Tag: geology

Categories
climate change people don't suck politics

The Long, Unforgiving Grind of Hope

Unfortunately, you usually have to be old to know that things can change. To know that the hopeless can turn hopeful.

–Lawrence O’Donnell

It’s strange, because I remember so many things changing in a positive way when I was younger. Before I turned 20, the Berlin Wall fell. Apartheid ended in South Africa. HIV went from a terrifying death sentence to something that could at least be managed with medication. CFCs were phased out in an effort to stop massive ozone depletion. The first civil unions for same-sex couples happened in America. The internet went from non-existent to bulletin boards you dialed specific numbers to reach to a single cable that opened up the floodgates.

I know that change can happen, intellectually. I’ve seen it happen for over four decades now.

Yet it can be so easy to convince yourself, even looking at the tumultuous years you’ve already lived, that nothing more is going to change for the better. Because things also change for the worse. The PATRIOT Act happens. Trump gets elected. The internet turns into anxiety-inducing shit. We keep belching endless streams of carbon into the atmosphere. And no matter how hard you try to see something good happen again, the world doesn’t move. It just grinds you down and down and down.

In my childhood, my teens, my twenties, change was a thing that just happened. Suddenly, the Berlin wall toppled and people were dancing in the streets and the USSR was over. Suddenly, we could no longer buy Aquanet hairspray, and that was good, because it meant a lack of ozone wasn’t going to let the sun cook us all like eggs in a frying pan. And now here I am in my forties, venting to one of my fellow regulators, why won’t this group just take their fucking half a cake–yes, it’s not the whole cake they wanted, but it’s half a cake they can hold on to while they keep fighting to get the other half.

Change was once a magic, instantaneous thing because I wasn’t involved in it. I wasn’t in the midst of it. I heard there was a problem, and then somehow, it wasn’t a problem any more because people just all agreed it wouldn’t be. Yet when you become one of the people who actively wants change happen instead of vaguely observing it, any movement at all feels impossible. You make calls and donate money and knock on doors and write letters and protest and give feedback on regulations and nothing changes. You compromise and compromise and compromise and feel like the ground you give gains you nothing in return. Things used to change, and now they don’t. They can’t. They never will again.

But loves, I understand now that this is exactly how the people felt, when they were staring down the Berlin Wall. It’s how they felt sixty, a hundred, a thousand years ago when they faced a mountain of human suffering that seemed immovable, a crushing and endless reality. Nothing changes. Nothing good happens.

Until it suddenly does.

In geology one of the first lessons is: the greatest mountain will one day be worn down to nothing but sand, and all it takes is the gentle fall of rain. The tiniest cracks are wedge open by frost, bit by bit by bit, until suddenly an entire cliff face gives way.

Change is not impossible, it is inevitable. All it takes is pressure and time. So fight for every crumb and then keep fighting. Turn frustration from the fuel of exhaustion and burn it to heat the fire of hope. We are the rain. We are the frost. We are the change happening, one grain of sand at a time.

We will move mountains, and the children who watch us will marvel at how easy it was.

Categories
writing

Too Long for Twitter: I don’t like fantasy maps

I made the mistake of mentioning on Twitter that some day I would vent about why I hate fantasy maps, and that got enough people asking that apparently today will be that day.

DISCLAIMER THE FIRST: These are my personal opinions as a reader. If you, as a reader who is not me, happen to love fantasy maps and can’t get enough of them, that’s totally fine. This is not a judgment on you. We are allowed to like different things when we’re talking pretendy funtimes and not, say, fascism.

DISCLAIMER THE SECOND: Some of my fellow writers may read this. I want you to please understand that this is not a personal attack on you for having decided to make one of those fantasy maps. Readers have different preferences, and I’m sure you have readers who will like maps as much as I don’t like them. And in fact, despite my preferences as a reader, as a geologist, I would be more than happy to help make sure your fantasy map doesn’t contain horrendous geography for a reasonable fee. Because if they’re gonna be out there, I’d like for your maps to be good ones. And I actually do enjoy maps as objects of art, weirdly enough.

