All of My Faults Are Stress-Related

Seeking tech advice: smartphones for geologists

2010-11-22T17:32:00.000-08:00

I currently have what I fondly refer to as a "stupidphone." It makes calls. It receives text messages. It stores phone numbers from some of my contacts. I can set it to "silent" mode during class. And... well, that's about all I do with it.

But that's going to change soon.

I'm thinking hard about getting a smartphone. My current cell carrier is being acquired (locally) by AT&T, which means that iPhones are finally an option in Durango. But Verizon also has good service here, which means that the various Android phones are also possibilities. I'm going to upgrade to one or the other, but I'm not sure which. I've talked to my local salespeople, but I'm not sure they quite understand what I want from a phone. In my ideal world, I would get a phone that would allow me to do the following on the road from Durango to Albuquerque or Denver: find my location from GPS, plot it on a map, look up the geology on a geologic map, figure out the direction to a mountain peak in the distance, take a picture of an interesting outcrop, and show it to the world on Twitter. (In my dream world, I would be able to do this while driving through the Navajo reservation, but I don't think any carrier has decent service through much of it.)

So, Internet: what's your experience with smartphones? I'm interested in hearing what you like and don't like about your current phone (especially the iPhone, Droid X, and Samsung Fascinate, though if you love another Android phone, I'd like to hear about it, too.) I'm also hearing about what apps you like as a geologist (or as a non-geologist who knows the kinds of things that I like).

(I know that Android vs iPhone can be a near-religious preference, so I guess I should also say that I'm agnostic. I like Apple products (I've got a Mac at home and I love the iPod Nano I won from my local NPR station), I like Google (Google Earth, the search engine, gmail, blogger...), and I use a PC at work. I could work with any of the operating systems.)

Edit: Given that the first comment gets into the Apple vs Android preference immediately, here's some more ground rules: I want to know what YOU like about YOUR phone. If you're an Android fan, don't tell me what's wrong with the iPhone; if you like iPhones, don't tell me what's wrong with Android. I've kept one comment, but will not publish any others that bash the other operating system.

Why pseudonymity matters

2010-09-23T20:12:00.000-07:00

A while back, someone on Twitter shared a link to an article in an Anthopology blog that mused about the reasons why people are more comfortable sharing personal information on line than they are in person. But as I read the article, I saw something else: one of the reasons why many women choose to use pseudonyms online.

The blogger witnessed a conversation on a subway that went like this (full version here):

Him: I haven’t seen you in awhile!
Her: Yeah …
Him: So are you going to Penn?
Her: No.
Him: You don’t live out east?
Her: No. I live here, in Manhattan.
Him: Oh, I live on Long Island. If I didn’t have kids …
Her: Yeah, it’s expensive.
Him: Well, yeah. But also the schools. I would have to pay for the type of education my kids get on Long Island.
Her: [Nods politely. Casts sidelong glance at me.]
Him: Are you married.
Her: No.

Just reading the conversation made my skin crawl and set off every one of my warning alarms about creepy guys. Ick. ICK.

The anthropology blog muses that people are willing to share much more personal information online because they feel as if they have a degree of distance that they don't have on a subway. There's this implication that sharing information online is just as dangerous as talking to a creepy guy on a subway, but that people don't realize just how dangerous it is.

But... sharing can be valuable as well as dangerous.

Living in a world where one can't share personal stories - a kid's lost tooth, a failed experiment, a glorious day in the field - is isolating. It's even more isolating when those personal stories involve undercurrents of discrimination - like being mistaken for an administrative assistant. Blogs (and other communication across distance) can reduce the sense of isolation for women geoscientists - that's one of the findings from the survey that Anne Jefferson, Pat Campbell, Suzanne Francks, and I did last summer (now online here). Blogs do seem to help.

But sharing that personal information can come at a cost if you attach your real-life name to it. Creepy stalkers may be rare, but if your real name is attached to your stories, you can be found. And, although it may help job-seekers to be Googleable, it's also important that job-seekers come across as someone who would fit into a job. Expressing fear that you aren't good enough at research is not a good way to sell yourself to an R1 university, and sharing frustration with teaching sexist students does not make you look like an excellent teacher. The very things that make women-in-science blogs valuable could threaten the careers of the bloggers, if the bloggers didn't use pseudonyms.

We didn't talk about pseudonyms in our GSA Today article. But I've got a feeling that pseudonymity is what makes the benefits discussed in our article possible.

Job opportunity: director of STEM student support services

2010-09-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

Hello world, and sorry for the blog silence. I'm still not back to regular posting, but I would like some help spreading the word about a job opportunity here at Fort Lewis College. We recently received a grant from the Department of Education, to provide support for science/technology/engineering/math students who are low-income, first-generation, or have disabilities. We have a similar program (the Program for Academic Advancement) for students college-wide, but this new program will support math, science, and engineering students. I'm excited about this program - our PAA program does a fantastic job helping students finish their degrees and move on to graduate school or the workforce, and I'm looking forward to working with the STEM3 program.

If you have a blog that deals with diversity in science, could you tell your readers about this job opportunity?

Here's the official job announcement (also online here: http://www.fortlewis.edu/administrative_services/human_resources/joblist.aspx ):

Director
STEM3 Student Support Services Program
Fort Lewis College
Durango, Colorado

Fort Lewis College invites applications for the Director of its new STEM3 Student Support Services Program (a federally funded TRiO program). The position is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that requires application for renewal every five years. The Director is responsible for organizing and managing support services for 120 academically and/or economically disadvantaged college students. Services include tutoring and academic, career, financial aid, and graduate school advising for eligible students in the STEM disciplines. STEM disciplines include the Sciences (Agriculture, Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Exercise Science, Geology, Geoscience, Physics, and Psychology), Technology (Computer Science Information Systems), Engineering, and Mathematics. The Director will also be responsible for approving expenditures, maintaining budget control and responsibility for the appropriate use of grant funds; facilitating and overseeing development and implementation of effective, objective project evaluation; maintaining data collection and a program database for monitoring and tracking of participant progress and outcomes; working closely with the Dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and the FLC STEM faculty to ensure program delivery will meet STEM student needs; overseeing preparation of fiscal and technical reports for the U.S. Dept. of Education and Fort Lewis College; managing and supervising program personnel; providing intrusive academic advising and monitoring, and financial aid advising to a small caseload of participants; attending STEM Department Chair meetings; and serving on relevant college committees.

