earthquakes

At this point, I know better than to accept at face value what an article claims that a scientific paper says, so I set out to find the paper – particularly since for once I have a chance of understanding at least some of the paper since it’s about geology! I had to comb through the RawStory article that the Alternet article links to in order to actually find the paper in question. Which is:

Giampiero Iaffaldano, Laurent Husson, Hans-Peter Bunge, Monsoon speeds up Indian plate motion, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 304, Issues 3-4, 15 April 2011, Pages 503-510, ISSN 0012-821X, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.02.026.

The article is available on ScienceDirect, though you may not be able to read the whole thing for yourself if you don’t have a subscription to the service. You should be able to at least read the abstract, which should give you the gist of it.

So what does Alternet take out of this paper? “Climate change can affect plate tectonics, oh shit, that’s why we’ve got all the huge earthquakes OH MY GOD.”

I will point out that there’s one VERY salient quote from Giampiero Iaffaldano (the lead scientist) that’s in the RawStory article that Alternet leaves completely out:

Iaffaldano stressed that his study did not mean that global warming would translate to stronger earthquakes happening more often, with the relevant patterns developing over “the order of millions of years.”

“Of course earthquakes do occur at the boundaries between plates because of plate motions, but our work doesn’t imply at all that we will see an increase in these types of events,” he told AFP.

Emphasis added by me. This little omission really leaves me wondering about the motivations of the Alternet author.

As for the paper itself, what does it actually say, and is it interesting? The paper does make a reasonable case for linking climate change with an effect on plate motion and speed. However, the important part that also gets left out of the Alternet article is that this link is explored on a million year scale. It’s an examination of how the change in climate over the last 10 million years or so – the climate change in question being a strengthened Indian monsoon – has affected the erosion of the Himalayas, which ultimately lead to decreased resistance in the convergence between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

Now, personally, I find this fascinating, since it links relatively “fast” surface processes (eg weathering and erosion) to much slower tectonic processes. I think that opens up a lot of very interesting research questions – Iaffaldano points out that he’s curious to see if there’s a climate signature to be found in other fairly recently uplifted areas.

But I think for general interest, it’s VERY important to note that when we’re talking a scale of millions of years – which is what plate tectonics operates on – the current climate change we are inflicting on the planet is NOTHING in terms of duration. It’s not even a blip. Now, if we keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere and manage to really fuck things up in the long, long, long, long term, maybe in ten million years future humans or aliens will be using simulations to wind the tectonic clock back and say, “DAMN, look at those plates move!” But this will have no measurable effect on our short little human lives.

It really bothers me that an interesting study is being misrepresented in this way. While I appreciate wanting to add some urgency to the issue of climate change – trust me, I do, BIG TIME – this is not the way to do it. It smells like a scare tactic, and it plays into the hands of the climate change deniers.

Categories
bbcp climate change geology grad school

The Bighorn Basin Coring Project

From mid-July to the beginning of August, I’m going to be outdoors, in Wyoming. No, I’m not crazy. Yes, I have a good reason for doing this. Because in the summer, that’s when we’ll be coring through the Willwood Formation in the Bighorn Basin. And this is a big deal.

The Willwood Formation is about Eocene in age, and sits on top of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation. The Willwood Formation is mostly a lot of paleosols (lithified soils) and river sandstones. And more importantly, the sediments that form these rocks were laid down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and then the later, smaller thermal maximums during the Eocene. As a quick summary, taken from a thesis proposal I’ve been using in order to beg for money1:

The sedimentary geologic record can be used as a window into the past conditions of the Earth, including the climate in which sediments were laid down. In the Cenozoic, there are many examples of shifts in global climate. Potentially significant to the modern climate in which humans live are the hyperthermal events that occurred during the Eocene. Hyperthermals are relatively brief (~100,000 years) warming events that coincide with the release of massive amounts of carbon from terrestrial reservoirs. The most well understood of these hyperthermals is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 55.5 million years ago. During the PETM, 6,800 Gt of carbon were added to the shared carbon pool of the atmosphere and ocean, and global temperatures rose 5-9° C (Sluijs et al. 2006, Zachos et al. 2008). Slightly more recently (53.7 Ma), the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2, also called ELMO) occurred. ETM2 is about half the size of the PETM isotope excursion (Lourens et al. 2005), and generally much less well understood.

This project is a big deal, for several reasons. Just to start, coring is not a cheap process, and this project is funded by a pretty major grant from the NSF. But what’s more important is what we hope to learn from the cores. The PETM is of great interest to climate scientists and geologists right now, because it’s perhaps our best historic example of what humans are currently doing to the planet. There weren’t a bunch of little proto-horses in the Eocene burning oil so they could roar around in ridiculous cars, but it was a sudden, rapid surge of carbon being put in to the atmosphere, even if the source is being debated.