We all on the same page now? Good.

Why I Don’t Like Fantasy Maps: A Short List by Alex Acks

  1. Most of them are terrible. Like geographically, geologically terrible. You’ve already probably seen me complain about the map of Middle Earth. From my experience as a reader, and I’ll readily admit that I have neither had the patience nor time to read every fantasy book ever written, the majority of fantasy maps make me want to tear my hair out as a geologist. Many of them are worse than the Tolkien map, and without his fig leaf of mythology to justify it. (And sorry, it’s not a fig leaf that works for me.)
  2. Corollary: If your fantasy map is terrible, you have probably already lost my willing suspension of disbelief before I even dive into the book. Sorry, but this is what an MS in Geology will do to an otherwise easygoing person.
  3. Corollary: Looking at these maps will often make major worldbuilding issues lunge out at me that otherwise might have slid by. Like, for example, the question of where the hell your massive population center is getting its water when it is located nowhere near a river. Or the question of where they’re getting their food from. And so on.
  4. A lot of fantasy maps stand out very glaringly as lands that have been artificially created around a story that was already written, rather than organic geographies that shape the stories and peoples. This will often point back at the previous three points, because features and geography that are located to suit a story aren’t necessarily going to make any goddamn geographical sense. I find this artificiality annoying.
  5. There’s a tendency in certain fantasy maps to make most country borders follow things like mountain ranges or rivers. This, frankly, looks extremely weird.
  6. The number of people who don’t bother to put a fucking scale on their fucking map astounds me. A map without a scale is functionally useless.
    1. We failed student projects in field lab for not doing this, because without a scale, a map (or diagram, or picture) is meaningless.
    2. Putting some kind of scale or other surveying marks to indicate how distance on a map relates to measured distance is not a recent invention. (Even if the measurements weren’t terribly accurate at times.)
    3. If you don’t put a scale on your map, then it’s basically a relativistic perception exercise for whoever the cartographer was… which could almost be interesting if one of the characters made the map, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen in a book I’ve read.
  7. I get extremely offended as a reader if understanding a book requires me to check an appendix or look at a map for what’s happening to make any sense. It breaks up the flow of reading, and a lot of times, it’s something that could be taken care of in the text.
    1. There is literally only one book I can think of as an exception to this: The Killer Angels. Which is not a fantasy novel; it’s a historical novel that closely follows the Battle of Gettysburg. It’s got some very detailed maps of the battlefield over each of the days in it that it does help to consult for understanding of things like troop movements and line of sight. I have never run across a fantasy novel that hits this level of detail, and honestly I doubt I’d be interested in one.
    2. ETA1: OH WAIT I LIED! There is one other exception, and it is a fantasy map! The map of the Stillness that NK Jemisin has at the beginning of The Stone Sky is A+ and has a scale. I didn’t feel the need to consult it during reading, but it warmed the rockles of my geologist’s heart to see all the plate boundaries laid out for the supercontinent.
  8. If the map isn’t required for understanding of the text, I’m left wondering why it’s even there. It’s not necessary. It’s more information than I need.
  9. I’d rather have the space to imagine things for myself.
  10. I don’t like that the ubiquity of unnecessary maps in fantasy literature puts pressure on me as a writer to follow suit. As someone who has drawn or otherwise generated many a map as a function of my job as a scientist, you can’t make me.
Categories
suffering for charity

Want to make me watch San Andreas?

A lot of people have been asking me about this one. Come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?

AHAHAHAHAHAHA ha ha ha haaaaa

Well. Uh. I like the Rock? And the geologist isn’t wearing a white labcoat? And watching the Rayleigh wave go through LA is… kind of cool, even if it’s moving way too slowly?

Oh, who am I kidding. HOW THE FUCK IS THERE A TSUNAMI EVEN AGH Deep breaths. This one must be aiming for a spot on the DVD shelf o’ bad geology, right between Volcano and The Core. Fuck you, my liver can’t take this right now.