Minimum qualifications are as follows:

• Masters Degree in Social Sciences, Education, Educational Administration, Student Personnel Administration, Counseling, or related field and a BS / BA in a STEM discipline (see above)
• At least four years experience working with disadvantaged students (low-income, first generation, students with disabilities) in higher education
• At least two years experience designing comprehensive programs that include courses, activities, workshops, tutoring or supplemental instruction, student monitoring, or other services that promote retention of SSS eligible STEM students at the postsecondary level
• At least two years experience implementing procedures for delivery of services, data collection, program evaluation or similar procedures that enhance program effectiveness and promote student retention in SSS or similar programs at the postsecondary level
• At least three years of administrative and supervisory experience that includes budget oversight and management.

Preferred qualifications include:

• Experience as a disadvantaged (first-generation, low-income, or disabled) college student
• Experience working with a TRiO program or other program with a similar mission
• Ability to provide ad-hoc tutoring support, especially in mathematics
• Successful grant writing and grant management experience.

This position is a full-time, 12 month position. Candidates must be willing to work flexible hours including evenings and weekends. Some travel is required to statewide, regional, and/or national meetings. Salary is $42,000 with full range of benefits. The position is anticipated to begin in November 2010. Individuals with experience as a disadvantaged individual or assisting disadvantaged students are encouraged to apply.

APPLICATION PROCESS
Interested and qualified applicants must submit: 1) a letter of interest detailing experience that meets the minimum and preferred qualifications, 2) a current resume, and 3) the names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of three professional references electronically to:

stem3directorsearch@fortlewis.edu

Deadline: Complete applications must be received no later than 5:00 pm on Monday, October 18, 2010 to receive consideration.

Fort Lewis College does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, religion, national origin, gender, disability, sexual orientation, political beliefs, or veteran status. Accordingly, equal opportunity for employment, admission, and education shall be extended to all persons. The College shall promote equal opportunity, equal treatment, and affirmative action efforts to increase the diversity of students, faculty, and staff. People from under-represented groups are encouraged to apply.

Blog status: I'm here and I'm elsewhere

2010-07-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

After the ruckus over at Scienceblogs recently, I've had some questions about the status of my blog. So here's a late official announcement: I left Scienceblogs permanently last winter. I've been busy lately, and things aren't likely to slow down any time soon, but if I have time and inspiration to continue blogging, I will do it here.

However, I'm also contributing to my department's new blog: FLC Geo News. The new blog will include news about happenings in the Four Corners area (Four Corners Geologic Society, Four Corners Gem & Mineral Club, talks at Fort Lewis College), active geoscience in the Durango area (debris flow videos, Animas River floods and low water, snowfall, avalanches), and stories from the department. I won't be duplicating anything here, so if you visit Durango for field camp (or for work or play) and read this blog for news, you might want to follow the department blog instead.

Why are we making this move? For the past nine years or so, the department has been sending a newsletter to alums and friends of the department. The newsletter started as a collaborative writing exercise for our junior writing class, but it's become important to the department beyond any educational benefit. The writing class is changing to a research methods class (because the college now requires two writing classes that are guaranteed to transfer, and we didn't want to change our class to fit the state's requirements), and that meant that the newsletter assignment no longer fit into any of our classes. At the same time, one of the college's web designers suggested that we add a blog to our department web page. So we decided that we would partly replace our newsletter with a blog.

The plan is, initially, to use the blog to post stories similar to what we've put in the newsletter. That means snow reports, news about student/faculty research projects, and lots of stories about field trips (including field camp). One of the advantages of a blog is that we'll be able to share pictures in color. Another is that we'll be able to share news quickly, and let friends and alums know when faculty and students are coming to their town for a conference. (And yes, we'll be able to give snow reports before everything melts.) We're planning to use the blog posts as the basis for a paper newsletter, for people who avoid the internet. (They exist. No, really, they do.)

I'm hoping that we'll also be able to use the department blog the way the Wooster geology department uses theirs. Their senior geology majors have to do an Independent Study for graduation, and this summer, the students are telling stories and sharing pictures from their field work. The stories are great, and I think it's good practice for the students to tell stories to non-specialists. (We're going to have students give their articles to faculty members to post, too, just like the Wooster department is doing.) We require senior thesis projects, too, and our students also have stories to tell. The blog will allow them to do it (and do it before their papers and presentations are due at the end of the year).

I'm the only one who has posted anything so far. If you want to see pictures from field camp's week backpacking near treeline, come check us out.

Ghosts under pressure

2010-04-08T07:04:00.000-07:00

Callan has a great (and evocatively titled) post about "crystal ghosts" - metamorphic minerals that have been replaced by something else. Callan's examples are, like most of the ones that I've seen, "retrograde metamorphism" - replacement of one mineral as it cools. Textures like these form because we live on Earth's surface, and it's colder here than where metamorphism happens. In fact, we only see metamorphic minerals because it's hard for those retrograde reactions to happen - you've got to add water to get many of the minerals that form at lower temperatures.

But my favorite metamorphic ghost tells a different story:

This is a microscopic image, rather than a field photo - it's of a thin slice of rock with light passing through it. And it contains the same minerals that Callan discussed: kyanite, sillimanite, and andalusite. Three minerals with exactly the same formula, formed under different combinations of temperature and pressure.

Except they're all here in the same rock:

If all these minerals had formed at the same time, we would know the exact temperature and pressure at which they formed. But, as with most places where all three of these minerals are formed together, they probably didn't form at once. In this case, it looks like the kyanite replaced the andalusite. (In another sample from the same outcrop, kyanite fills the entire andalusite-like square.)

And that's really cool, partly because it's a texture that you don't see very often, and partly because it means that this rock got really hot first, and then was buried. (Andalusite forms at high temperature and low pressure; kyanite forms at higher pressure.)

And it fits with the story that my students and I had been working out before we found this rock: that a granitic magma worked its way up a fault zone while the fault was active, first heating the rock and then burying it.

Ghosts can tell fantastic stories, if you listen to them.

How big was that EQ? Magnitude vs intensity in Chile and Haiti

2010-02-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

My intro class is covering earthquake size on Monday. I talked to them about the Haiti earthquake at the beginning of the semester, and now an even larger earthquake has struck the subduction zone off the west coast of Chile. I put together a bunch of powerpoint slides for my class using some images shared by geobloggers, journalist-bloggers, and the USGS. And although I'm currently on blogging hiatus, I decided to share them with the world, in case anyone else could use them.