This is important because, no matter how many people2 in the world are short-sighted and basically sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “Lalala can’t hear you” every time someone brings up this science, that doesn’t make it any less real and pressing.

The paleosols, which are what I’m mostly interested in, can tell us a lot about how the local climate shifted in response to the PETM. This is important, since most human beings have a vested interest in their local environment not suddenly changing and, say, making it impossible for them to grow food. Also, one of the cores will be through the ELMO thermal maximum, which I think will end up providing a valuable set of comparative data. There’s already some pretty robust data for the PETM in the Bighorn Basin, and the cores will give us even more. If we then compare that data to what we come up with from ELMO, that may give us a sense of just how far a local environment will shift pushed by how much carbon – because it may not need an input as big as that in the PETM to really mess things up.

Hopefully, that’s enough to get you interested! The BBCP has a facebook page now, here. When we’re actually coring during the summer, there will be a blog for the project hosted by Smithsonian, which I’ll link to when it’s up. I’ll also no doubt be blogging about it here, and I think I’m going to be responsible for tweeting about it as well.

The coring is going to run from July 13 through August 8. I’ll probably be on the rig from July 19 through the end of the project, since I’m going to try to go to TAM before I head up to Wyoming. I’ll also be on the night shift the whole time – coring is a 24/7 process – so I guess I’ll be documenting BBCP – After Dark3.

Once we’ve got our cores, we’ll actually be sending them out of the country (since this is a project with multinational investigators!) to Bremen, Germany. They’ll be living at the Marum core repository, which is also where all of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program cores go. That means in January 2012 (if I can find the funding for it!) I’ll be heading off to Bremen for three weeks of intensive core prep, description, and sampling.

And then, science! Lots of science!

Year two of grad school is looking ridiculously exciting.

1 – It’s a time-honored scientific endeavor. I wish I was joking when I say that.

2 – Here, I use the term people in place of the perhaps more true but less polite term: idiots.

3 – I actually volunteered for this. If you knew how badly I sunburn, you would understand why. I also don’t like the heat, and it’ll be much cooler at night.

References
Lourens, L. J., Sluijs, A., Kroon, D., Zachos, J. C., Thomas, E., Rohl, U., Bowles, J., and Raffi, I. 2005. Astronomical pacing of late Palaeocene to early Eocene global warming events. Nature, vol. 435, p. 1083-1087.

Sluijs, A., Schouten, S., Pagani, M., Woltering, M., Brinkhuis, H., Sinninghe Damsté, J. S., Dickens, G. R., Huber, M., Reichart, G.-J., Stein, R., Matthiessen, J., Lourens, L. J., Pedentchouk, N., Backman, J., Moran, K., and and the Expedition 302 Scientists. 2006. Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum. Nature, vol. 441, p. 610-613.

Zachos, J. C., Dickens, G. R., and Zeebe, R. E. 2008. An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics. Nature, vol. 451, p. 279-283.

Categories
earthquake geology japan

The Sendai Earthquake

I haven’t had anything to say about the Sendai earthquake; it has quite literally left me speechless with horror, and pain, and agonizing worry. I know and care about people who live there. I’ve been to Japan twice, myself, and hope to travel there many more times in the future. There is something more personally horrible about knowing a place – if even a little – remembering its sights and sounds and smells, and knowing that something terrible has happened there.

I can’t really focus enough to think about the science behind what has happened. If you’re interested in the details, the USGS is the place to go. Or Chris Rowan has an excellent synthesis of the data at Scientific American.

Garry at Geotripper has tried to put things in a perspective of why the geosciences really are important to each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not. It’s an excellent post. You should read it. The one thing that really stuck with me is:

Many will watch an event like this unfold and try to find some meaning. In one sense, there was no meaning; this was something the Earth does.

There is a quote that I have in my e-mail signature, which I’ve seen attributed to Will Durant – though there’s a good argument that it’s probably an anonymous quote:

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

The Earth is so very, very old, and so very, very vast. We are tiny, and frail, and even the longest life any one of us can hope to have is less than the blink of an eye in the history of our planet. The Earth does not care about us. We have no special significance. We have only each other.

(photo from Getty Images)

In a way, studying geology has been the most humbling experience of my life. There is not a day that goes by that I am not reminded that our world operates at a scale that we cannot even begin to grasp, and that it did so long before we existed, and will continue on long after the last human is gone.

I’ve seen people – and here I use the term loosely – cheer, as if this is some sort of cosmic vengeance for Japanese misdeeds during World War II. I have seen others try to use this tragedy to justify the self-satisfied little voice in their head that they think is god, but is only actually themselves. First I was angry. Now, I’m just sick. I’m sick that there are people so small-minded and cruel that they take joy in the suffering of others. I’m sick, and worried, and I hurt for my fellow humans who are in so much pain, and so far away.