So here’s the deal. Donate money to charity, and I will watch this movie and write a review of some sort for it. Raise more, and you get my notes. Don’t raise enough money, and I won’t go, but charities still get money, so yay! The price I’m setting on this turd is $400 $300. (You get the Rock’s biceps discount.) The movie comes out on May 29, but I have company from out of town that week so will be unlikely to see it until June 1 at the earliest. So that gives you nearly two weeks to come up with the money if this is going to be a thing.

Accepted charities are:

 

As usual, honor system. Donate, then contact me via social networking site, email, or messenger pigeon to tell me how much you donated. If you don’t get some kind of acknowledgment from me, I didn’t get the message. (If you prefer your donation to remain anonymous, please tell me that too.)

Progress: $155/$300

THANK DAMN YOU

  1. Zig Zag Claybourne ($20)
  2. Emily ($10)
  3. Madred ($100)
  4. Pat ($25)

ETA: Sorry to say, but the time for this has passed and the goal wasn’t met. So I don’t have to see the movie (Yay!) and charity got $155 (YAY) so I think we all still win. :)

Categories
geology

…Google, no.

A lot of descriptive geology is just pattern recognition. I spend a lot of time Googling pictures of various structures, minerals, and other phenomena to get an idea of how the same thing can look wildly different.

So today:

You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

….no, Google. No.

you tried

(Psst: This is nodular bedding.)

Categories
ask a geologist

[Ask a Geologist] Young coal and petroleum

Andrew asked:

Would a planet terraformed fifteen million years ago have any petroleum or coal reserves? If so, how would the extent of the deposits compare to Earth?

So, in order to get petroleum or coal, you need the following:

  1. Lots of organic matter building up
  2. Heat and pressure via burial
  3. Time

How much time? That’s kind of the question. You need enough time for geologic processes (normally subsidence) to bury the deposits of organic matter deeply enough that they get pressure cooked at around 49-149C, and then those deposits need to stay cooking long enough for the heat and pressure to crack the organic matter into more familiar hydrocarbons.  How long is that going to take precisely? To be honest, we don’t precisely know. Probably hundreds of thousands of years, not counting the sheer time it’s going to take to bury everything deeply enough.

That said, we at least have an idea of a minimum time, just because we can look at the youngest oil and coal deposits in the world, which are Oligocene to Miocene in age–that gives us a range between about 5.3 and 36.6 million years old.

So yes, as long as your terraforming ramped up quickly enough that you had lots of plants and plankton to die and get buried on land and in the ocean, and your planet was tectonically active enough for active burial (and the temperature and pressure curves line up appropriately for burial) you could potentially have petroleum and coal.

There would probably be a lot less in the way of reserves than we have on Earth, just because your production window would be so much shorter than the one we’ve got. On Earth, we’ve had coal deposits forming since the Carboniferous (a ~355 million year window) and petroleum deposits go back even further, into the Proterozoic (a >565 million year formation window). Just how big the difference will be depends also on how much organic matter your new world is pumping out–if you’re having a mini carboniferous for all 15 million of those years, for example, it still won’t be that much in comparison, but it would be more significant than if your world looks like the Permian.

Categories
ask a geologist geology

[Ask a Geologist] Moon Artifacts

Andrew asked:

Given ancient alien artifacts which take the form of giant stone cubes, made roughly fifteen million years ago, on an airless moon, what sort of information about them or their makers could a geologist infer from analyzing them?

All right, off the top of my head:

Age analysis:

  1. How old the rock itself is, via radiometric analysis, looking at zircons, etc. but this only tells you when the rock itself cooled. Which is of questionable use if we’re talking a sedimentary rock, since at best that will tell you the age of the parent rock. If it’s metamorphic, what radiometric analysis would tell you age wise really depends on the degree of metamorphism.
  2. How long the rock has been exposed on the surface. If we’re taking a moon with no atmosphere, then the artifacts could be examined for pitting/scarring caused by micrometeorites. As long as some measurement can be made as to the historical frequency of that sort of impact on the moon in general, then you could do some statistical analysis and get an idea of exposure time.