There are two different ways to talk about the size of earthquakes: magnitude and intensity. If you listen to news reports about disasters, you've heard of earthquake magnitude. You may not have heard of intensity, but if you've experienced an earthquake, the Mercalli intensity scale should sound very familiar to you. The two ways to talk about size are complementary - they describe different things. Both are important, but in different ways.

An earthquake's magnitude is related to the amount of energy released by an earthquake. The Richter scale, which isn't actually what's used any more, is a kind of magnitude scale. Richter's scale used the amplitude of shaking on a seismograph to estimate the size of an earthquake - the bigger the squiggle, the bigger the quake. (The moment magnitude scale used today includes other information that gives a more complete picture of the energy released by the earthquake. That information is especially important for understanding large earthquakes, like the one that just occurred in Chile.)

All earthquake magnitude scales are logarithmic: a magnitude 8 earthquake is an order of magnitude larger than a magnitude 7 earthquake. To illustrate this concept for my class, I borrowed the seismograms recorded by Ian Stimpson and shared on his blog (Chile and Haiti), re-scaled the Haiti seismogram, and put the two seismograms on the same powerpoint slide:

The maximum amplitude of shaking at the Chile earthquake is around 35 times greater than that of the Haiti earthquake. The difference in energy is even more extreme - the Chile earthquake released something like 500 times the energy released by the Haiti earthquake. One of the reasons for that can be seen in the two seismograms: the Chile earthquake shook for longer than the Haiti earthquake. The Chile earthquake also broke over a larger area (around ten times larger). Edit: as Ian Stimpson pointed out on Twitter, there's another reason why the energy difference is even larger. His seismograph saturated for the Chile earthquake - at some point, the seismograph can't record increases in the amount of shaking. (That's one reason that moment magnitude is used for large earthquakes - and it's one reason why initial reports stated that the Chile EQ was M 8.3, not M 8.8.)

We won't know how much damage has happened in Chile for some time. It's likely to be significant, but not 500 times worse than Haiti (and the Haiti earthquake has probably killed more people). Those differences are partly due to differences in the buildings, but they are also reflected by the second way of looking at the size of an earthquake: seismic intensity.

The intensity of an earthquake describes its effect on the Earth's surface (including its effect on people and the things they build). Intensity is measured on a descriptive scale called the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. The Mercalli intensity scale includes descriptions like:

I. Not felt except by a very few under especially favorable conditions.

and

XII. Damage total. Lines of sight and level are distorted. Objects thrown into the air.

In between, it describes earthquakes that wake up people who are sleeping (intensity V), move heavy furniture (intensity VI), and cause chimneys to fall over (intensity VIII). Intensity is related to the energy released by the earthquake, but it's also related to distance from the fault that slipped, to the way that the fault broke during the earthquake, and to rock and soil conditions that can increase shaking.

And those differences mean that Port-au-Prince was hit really hard - probably harder than any place in Chile.

Although reports of damage are just coming in, the USGS has maps that estimate the amount of shaking in the Chile earthquake:

Image source: USGS ShakeMap for Chile EQ

A huge area was affected by shaking of Mercalli intensity of VII or VIII - strong enough to destroy some buildings, but to leave many standing (especially if they were designed to withstand earthquakes).

Contrast the Chile map with that of Haiti:

Image source: USGS ShakeMap for Haiti EQ

The Haiti earthquake shook a small area very intensely. Unfortunately, that area included the city of Port-au-Prince - a city with a dense population and buildings that are not built to withstand earthquakes. The results were devastating.

Other sources of information for classes:

IRIS's teachable moments collection
Terremoto Chile, a blog (in Spanish) about the Chile earthquake

Networking opportunity for women in atmospheric science and meteorology

2009-03-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

Via the Association for Women Geoscientists e-mail newsletter:

Are you a woman interested in atmospheric science or meteorology? The Desert Research Institute and the National Science Foundation are sponsoring a program called ASCENT (Atmospheric Science Collaborations and Enriching NeTworks), designed to connect women faculty and post-docs with one another. It's an opportunity for networking and making professional connections, during a three-day workshop in Steamboat Springs, Colorado this June.

From their website:

Atmospheric Science Collaborations and Enriching NeTworks (ASCENT) is a program focusing on women in atmospheric science/meteorology and is designed to initiate positive professional relationships among female faculty of different ranks and postdoctoral researchers. The program consists of a three-day summer workshop with follow-up reunion events at major national meetings. While networking with like-minded women scientists, participants will have the opportunity to be involved in frank discussions to explore specific promising practices toward eliminating the "leaky pipeline", defined by the attrition of women at different stages in their academic careers. By fostering relationships among women faculty and researchers, ASCENT will develop research opportunities and improve the quality of collaborative atmospheric research conducted at multiple universities and colleges.

The workshop will also accept two female high school teachers and two female high school students. The application deadline is March 15.

Panel discussion on women in science - ideas?

2009-02-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

I've got a great new dean who's an active supporter of women in science (and a woman scientist, as well). When the call went out for ideas for Women's History Month, she suggested that the scientists do something. So... we're bringing in Dr. Marjorie Chan of the University of Utah, who has a women-in-geology talk she's given as an Association for Women Geoscientists lecturer, and besides her talk, we're going to do a panel discussion on issues facing women scientists. I'm organizing it, and I think I may be moderating it.

I've never organized any sort of panel discussion before, and I've never been in the audience for anything like this. So I'm looking for ideas.

We're a small public liberal arts college, so the audience will be a mixture of faculty members and undergraduates - no grad students, no post-docs. The panel members so far include Margie and the senior woman in the biology department - we're working on finding someone else. The other someones won't be from physics/engineering or chemistry - each department has one woman professor, but they're both assistant profs, and we don't want to put them on the spot.

So what should we talk about?

Margie knows the current statistics for women in the geosciences, and the biologist knows the history of her department, so at the very least, we can talk about the history in those two fields. Some of my other ideas are:

- Debunking persistent myths about women's abilities as scientists. (Maybe more important for students in intro classes, though.)

- Discussing Virginia Valian's ideas about the ways that tiny differences in perception can lead to big differences in women's success.

- Discussing the problem of balance.

- Doing some kind of exercise like Sciencewoman recently did, thinking about our strengths and how to promote them.

- Discussing the success of our biology program in hiring and educating women.

