Tag: petm

Categories
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!)

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 petm writing

Curse you, passive voice!

I’ve been reading a lot of scientific papers lately; I’m in two classes, and I’m trying to get in a sufficient amount of reading on topic before my research starts up. Easier said than done… for the most part, scientific papers tend to knock me out, even if I’m not tired when I start reading. And it’s not a fatigue issue, anyway; if I’m reading something that I’m interested in, it doesn’t matter how tired I am. I’ll stay up until four in the morning just because I need to read One More Page.

I think papers just knock me out because, for the most part, they’re badly written. There’s a lot of jargon, but that’s unavoidable in a specialized field. I think the bigger problem tends to be writing style. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that most scientists aren’t like me (writing fiction as a masochistic hobby) or my friend Evan (who has a BA in English). When I took my “writing in the geosciences” undergrad course – which I wasn’t terribly impressed by – most of the other students were just miserable about being there, because they hated writing so much.

Actually disliking the process of writing is not going to help when it comes to producing a coherent, interesting paper. I suppose the more the writer feels like he or she is fighting with the English language, the more the reader will feel like it, too.

There are a lot of things that make scientific papers a giant slog to read. I think one of the major ones is the ubiquitous use of passive voice. In prose, passive voice is the kiss of death. It’s something to be avoided entirely or used only sparingly, because it tends to interfere with the reader’s ability to connect with the action.

Of course, scientific articles aren’t fiction. Most of the time.

But the thing is, a lot of people who write scientific papers tend to use passive voice. I think it’s because it makes them sound somehow more impartial – one of the big uses of passive is to remove the doer from a sentence. “A simulation was run” as opposed to “we ran a simulation.” I can understand that desire, but it makes it damn hard to read and stay interested, particularly when it sounds like the methods section is just kind of running itself without any sort of human intervention.

I bring this up because I read an article in Geology over the weekend that didn’t hammer the reader with passive sentences, and it was a treat to read. I was tired, and it didn’t knock me out. I was interested. I felt engaged by the writing. Now, I can’t really say too much about the subject itself, since it deals with climate modeling and that’s not something I personally do. But the writing was definitely a step above most of the other articles I’ve read lately.

Go check it out for yourself, if you have Geoscience World subscription: CO2-driven ocean circulation changes as an amplifier of Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum hydrate destabilization (Lunt et al)

It’s a sad statement on the writing in this field when article that doesn’t make me fall asleep at my desk warrants an excited blog post.