Why do we care how old the rock is? Well, if it’s a wildly different age from what it’s sitting on, that implies some interesting things. As does knowing how long it’s been sitting out on the surface, since those two numbers might be quite different.

Basic compositional analysis (here I’m assuming igneous or metamorphic rather than sedimentary rocks):

  1. Are there weird, unknown minerals? What about ones that are incredibly rare on Earth but common elsewhere? Particular sorts of minerals (eg Olivine versus quartz) will tell you about the type of melt the rock came from. Some minerals only occur in certain conditions (eg metamorphic minerals like silliminite) while others indicate a particular, very specific set of formation conditions (like diamonds). This is something you’d learn from x-ray diffraction.
  2. Textures will also tell you important things, like how rapidly the rock cooled, etc. Spinifex texture, fit example, tends to be seen in things like komatiites, which have a very specific melt composition and literally no longer form on Earth today. And all this you can do with thin sections. If you have a sedimentary rock, you can learn ridiculous amounts about the formation of the rock with thin sections, such as looking at generations of cement or weathering features.
  3. Even just looking at bulk oxide makeup (via something like xrf analysis) can give you clues about origin and formational conditions. For example, I used XRD analysis of samples from my vertisols to calculate mean annual precipitation during their formation in my master’s thesis. There is a ton of research out there about various sorts of rocks, formation or weathering conditions, and how that relates to their basic chemical makeup.
  4. At the very least you can use this to figure out if the rock is even native to the area. If there’s something really wild about the composition (for example, there are absolutely no impurities in any of the crystals) that could be a hint that the rocks were manufactured in some way rather than formed in natural conditions.

Visual assessment:
Just by looking at it even, there will be clues about how these things were–or weren’t–made. Tool marks? No tool marks? Or if you look microscopically using some sort of pocket scanning electron microscope, what will you see? Crystals cut cleanly in half? Evidence of flash melting, as if these were shaped using some kind of super heated plasma blade? Or were they made in molds, in which case everything would have crystallized perfectly flat against the mold surface? These visual clues might tell you the most about the makers of the artifacts.

This is obviously a non-exhaustive list. I’m sure there’s a million other things a geologist with a different specialization than mine could think to assess. But hopefully this will get you started!

Categories
geology

Deep Time

In perfect Rachael World (you know, the same place where my best friend Kat will be Minister In Charge of Hot Forking People Wot Deserve It) everyone will be required to take a basic geology class. And not be allowed to escape until they have at least a rudimentary grasp of the concept of Deep Time. (That thing that involved metaphors about if the life of the Earth was a football field, humanity’s entire existence would be the last blade of grass, etc.) Once you’ve had your mind completely blown by the immensity and longevity of the universe, you end up with two contradictory but true conclusions:

  1. The world is immense and old, and we are tiny and brief. What happens today is less than the blink of an eye in the grand scale of mountains and planets and stars. Whatever happened? It’s okay. It’s not a big deal. The stars are still there, the Earth still turns. In ten billion years it’ll all be dust anyway. Let it go.
  2. The world is immense and old, and we are tiny and brief. And yet somehow in this moment that is less than the blink of an eye to the universe, you have sat next to someone, you have fallen in love, you have hated, you have laughed, you have cried. You stand at the confluence of infinite rivers carrying sand without number, and yet somehow you have plucked one grain from the flow and licked it from your finger. This will never be repeated. This single, beautiful heartbeat is all you get.

    Make it count.