- Brainstorming things that we can do to help women in science (both students and faculty).

Anyone led a panel like this, or been in the audience for one? Any advice for what works and what doesn't?

There's No Place Like Home

2009-02-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

I'm a day late for this month's Accretionary Wedge - somehow I got it in my head that we had until the last day of the month. I should have known that the due date was approaching when everyone else started posting!

I got into geology because I wanted to go places. I remember sitting on the grass near the end of Freshman Orientation, talking to a guy in my freshman seminar about traveling. He told me that I should major in geology and then specialize in some obscure type of rocks, so I would have to go to exotic places to study them. I took his advice: I majored in geology, and then I went to grad school on a plate boundary to study high-pressure metamorphic rocks. (He also majored in geology, but went on to get a Ph.D. in Tibetan Buddhism.) I know the lure of geologically spectacular places.

So my suggestion for the "100 great geologic places" list might surprise you:

Your own backyard.

"You should talk," you might be thinking. "My FIELD CAMP goes to your backyard. But I live in the most geologically boring place in the world. I want an excuse to get out of here!"

But I'm serious. Every place has geology. Even if it's flat and buried beneath black soil. Even if it's under pavement. Even if it's covered by trees. Somewhere below you are rocks, and below that are more rocks, and eventually there are metamorphic rocks and mantle rock and on and on and on. Those rocks contain water, maybe near enough to the surface that it seeps into your basement, and maybe deep enough down that your community should worry about running out of it. Those rocks affect the types of soil that develop or the stability of very tall buildings. Your home's tectonic and climatic history created the landscape you look at, whether it's rolling hills or flat fields or mountains hidden in the smog.

Maybe you don't have a point of geologic interest along your local highway. But wherever you are, there's something. Maybe it's a roadcut. Maybe it's the boulders piled up in old fences, collected from glacial debris. Maybe it's the river the made your city great, or an old quarry, or gullies that form after it rains. Maybe it's the stone used in your buildings. (There's human history there, too. Where did the rocks come from? Are they quarried locally? Were they imported from halfway around the world?) Even concrete has a geologic source.

The best assignment I was ever given as a student was to figure out how geology had affected my hometown. There's a world of spectacular geology out there, but geology is also part of the mundane and ordinary space that we live in every day. So yeah, go over that rainbow and check out the erupting volcanoes and glaciers and shear zones and waterfalls and canyons. But then click your heels together and bring it all back with you.

There's no place like home.

Friends of volcano monitoring on Facebook

2009-02-25T10:42:00.000-08:00

I forgot my Facebook password the day after I signed up, so I can't join this. But the rest of you technologically hip people can!

Facebook friends of Volcano Monitoring

I think Maria is responsible for the creation of this group.

Edit: Maria says she wasn't responsible for setting it up - they just referred to her post to explain the group.

What makes a great paper?

2009-02-24T06:54:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season for nominating papers for awards (at least if you're a member of the GSA Structure/Tectonics Division, like I am). The division's rules are that the nominees must still be alive, but there isn't any restriction on the publication year. (In fact, last year's award was given to a paper published in 1977.)

Two summers ago, when I was preparing to teach my first ever upper-level structural geology seminar, I looked through some of these papers to try to find something to discuss. And... I chose other papers instead. I got a copy of one (Treagus and Lisle, 1997) that seemed to ask fundamental questions about the discipline, but I didn't end up using it, because it seemed too theoretical for the interests of my students. I haven't even read most of them. I've got the three books on my shelf (Pollard & Fletcher, 2006; Passchier & Trouw, 1996, and Ramsay & Huber, 1983), and have meant to read them, but in the end, I've only read sections as I needed information. (I've been meaning to read Pollard & Fletcher and blog my way through it, because I found myself needing to stop and think about the material frequently. But that's pretty far down on my to-do list right now.) And I've only read three of the papers (all while I was an undergrad). (I also recognize five more as papers that I really should have read, and that I've seen cited and listed as great papers for class discussions, and yes, I do feel guilty about not having read all of them.)

So my experience with the Best Papers is pretty limited. But at least for those three, I agree with the choices:

Davis, Suppe, & Dahlen (1983) The mechanics of fold-and-thrust belts and accretionary wedges.
I think about this paper every time I shovel my driveway. It's an important paper because it solves a big problem (how do thrust faults manage to move stuff so far?), it's led to a fruitful model for understanding mountain belts all over the world, and it's got practical use (because thrust belts are so important for oil exploration). It transformed the way that we think about one major type of structure. I don't make students read it, in part because there's a lot of math (and although it's explained very clearly, a lot of my students are math-phobic, and I want them to understand the concepts even if they get lost in algebraic manipulations). But it's also a weird paper for structural geology - so much of structural geology involves using evidence from a particular place, either field evidence or GPS or modeling. Davis et al. derived a new way of thinking of a major type of structure from first principles. Very cool, and very powerful. But as a model for "this is the way a geologic paper is written," it's an anomaly, because it's making a different kind of argument from the ones we usually make.

Platt (1986) Dynamics of orogenic wedges and the uplift of high-pressure metamorphic rocks.
I read this paper repeatedly during grad school, because it essentially inspired my dissertation. Here's the gist, for people who haven't been obsessed by (and then disillusioned with) high-pressure metamorphic rocks: blueschists are way cool, because they form at unusually low temperatures for their high pressures. The only place where they form is in subduction zones, where cold rocks are shoved into the mantle at faster speeds than heat flows - they get buried too fast to heat up. They're only found in a few places around the world, in places that used to be subduction zones (or still are, in some cases). Blueschists were yet another puzzle that was solved by plate tectonics, but in this case, the solution created another problem. If blueschists form in subduction zones, where rock is sliding down into the mantle, how do they get back to the surface? To make matters worse, the mineral assemblages that record the metamorphism can be transformed if they get heated up (which is probably the reason why there aren't many good blueschists in Vermont, or in Precambrian rocks, or in my %$&@@! dissertation field area).

John Platt proposed a solution to the problem that used Davis et al.'s wedge idea: blueschists could be exhumed during subduction (which would keep them cold) if the wedge dynamics worked out correctly. The wedge needs to keep a constant shape (according to Davis et al.'s analysis), so if you add material to the bottom of it, you can force the wedge to spread horizontally, which would move rocks toward the surface. Presto! Exhumation!