There is no meaning to the Sendai earthquake. There is no capricious god, no vast karmic wheel. It is simply a thing that has happened, that we as humans must struggle against, and fight to overcome, and mourn those who have died afterward. Because there is nothing more to it – it’s just the summation of physics and time – what we do is so very important. We have only this world, only this life, and only each other.

(photo from the Sacramento Bee)

Doctors Without Borders
Red Cross
Japan America Society of Colorado

Categories
feminism geology pictures

What I’ve been doing lately…

It’s been a busy week… couple of weeks… month… well, from about January on. But I’ve been doing things with my time, at least.

For example, today I went to Denver, CO’s Rally for the American Dream. With 3000 of my fellow Coloradoans – including my husband and my parents – I was in good company indeed.

We did a lot of cheering, a lot of chanting. There were maybe ten or twenty “Tea Party” counter protesters. One of whom wandered around in the crowd and tried to start trouble with his bizarre “Can’t get a taxi? Blame the Dems” and “Shame on Colorado Dems for Voting for an African” signs. He was completely ignored by the crowd, and then the cops chased him off.

The IAFF was out in force, as were a lot of other union people – and ordinary citizens. At the end of the rally, the Walk for Choice took off. A lot of us joined in, since it’s another important thing to support. We walked from the capital to Writer Square and back, shouting chants like, “Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate!”

At the end of the Walk for Choice, there were maybe ten crazy anti-choice people waiting at the capital, on the other side of the street. It was standard “OMG THE BABEEZ” bullshit. It was also the most surreal moment of the afternoon – there was a very odd old guy with the anti-choicers, holding a very standard sign in one hand. His other hand was raised in a fist and covered with – I swear I am not making this up – a sagging latex mask of Ronald Reagan. Overcome by just how bizarre it was, I shouted across the street, “Dude, you’ve got a severed head on your hand!”

So yeah. The disembodied zombie head of Ronald Reagan doesn’t want you to have an abortion. Or something. Weird. Eerie.

I have also been putting a lot of time in at the core lab. If you want to see what’s been eating up most of my spare time, here are some pictures from our current core, which is from a meandering river deposit. I’ve tried to add some description to the photos, and hopefully it’s not too technical.

Busy busy!

Categories
geology grad school writing

Emerging From Under My Rock

So, where have I been since Thanksgiving? The easy yet melodramatic answer is: in a black pit of horrible despair. Really, I just mean that I was working on an intensely awful end of semester group project, which I was having to spend over twenty hours a week on. With the other end of semester goings-on, it meant that I spent several weeks where I didn’t get to see my friends and barely got to see my husband while he was awake. There was other awful drama connected with it that I’d rather not go in to now; let’s just say that I’m glad I survived it without ending up in jail.

Thankfully, that’s all done with now! WOO! I survived my first semester of grad school. I have been assured by many friends that grad school is normally not quite this horrible, so I’m going to try not to worry too much about next semester.

The last thing I did in the semester was actually write a paper for sedimentary petrology. That was actually a lot of phone, particularly when compared to the soul-destroying awfulness of the group project. I enjoyed spending time with my thin sections, and it also means I’ve got a new round of photo micrographs to share! The ooid grainstone micrographs are cooler looking than the lithic arenite, though I think the diagenetic history of the lithic arenite is more interesting. But that’s because sandstones tend to be a diagenetic nightmare.
Lithic arenite photo micrographs
Ooid grainstone photo micrographs

Now that school’s done with until January, I’m hoping I can manage to get some writing done. I’ll also be in England from December 23-January 1, since Mike and I are going to see his family. There’s a lot to look forward to this vacation.

Other things:

I love my Senator. Mark Udall, I mean. Bennet, well, the best I can still say for him is that at least he isn’t Ken Buck.

Tron: Legacy was a fun movie. Don’t bother seeing it in 3D, in case you’re one of those people that actually likes the 3D thing. It’s great in 2D, and I have it on good authority that the 3D really doesn’t add anything. If you want something deep, it’s not the movie for you, but if you want lightcycles and Jeff Bridges being stoner!God, it’s a great time.

My parents gave me a Galaxy S as my early (and only) Christmas present. I am deeply in love with my amazing phone, and am greatly enjoying the fact that I no longer have the most pathetic phone out of all of my friends.

There is now a Jack’n’Grill by my house. We went there yesterday and the food is fantastic. It’s also huge. We didn’t realize until we got there that it was the home of the seven pound breakfast burrito once featured on Man vs. Food. The rest of the food is in keeping with that. You can’t get a burger that’s smaller than 10 ounces. But it’s 10 ounces of pure awesome, that’s for sure.

Yesterday Kat came up to hang out. During the afternoon we worked on some writerly stuff. The end result is that I sent out five query letters to agents. I am both excited and terrified about this. I hope the rejection callouses that I’ve built up over the last nine months with my short stories will help me in this process.