Categories
ask a geologist geology

[Ask a Geologist] Evidence of a Nuclear Winter

Andrew asked:
Given a rough Earth analog that experienced a major nuclear war about 1 Ma, would there be any evidence of in the rocks in modern times?
All right, so I can think of two major potential lines of evidence off the top of my head when it comes to nuclear weapons:
1) Radioactive isotopes: Most of the radioactive isotopes in nuclear fallout are incredibly short lived, with half lives ranging from minutes to hours to days. (None of the common ones seem to have a half life that lasts more than a year.) So the blasted nuclear hellscape probably wouldn’t still be glowing in a million years, from what I’ve read. If nothing else, consider the fact that it’s safe for people to go to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Trinity test site.
On the other hand, nuclear fallout does cause isotopic shifts that can be traced by chemists. For example, there are different calculations you have to do for pre-industrial and pre-nuclear samples in various kinds of radioactive dating (particularly carbon-14) because it’s caused the amounts of various atmospheric isotopes to shift. Strontium-90 levels also changed due to nuclear testing and that change is recorded in teeth, for example. However, 90Sr and 14C are both short-lived enough isotopes that I don’t think they’d be all that useful for the chemists in a million years. Presumably all the isotopes will have decayed away, though maybe there’s some magical chemistry that could be done looking at relative proportions of daughter isotopes. At this point we’re way outside my comfort zone; geochemistry was never my strong suit. But there is potential there, and if you want to go that route I’d suggest finding a geochemist to ask.
2) Sedimentary evidence. Probably more useful, if your future people have some geologists among them. If you had a worldwide nuclear holocaust, you’d end up with mass extinctions, large-scale fires, and presumably the collapse of civilization. So at the very least, your future explorers would find these signs. Paleontologists would see the evidence for mass extinction, and more damning, would potentially find massive boneyards in multiple locations all dating to the same time, that would indicate a single cataclysmic event. You’d also get charcoal layers associated with the extinction from worldwide fires, and occurrences of “nuclear glass” like the “Trinitite” found at the Trinity test site. All those could be geologically dated to the same time, which would be some pretty damning evidence.
Of course, since it’d be evidence preserved in rocks, they’d have to dig for it or find outcrops. But you should find that kind of stuff around. Heck, you could probably even find buried portions of cities (concrete is pretty hardy stuff; it’s already a rock) and maybe some shadows would be preserved on it, things like that. The trappings of civilization don’t necessarily weather away that fast, particularly not if they get buried in ash and sediment.
As a note, you’d see this kind of evidence preserved both on land (anywhere sediment is aggrading rather than eroding) and in the ocean. Ocean sediment cores would probably show some very strange things going on, an abrupt shift in sedimentation followed by a slow recovery.
Andrew later clarified that he was talking about a slushball Earth, with the global ice age touched off by the nuclear holocaust.
Now, I’m not entirely certain that a global nuclear war would set off global glaciation to begin with. I did some reading on the snowball Earth for a grad class, and I didn’t find most of the proposed mechanisms all that convincing other than lesser solar output and/or change in ocean circulation. The worldwide disaster from a nuclear war might throw a lot of particulates in to the air (and we know those will cause cooling) but they’ll fall out of the air fairly quickly, and consequently dirty up your snow.
But anyway. The slushball Earth isn’t something we need to debate here.
Even with global glaciation, you’ll still end up with geological evidence getting deposited in your oceans, even if at a different rate–but it’s something you’d be able to see with, say, a core drilled into ocean sediments. There’s a reason these kinds of corse get used often for paleoclimate research. In the slushball, there’s still open-ish water at the equator, which can allow for some sediment settling (such as say, the big ash layer) and input. Or if suddenly you’ve got what looks like normal sedimentation that has an ash layer than shifts to something odd like banded iron formations, that’s a big glaring clue that something weird and catastrophic happened.
Thoughts from other geologists?
Categories
ask a geologist drunk post flowchart geology

[Ask a Geologist] When Geologists Get Funky

Andrew asked:

What DOES happen when you get a bunch of geologists drunk?

For ease of answering, I have prepared this handy-dandy flowchart:

drunk geologist flowchart

Categories
ask a geologist geology

[Ask a Geologist] Of Meteorites and Jars

The lovely and cupcake-alicious E. Catherine Tobler had a couple of geology-related questions, which I have simplified because sooper sekrit reasons:

1) Pretend it’s before 1900–how do you test if a piece of jewelry is made from a meteorite?