In retrospect, this paper doesn't seem as powerful as it did when I first read it. For one thing, I wonder if Davis et al.'s model works for metamorphic rocks. (The derivation is based on the behavior of brittle rocks. If the rocks are ductile - whatever combination of plastic and viscous behavior you need to explain the various deformation mechanisms - does the wedge theory actually work?) For another, the only talks I've seen that have applied the model successfully in the field have been by John Platt or his students. (Of course, I may just be cranky because there weren't any well-preserved blueschists in my dissertation area, so I couldn't test the model myself.)

The third one of the papers that I've read is Paul Hoffman (1988)'s paper on the Precambrian assembly of North America. It's an interesting example, because it's an Annual Review, not a new research paper. It's the kind of thing that I'm more likely to assign in a class, however, because it pulls together ideas from a lot of different research and summarizes it in a way that's easy to digest. I haven't used it in class, because there's been enough new research on the Precambrian geology of North America that the paper is now somewhat dated.

***

What about the rest of you? Have you read any papers on the list below? Are there any that I really should read? And what do you think a Best Paper should do - should it change the way we think? Should it inspire new research? Should it summarize the state of research in an accessible and elegant way? Should it be a nice example of how research should be done (which was how a couple of the papers awarded in this decade have been described)?

And are there any papers that really should be on this list? (How about Tanya Atwater's original paper on the San Andreas Fault - the paper that brought plate tectonics onto land? Or for metamorphic people, Phil England & Alan Thompson's paper on metamorphic pressure-temperature-time paths? Or anything about metamorphic core complexes?) Would it be better to have recent papers, to show that the field is still dynamic (no, really, it is!), or should we recognize the classic papers that have shaped the field?

For reference, here's the list of all the papers ever given the Best Paper Award, stolen from the Structure/Tectonics Division web page:

2008: Thomas, W. (1977) Evolution of Appalachian-Ouachita salients and recesses from reentrants and promontories in the continental margin. American Journal of Science 277, 1233-1278.

2007: Pollard, D.D. & Fletcher, R.C (2006) Fundamentals of Structural Geology. New York, Cambridge University Press. 512 p.

2006: Dixon, T.H, Miller, M., Farina, F., Wang, H. & Johnson, D. (2000) Present-day motion of the Sierra Nevada block and some tectonic implications for the Basin and Range province, North America Cordillera. Tectonics 19, 1-24.

2005 (2 awards): Beaumont, C., Jamieson, R.A., Nguyen, M.H. & Lee, B. (2001) Himalayan tectonics explained by extrusion of a low-viscosity crustal channel coupled to focused surface denudation. Nature 414, 738-742.

Hodges, K.V., Hurtado J.M. & Whipple, K.X. (2001) Southward extrusion of Tibetan crust and its effect on Himalayan tectonics. Tectonics 20, 799-809.

2004: Atwater, T. & Stock, J. (1998) Pacific-North America plate tectonics of the Neogene southwestern United States - An update. International Geology Review 40, 375-402.

2003: Lavé, J. & Avouac, J.P. (2000) Active folding of fluvial terraces across the Siwaliks Hills, Himalayas of central Nepal. Journal of Geophysical Research 105(B3), 5735-5770.

2002: Catuneanu, O., Beaumont, C. & Waschbusch, P.J. (1997) Interplay of static loads and subduction dynamics in foreland basins: reciprocal stratigraphies and the "missing" peripheral bulge. Geology 25(12), 1087-1090.

2001: Dunlap, W.J., Hirth, G. & Teyssier, C. (1997) Thermomechanical evolution of a ductile duplex. Tectonics 16(6), 983-1000.

2000: Passchier, C.W. & Trouw, R.A.J. (1996) Microtectonics. 289 p. Springer.

1999: Treagus, S. & Lisle, R. (1997) Do principal surfaces of stress and strain always exist. Journal of Structural Geology 19, 997-1010.

1998: Muehlberger, W. (compiler) (1992 & 1996) Tectonic Map of North America. American Association of Petroleum Geologists (two sheets).

1997: Molnar, P., England, P. & Martinod, J. (1993) Mantle dynamics, uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, and the Indian monsoon. Reviews of Geophysics 31, 357-396.

1996: Suppe, J., Chou, G.T. & Hook. S.C. (1992) Rates of folding and faulting determined from growth strata. In: Thrust Tectonics (edited by K. McClay). Chapman & Hall. London, 105-121.(Click here for citation and response)

1995: Wojtal, S. (1989) Measuring displacement gradients and strain in faulted rock. Journal of Structural Geology 11, 669-678.[awarded in 1996]

1994: Armijo, R., Tapponnier, P. & Han, T. (1989) Late Cenozoic right-lateral strike-slip faulting in southern Tibet. Journal of Geophysical Research 94, 2787-2838.

1993: Worrall, D. & Snelson, S. (1989) Evolution of the northern Gulf of Mexico, with emphasis on Cenozoic growth faulting and the role of salt. In: The geology of North America - an overview (edited by Balley, A.W. & Palmer, P.). Geological Society of America Decade of North American Geology A, 91-138.

1992: Hoffman, P. (1988) United plates of America, the birth of a craton: early Proterozoic assembly and growth of Laurentia. Annual Reviews of Earth & Planetary Sciences 16, 543-604.

1991: Pavlis, T. (1986) The role of strain heating in the evolution of megathrusts. Journal of Geophysical Research 91, 6522-6534.

1990: Engebretson, D., Cox, A. & Gordon, R. (1985) Relative motion between oceanic and continental plates in the Pacific basin: Geological Society of America Special Paper 206.

1989: Platt, J.P. (1986) Dynamics of orogenic wedges and the uplift of high-pressure metamorphic rocks. Geological Society of America Bulletin 97, 1037-1053.

1988: Simpson, C. & Schmid, S. (1983) An evaluation of the criteria to deduce the sense of movement in sheared rocks. Geological Society of America Bulletin 94, 1281-1288.

1987: Boyer, S.E. & Elliott, D. (1982) Thrust systems. Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists 66, 1196-1230

1986: Davis, D. Suppe, J. & Dahlen, F.A. (1983) The mechanics of fold-and-thrust belts and accretionary wedges. Journal of Geophysical Research 88, 10087-10101.

1985: Ramsay, J.G. & Huber, M. (1983) The techniques of modern structural geology: Volume 1: Strain analysis. 307 p. Academic Press.

