Saturday, February 7, 2009

Feb to-read list from Geology

Has Geology become open access? I've just set up RSS feed for it, and when I clicked links to several interesting articles, I discovered I could read them from home. (Cool.) Perhaps my school's subscription works from home now, which is great for me, but which would mean that these links are behind a paywall for the rest of the world.

I'm still going to post my to-read list, so I can kick myself if I don't find time to read these:

San Andreas Fault geometry through San Gorgonio Pass: southeast of LA, the San Andreas Fault is a real mess, with multiple strike-slip strands and thrust faults. Laura Dair and Michele Cooke have used numerical modeling to test whether different fault geometries, combined with known Pacific-North America plate motions, match the observed patterns of slip and uplift along the many faults. Doug Yule has a related commentary, which puts the study in context (and explains how cool and innovative it is). The results aren't just important for understanding faults - they're useful in trying to figure out just how big the southern San Andreas' Big One could be. (This one's going into my folder of possible articles to use for Advanced Structure.)

Mantle weakening and strain localization: Implications for the long-term strength of the continental lithosphere: The Jelly Sandwich and the Creme Brulee models of lithospheric strength are back. In the "jelly sandwich" model, a squishy lower crust is sandwiched between a strong upper crust and a strong upper mantle; in the "creme brulee" model, the upper mantle has no strength, and plates are held together by the top of the crust. Jacques Précigout and Frédéric Gueydan argue that a "jelly sandwich"-type lithosphere can start to behave like "creme brulee" in areas of active deformation, where high strain can result in reduced grain size and the possibility of faster deformation in small areas. (My kindergartener will be really upset if his jelly sandwich turns into creme brulee. Maybe he needs a hard-sided lunchbox to avoid rapid sandwich-squishing.)

Discovery of columnar jointing on Mars: The title tells the story. There are old volcanoes and lava flows on Mars, and HiRISE has found columnar joints. The pictures alone are amazing, but the authors argue that the type of columnar jointing is typical of fractures formed when lava comes into contact with water.

Porphyroblast rotation versus nonrotation: conflict resolution! Comment and reply. It turns out that the conflict is not, in fact, resolved, and the garnets are left spinning. Or not. The commenters and repliers focus on different models to make their arguments, and make some rather pointed comments. ("Fay et al. (2008) present a few numerical simulations (with unspecified code or boundary conditions) as evidence for nonrotation of porphyroblasts during non-coaxial flow.") It's a good example of how scientists write when they disagree on something (especially when their disagreement is around 20 years old, at this point).

9 comments:

Silver Fox said...

I can read these, and don't think I'm signed in - so what am I paying for? I'll have to figure that out!

Anonymous said...

whoa ... I have access too ... shhh, don't tell anybody, sooner or later they will find out

Anonymous said...

There's an RSS feed for the current issue and recent issues, so it seems that, like many journals, you can read current articles for free; archives probably not. I subscribe to The New Yorker's feed and I find I end up reading more of each issue because I can read it (or spreed it at spreeder.com) online. This works well for me, but I would never stop my print subscription.

Kim said...

Thanks for the explanation, Jude. That's great for bloggers, in particular. (And it means I'm going to save lots of pdfs as soon as the GSA journals come out.)

Chris M said...

Nope, it looks like they are all free. I am able to open pdfs all the way back to 1973 (first online volumes). I am not a member or anything.

Kim said...

It looks like GSA Bulletin articles are also currently available for free. I haven't seen any announcement about them being free (and I'm a member). It may be a programming error, in which case this is a good time to collect some pdfs of classic papers.

Mel said...

Grab them while you can. I remember seeing an announcement that GSA pubs will be free for a while (~1 month) but I can't find the announcement.

Andrew Alden, Oakland Geology blog said...

There's language on the GSA journals home page referring to a free period, but they say that ends on 19 January. I guess they're taking their time.

A few years ago, Geology was open access for a while. I told my readers about that, then had to go back and edit that part out.

Kim said...

The GSA site says that free trial access ends on 19 January 2008. (I think I remember hearing about that; I meant to grab copies of a bunch of things, but was too busy to do it before the deadline.)