After trawling around on the internet a bit, the most likely thing I could come up with is just checking if the jewelry is magnetic and then doing a double check with a streak plate… basically, if the piece is attracted to a magnet, that at least indicates it involves naturally magnetic minerals. And then if you scratch it on a ceramic streak plate and it leaves a metallic gray streak, that’d be a pretty good indicator that it’s at least not one of the usual suspects. Magnetite leaves a black streak and hematite leaves a red streak.

The streak test is a pretty old school one for mineral identification, so it would at least indicate that something weird is going on if you have this magnetic thing that’s not leaving an expected streak color. I know there are also chemical tests you can do to see if something contains nickel, which would be a big hint since all metallic meteorites are nickel/iron.

I don’t know precisely when the streak test came into wide use or when they really started cataloging streak color for minerals. But Mohs hardness scale was invented in 1812, and that kind of testing has been in use since basically the Greeks, just not standardized. Streak testing is an outgrowth of hardness testing, since when you rub something on a substance that is harder than it, you leave a streak of powdered mineral behind.

That said, I didn’t quite trust my own answer on this, so I e-mail my planetologist buddy John Dee since he knows space rocks so much better than I do. Here’s what he had to suggest:

Easy-peasy – just cut it in two, etch it with nitric acid and look for the Widmanstätten pattern. The pattern is formed when the iron core of a planetismal slowly cools and creates interlocking crystals. When the planetismal is later broken into pieces, it forms the stoney and iron meteorites.

Magnetism won’t be much use, as the planetismal probably wasn’t large enough to have an intrinsic magnetic field. And the streak pattern won’t be diagnostic because you’ll get the same result for native iron. But only a meteorite will give you the Widmanstätten pattern!

I don’t know if cutting the jewelry in half is actually an option, but even just etching the outside of it should reveal the Widmanstätten pattern. And so long as the jewelry was made without completely melting down the meteorite–if you just heated it enough to get it to bend instead, for example–that would be the best indicator for certain.

Question number two was a little less out of this world:

2) You’re in ancient Egypt. What kind of rock would you use to make a container for a liquid?

I found this awesome site that listed Ancient Egyptian quarries and mines and what each one produced. Which made answering this a lot easier. Basically, the material would need to be workable (well, presumably anything in the above quarries were things the Egyptians knew how to work), would need to be durable, would need to not react with what you put in it, and would need to be non-porous (to prevent seeping or desiccation).

So this eliminated things like schist (flaky), sandstone (potentially porous), and gypsum (too dang soft).

That leaves a lot of good options still:

  • Quartzite would definitely work. A good quartzite will be completely cemented with quartz, so that would take care of the pore space issue. Quartz is also pretty resistant to chemical weathering, so wouldn’t interact with much you’d put in it to the best of my knowledge… it’s a tough mineral. And we know that the Egyptians had access to a quarry with quartzite in it.
  • Travertine and regular limestone (which would potentially be cool looking and fossiliferous) also might work all right since as far as I’ve been able to find, and unless you filled it with acid wouldn’t interact with the liquid. (And as long as you keep them in a dry climate, both of those will last forever and ever.) The big thing again would be to make certain it was non-porous limestone–it just can’t have vugs in it, or a lot of dissolution molds. I think Travertine would likely be good since it’s hydrothermal… though the other thing to keep in mind is that hydrothermal sourced rocks might have some other nasty impurities in them since a lot of metallic and heavy elements tend to get kicked up in hydrothermal systems.
  • Granite or diorite could potentially work too. Since all the crystals are interlocking, it’d make for a water-tight or even air-tight vessel, but it could be a bitch to work and polish up I imagine.
  • The one option I like the best is serpentinite. There’s a quarry for that, and it would make a darn cool looking green or black jar. I also found a reference that said serpentinite was used for small decorative containers, so there you go.

Looking up all that information about quarries was really fun!