1984: Coney, P.J., Jones, D.L. & Monger, J.W.H. (1980) Cordilleran suspect terranes. Nature 288, 329-333.

Wayne Ranney speaking at Four Corners Geological Society

2009-02-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

Wayne Ranney, co-author of Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau and blogger at Earthly Musings, will be speaking at the Four Corners Geological Society meeting in Durango on Friday.

Place: Fort Lewis College College Union Building, Student Memorial Lounge
Date: Friday, February 27
Time: 5:30 pm social hour, 6:30 pm dinner, 7:30 pm talk
Cost: $20 for dinner, $5 for talk only (talk is free for students)

If you're planning to come, let me know - I'm the Durango contact (and am in charge of making sure there's the right amount of food).

A Google Earth explosion!

2009-02-22T12:10:00.000-08:00

I'm only teaching a writing class this semester, so I haven't been hunting down Google Earth files as much as I do when I'm teaching my intro class. So I hadn't realized what a fantastic collection San Diego State has put together!

- The geologic map of the Grand Canyon

- Grids showing all of the USGS's 7.5 minute, 30x60, and 1X2 degree map boundaries. (Need to find a paper map? Don't know the quad? Now you can fly to it. This is going to make scouting field camp locations so much easier...)

- World gravity and magnetic anomaly maps. (Plus plate boundaries and faults, which I had already been using.) There's geophysics/tectonics exercise just waiting to happen.

- Magnetic declination and inclination all over the world. (I need this for my sophomore mapping class.)

And my favorite: Ron Blakey's paleogeography globes...

... because the world was round 300 million years ago, too. And I, at least, have a hard time putting research from other parts of the world into a mental model.

Ron Schott wants to build a Google Earth geology layer, which would make it easier to find all this cool stuff. If you're drooling nearly as much as I am, go to his post and tell him what you're interested in.

Hard work, grades, and study strategies

2009-02-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

There was an article in the New York Times last week about students' grade expectations. (Summary: student expect high grades, especially if they feel that they worked hard. Professors disagree.) Much commentary ensued, at the NYT, in academic blogs, like Female Science Professor, and in my work e-mail.

Like most professors, I think my grades mean something. Exactly what depends on the class. Usually the grade says something about my confidence that the student will be able to use the concepts and skills from the class in future work, either in classes, research, or a job. But then there are general education classes, where the students could be anything from future geologists to future teachers to people who will need to live on this planet for the rest of their lives - I'm less confident that my grading methods match my goals for all of those students. But I keep trying.

I've never had a student formally challenge a grade in one of my classes, but every semester I've got students who do poorly on the first exam or paper, and want to do better on the next ones. And that's where it gets tough: if hard work isn't enough for a good grade, what kind of advice do you give to a student who wants to do better?

Like most professors, I suspect, I've got quite a collection of ideas about how to study effectively, and how to get better at doing things that aren't easy. Sketch and label diagrams from the textbook or lecture. Write definitions of unfamiliar words. Get together with friends and explain things to one another. Try to write questions that I might put on an exam. Etc., etc., etc. But they don't always work.

I heard an incredibly depressing geoscience education talk at last fall's GSA (McConnell, 2008). Dave McConnell had students report the strategies they used for studying in their intro class, and coded them as "rehearsal" (such as re-reading notes or the textbook), "elaboration" (such as many of my suggestions, I think - writing definitions or labeling sketches), and "organization" (such as outlining or categorizing material). And the correlation to class performance? None. (Well, except for one outlier, who did nothing and got a grade of 20 or so on the exam.) All of the students preferred to use the easier study strategies (such as reading notes or memorizing terms), and disliked the more difficult ones (such as drawing pictures or writing summaries) - the students who did well in the class didn't use the more challenging strategies any more than the struggling students did. Nothing seemed to help - some students just did well, and some students did poorly.

When I came home from the meeting, I graded my intro class's first exam, returned it, and told the students who got D's or F's to come talk to me. And then I had no idea what to tell them. I had just heard this talk that showed that effort had no effect on mastery of the course material, and there I was, trying to tell students how to study for their next test. What was I going to say? "You know, when I took tests, I just re-read my notes, took the test, and got an A. Except for math classes - I never studied for them at all. So good luck, and I have no idea what I'm talking about - and I'm not sure the geoscience education researchers know, either." No way. I teach certain material, give certain assignments, and put specific questions on tests because I think they're important, either as life skills or as knowledge about the world we live on. I want the students to do well enough to get A's or B's, not because it would make us all feel better, but because if they don't, they've missed something worth knowing.

I gave the students the same advice. And met with some of the same students after the second exam, to keep brainstorming new strategies for learning.

I hope that somebody does a study that focuses on struggling students, because I want to know what strategies help people learn better. I don't want to be a gate-keeper, separating students who would succeed no matter what they did from students who aren't going to make it. I want to help people get over barriers, or open doors, or... well, pick your metaphor. This planet is too cool and too important for geology to be restricted to those that learn it easily.

High metal concentrations in fluid inclusions?

2009-02-18T20:27:00.000-08:00

I've got a question for any readers with expertise in ore deposits. There's a paper in the Feb. 6 issue of Science (Wilkinson et al; discussion of paper here; warning: paywall) about anomalously high concentrations of metals found in fluid inclusions in ore minerals. I'm curious what you think, and whether the conclusions have practical implications for mineral exploration.

Here are the basics, as far as I understand them. Hot water traveling through rock is responsible for depositing many of the ore deposits that we use for metals. (There are exceptions - iron, for instance.) In previous work, the concentration of metals in the hot water has been estimated from the tiny bits of fluid trapped in quartz or other minerals in ore deposits, but not in the ore minerals themselves. (The quartz has been interpreted as having formed at the same time as the ore minerals, but the study authors argue that it's difficult to be certain.) The concentrations of the metals in those inclusions are fairly low, which means that a lot of water would need to have traveled through the rock in order to form the ore deposits.

This study measured the amount of metals in fluid inclusions in the minerals quartz and sphalerite (zinc sulfide) from two different lead-zinc deposits (one from a Mississippi-Valley-Type deposit in Arkansas, and one from a higher temperature deposit in Ireland). In both cases, the concentration of metals (especially lead) were one to two orders of magnitude higher in the sphalerite. That's a huge difference, and would mean that much smaller amounts of water (and shorter amounts of time) may be necessary to form economic mineral deposits. It also means that the processes that collect and concentrate dissolved metals may be more important in making an ore deposit than the processes that cause them to be precipitated.

