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My BBCP: Night 1

My first evening shift has been uneventful so far. Drilling is way ahead of schedule, and they had about 400 and some feet of core drilled on Polecat Bench when the hole started to collapse. So this meant that this evening has pretty much been dealing with the collapsed hole and then moving the rig over to start on the second hole for the site, which we’re hoping we’ll get a full core out of. We’ll be drilling the second hole with polymer additives instead of just straight water, so that ought to keep things more stable.

The funny part is, all the trouble is coming from poorly cemented sand collapsing into the hole. Which was not something that we were all that worried about in planning – everyone was more focused on the abundance of swelling clays. But it’s not something I find particularly surprising, since we had a similar problem with some gas wells when I worked for Noble. Sand can be a bitch.

So I’ve spent most of the evening hunkered down in the RV on site. It’s pretty windy out on the Bench (because gee, it’s a treeless plateau, in the middle of Wyoming) and there’s not really anything much to do until we start getting core out of the second hole. And now that the rig’s been moved, we have to drill through the cap of Quaternary gravel to get to the good stuff that we actually want. Apparently on the first core, the gravel took something like six hours to get through. We’re hoping that it’ll go a little faster with the additives in the water, but we’ll see. It’s a very real possibility that I’ll go through my first shift without seeing any action at all.

This isn’t a surprise, though… everyone already knew that tonight would be uneventful due to the collapsed hole, etc. I just chose to come out to the Bench anyway because the other option was just puttering around in Powell (which rolls up its sidewalks around 9, I hear) or in the lobby of the motel. I’m sharing a room with my advisor, which is great, but she needs to be sleeping while I’m awake, so I couldn’t very well hang out here. So instead I got to meet the other night shift people. We played a game of Dominion, listened to The Book of Mormon, and did some other silly stuff to entertain ourselves. I wish I had some pictures of our beautiful crew, but most of them aren’t looking too lively right now, and I have a policy against taking picture of people who are asleep.

Four hours left to go until shift end. The motor on the rig is going now, which means they’re drilling slowly through the gravel. We’ll see how far we get before it’s time for the day shift to take over.

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bbcp climate change geology petm

I’m Going to Wyoming, for SCIENCE! (and this is why you should care)

In a few short hours, I’ll be on my way to the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, to participate in the coring portion of the Bighorn Basin Coring Project. Things are moving much faster than expected – the rig is already at Polecat Bench, where it wasn’t planned to be until Friday, because coring went so quickly at the first location, called Basin Substation.

(All of the amazing pictures for this post taken from the BBCP Facebook page.)

This was kind of a surprise, but a good one. It also means my advisor and I are scrambling to get up to the Basin as soon as we can. And that instead of one two week stretch, I’ll be coming back to Denver with her, and then flying back out to Wyoming on July 31 to help out at the third site. (The third site, Gilmore Hill, is on BLM land and we’re literally not allowed to start until August 1.)

I’ve set up a twitter account for just BBCP-related stuff. I don’t know how many good pictures I’ll get, since I’m on the nightshift, but here’s hoping! Please follow and spread the word. It’s a chance to see some science in action.

So why should you care about this project? Two words: climate change. In geology, the present is often the key to the past – we can observe processes today and use them to figure out the how and why of ancient rocks. During the PETM, the Earth’s climate changed remarkably, and in a fairly short period of time. I’ve written about it in more detail here, and you can also get more information on the project’s website. While the Bighorn Basin Coring Project is focused on understanding the PETM and many related issues, there is also this to consider:

This will allow us to investigate, in an unprecedented way, the high-frequency climatic and biotic variability of a continental depositional system during greenhouse conditions.

There are no guarantees in science, but there’s a possibility that this time, the past might provide a key to the present. Climate change induced by a rapid influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? While it’s not a perfect parallel (for the PETM it was methane, rather than our own carbon dioxide), it still could be very relevant. And I would think it’s something we want to understand well before our personal contributions of carbon get anywhere close to the rather voluptuous 6800 gigatons of methane that went into the atmosphere during the PETM. (As of 2004 we were at ~500 Gt.)

One thing we’re hoping is that we’ll not only capture the PETM, we’ll also maybe get some data for the other, smaller hyperthermals in the Eocene. How much carbon input equals how much climate change? As part of a species with a vested interest in climate not changing much, that’s a question I’d personally like to examine, and I’m hoping I’ll get my chance.

(And don’t worry, Mom, I’ll watch out for snakes!)

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Bighorn Basin Coring Project Website!

I’m less than a month away from my Wyoming adventure, and it’s getting exciting. The Bighorn Basin Coring Project now has an official website, and there are some great pictures there if you want to take a look at where I’ll be spending two and a half weeks of my summer. Check it out!

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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.