But the commentary said that both experiments and theoretical models (I'm not sure which, exactly - thermodynamic models?) predicted lower concentrations than those observed, so I'm curious exactly how big of a problem these observations are for ore geochemistry. (This study dealt with lead-zinc deposits, but the commentary mentioned that other studies had found similar results for copper and gold.) This paper talked about ways that lead and zinc could be concentrated, by evaporation of brines, but I'm not sure what processes might control the concentration of copper or gold in deeper deposits. Does it change the way one might explore, or are the targets the same regardless of whether we understand the source of the fluids or not? (Would understanding this problem make it easier to guess which sites wouldn't have economic concentrations of metals?)

References:

Wilkinson, J.J., Stoffell, B., Wilkinson, C.C., Jeffries, T.E., and Appold, M.S., 2009, Anomalously metal-rich fluids form hydrothermal ore deposits: Science, v. 323, p. 764-767.

Perspective: Bodnar, Robert J., 2009, Heavy metals or punk rocks? Science, v. 323, p. 724-725.

Surveys, succeeding in Earth Science classes, and playing outside

2009-02-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

I'm still thinking about the ACT survey about what students should know before coming into a college Earth Science class. The survey listed all sorts of important Earth Science topics, things that I cover in my class, and I wasn't sure what to say about them. Yes, if students had mastered them before coming to college, they would probably do well in my class... because those are the same general topics that my class covers. I hope my classes are interesting enough that students won't get bored even if they've already encountered the material, but I usually assume that my students don't know anything about geology. (In Colorado, high schools can choose whether to offer Earth Science or not, and the majority of my students haven't taken it.)

So I've been thinking... what experiences would help students succeed in my class? It would be nice if students came to college with just a little bit of comfort in chemistry and physics and math, if they could balance a chemical reaction and understand a little about equilibrium, if they knew the Ideal Gas Law, if they had a gut-level understanding of density and velocity, if they were comfortable converting units and setting up simple word problems (like rate x time = distance), if they knew what a logarithm was. I would love to teach an intro class where I could build on that knowledge. But, in general, I can't, so I teach my classes so that students can learn some geology anyway (I hope).

But there is one thing I would like kids to have done before they come to my class:

Spent time outside.

I'm not talking about spending weeks hiking with a map and compass, or filling their packs with rocks. (Though if they're into that, I've got a major for them. Senior research project, too.) I'm talking about simply going outside and playing. Throwing sticks in a river. Building a sand castle, and trying to figure out how to keep it from collapsing. Running away from ocean waves. Lying on the ground and watching the clouds go by. Flying a kite in the wind. Running away from their shadows. Catching snowflakes on their tongues and mittens, and seeing if any two snowflakes really are the same. Pretending to be the bear that went over the mountain (or maybe the little hill), to see what it could see. Trying to dig a hole through the center of the earth – extra points if it's on a beach, and the hole fills with water. Going out in a rainstorm, and watching the water run off the pavement or down the road. Sledding down a hill.

These are things I can work with. If even some of the students have done each of these things, if some of them nod when I ask about them, or bring up their observations and experiences when we're out in lab talking about how a river behaves, then I've got something to build on. And if they had fun outside as a kid, they're more likely to enjoy being outside during lab, and be able to learn instead of being uncomfortable because it's too cold (or hot, or windy, or buggy). And if the outside sparked their curiosity, they're more likely to ask questions and struggle with the material, even if the language is unfamiliar, the math is hard, or the spatial thinking is weird.

I've got the address to send the survey to ACT, and I'm going to say something about this. I have no idea how a standardized test could encourage parents and schools to promote outdoor play – maybe it can't. But if we tell the test-writers that this is important, maybe the message will eventually get through.

(If it's not obvious, I've just started reading Last Child in the Woods, and it's making me worried about the future of teaching geology.)

No, misrepresentations about the process of science don't help prepare Earth Science students

2009-02-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

I filled out a survey for ACT (the group that does one of the college admissions tests, I think) yesterday, and it's been bugging me ever since. The purpose of the survey was to find out what people who teach college-level Earth Science courses think students should know before they come into the class (or at least, what kinds of things help them succeed). There was a section on experience doing science... and all the questions were about experiments. Should students know how to design an experiment? Should they know about controls? Should they do double-blind experiments, or be able to predict how a different experimental design would affect the results?

Experiments are part of science. But not of all science. Dear ACT: scientists don't necessarily wear lab coats and play with Ehrlenmeyer flasks.

(Apologies to XKCD.)

I wrote a rant on the comment page at the end of the survey, suggesting that ACT look at some great websites dealing with the process of science (UC Berkeley's Understanding Science, Visionlearning). But it still bugs me (especially because I lost the envelope to return the survey, so ACT may never see my rant). The limited view of science (and the scientific method) that's predominant in K-12 books hinders student understanding of Earth Science. (Was plate tectonics recognized by controlled experiments? If it wasn't, does that mean it's not really science?) And it plays into the popular misunderstandings of topics like global climate change. (Or evolution - Darwin's work was based on observing the natural world. It's really cool that the idea of evolution by natural selection has become a unifying theory for a science that now involves plenty of experiments and lab work.)

I would like my incoming students have an idea for how science works - but not the misconceptions implied by the survey.

Feb to-read list from Geology

2009-02-07T19:53:00.001-08:00

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).

High points

2009-02-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

It's morph-the-meme time! Callan started it by asking people to tell which of the US state high points they had visited. ReBecca, Geology Happens, and Silver Fox responded. Hypocentre adapted it to the UK. And then Geotripper changed it into a story about one peak experience.

I've only climbed three state high points: Mauna Kea (by car), Elbert (Colorado), and Katahdin (Maine). I've been to more 2nd highest peaks, actually - Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. (I climbed everything in Vermont higher than 4000 feet... except for Mt. Mansfield. Don't know why.) And I circumnavigated the high point of Massachusetts last year, after finding that the roads to the top were closed. My husband has done more - Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. But I've been to the top of Katahdin several times, and I've got an old essay about climbing it that I can dust off and post here...

It was more than thirty years ago, my first time climbing Katahdin. 1978. The photos of me at the top show a rather dorky-looking girl, with a Dorothy Hamill haircut that needed a trim, thick glasses, wide-legged jeans, and a bright orange backpack with the shoulder straps tied together in front because they couldn't be adjusted down to my size.

Climbing the mountain wasn't my idea. It wasn't even my father's idea. A family friend had a long tradition of climbing the mountain regularly, and was planning to take his 11-year-old daughter along, and asked my father and I if we wanted to go as well. We said yes.

We climbed the mountain from the southwest side, along the Appalachian Trail. The trail started gently enough, climbing slowly through the mixed hardwood and evergreen forest typical of once-logged places in that part of the state. There is a spectacular waterfall about a mile after the trailhead. After the waterfall, fewer people followed the trail, and it continued to climb. And it climbed. And climbed. Still in the woods, still climbing. Two miles, three miles. An Appalachian Trail through-hiker wearing a frame pack passed us as if we were standing still. Finally, the trees started to get smaller, turning into the twisted little evergreens that grow near treeline all over New England. And then, at about 4000 feet, we came out into the open. I hadn't realized how high we had come with all that climbing. The view made me dizzy. And there ahead of us, the white blazes continued up, painted on rocks now. The trail followed a broad ridge -- I can tell that now looking at a topo map, but I wasn't aware of it then. All I was aware of was the immensity of space below me, and the size and exposure of the rocks I had to crawl over to get to the next white blaze. Our friends led the way up, and I, terrified, followed them. I don't know how I made it over those rocks. I think I may have stopped and cried and told my dad that I couldn't do it, but I don't remember. If I didn't say "I can't," I certainly thought it. At one point we reached a wall of granite, and the blazes on it said that the way to go was up. There was an iron handhold drilled into the rock. My dad helped lift me up, and our friend pulled me up from the top, and I was past it. From that handhold, there was no turning back. I couldn't quit -- not without having to face that handhold a second time. So I kept going.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity of scrambling (though it was no further than a mile), we reached the Tableland. Katahdin is flat on top -- at least on the southwest side. Flat, and covered with a jumble of lichen-covered rocks and little alpine flowers and signs warning that the vegetation is fragile, so stay on the marked trail. The marked trail went across the Tableland and to a second, much gentler ridge that let to Baxter Peak.

When you're on Baxter Peak, you know you're at the highest point in Maine -- 13 feet short of a mile high, with a large cairn that tries to make up the difference, as if those 13 feet are the source of all the state's insecurities. The north woods stretch around you in all directions like a dark green shag carpet. The other mountains look tiny. The lakes are the only thing that breaks up the forest -- well, the lakes and the clearcuts. And to the south, that year, we could see the scars of a forest fire that had burned a few years before. On a clear day, they say you can see the coast, but I must never have climbed Katahdin on a truly clear day. Certainly the top of Katahdin tells how great the trees-to-people ratio of northern Maine is.

It is the nearby topography that is the most spectacular, though. The climb to the peak is gentle from the west, but the eastern side of the peak is a near-vertical drop, down a cirque filled with the blue (or gray on a cloudy day) waters of Chimney Pond. From the peak, it felt like you could easily fall and land in the pond's middle. Technical climbers scale that wall. To the south of the peak, there is an arrete called the Knife Edge. And a knife-edge is what it looks like -- a ridge that is no wider than a yard in places, with 1000 foot drops on either side. A popular route to the top follows the Knife Edge. I looked at that ridge, and the people on it heading for the peak, in horror. It is still the only trail to the top of Katahdin that I have never hiked.

We descended by a different trail, the Abol Trail, which ends at another campground on the southwest side of the mountain. The Abol Trail is a much more direct route to the top than the Hunt Trail... which means it goes straight up. Or in our case, straight down. It follows an old rock slide, which means that a hiker descending the trail frequently feels like she is at the angle of repose herself, ready to tumble down the mountain in the middle of an avalanche. I did as much of my descent as possible on my rear end. After a painfully slow, too-exposed-for-my-tastes descent, we finally reached woods again. My dad couldn't believe how fast I hiked once I was on level ground again -- it was as if I wasn't at all tired.

That day on Katahdin wasn't the first time I realized I was afraid of heights, but it was the most memorable. I've been consciously fighting that fear ever since. I've been to the top of Katahdin at least four times since then, and I've climbed the steep part of other trails a few other times but abandoned the hike short of the top due to bad weather. I coaxed a college friend without a sense of balance up one trail, while hiding my own terror. I climbed a particularly steep, exposed trail called the Cathedral Trail with another geo-woman -- she was impressed by its difficulty, though she had spent time climbing mountains in Colorado.

Since my days climbing Katahdin, I have faced scarier climbs. I spent a summer in Colorado, working for the USGS and climbing 14,000 foot mountains on my weekends off -- there, I learned to scree ski and how to get down a too-steep slope without falling or losing my balance. I spent two summers mapping in a treeless mountain range in northern Alaska, trying to keep up with large men with no patience for young women who were afraid of heights. The Kigluaiks ("sawteeth" in Inupiak) were a mountain range made almost entirely of Knife Edge-like arretes. In Alaska, I not only had to walk the Knife Edges -- I had to scramble down their sides with a pack full of rocks and very little food to eat. Katahdin might seem easy to me now. But it still looms very large in my mind.

Titles and respect

2009-02-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I was introduced as "Dr. Hannula" to a class of kindergarteners. Doesn't that sound pompous?

Let me back up a bit. Because I'm part-time this semester, I had time to go to my son's 100 Days of Kindergarten celebration and help out in class. He's been asking why I can't come to school with him - his friends' moms, including one who is an M.D. doctor, have, so why not me? So on Tuesday, I went to kindergarten and helped kids count out 100 raisins and Cheerios for their snack.

Apparently, my son told his teacher that I should be called "Dr. Hannula." I vaguely remember a conversation at home about this, in which my husband told my son that I was a Ph.D. "doctor," and I guess it must have made an impression. At least it avoids the Miss/Ms./Mrs. weirdness - I'm married, but I kept my last name, and "Mrs." always makes me feel like I'm on the Brady Bunch or something. So when the teacher asked if I wanted to be called "Dr. Hannula," I shrugged and said "Sure!"

The experience caught me off guard, in part, because of all the discussion in the blogosphere about what to call Jill Biden, Ph.D., adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College, and wife of the vice-president of the United States. I'd been thinking more about honorifics, and especially about the sense that people who have earned respect (such as Richard Feynman) don't need titles.

My perspective is a bit warped by being a geologist. We're a notoriously casual discipline, as anyone who has noticed the dress code (or lack thereof) at our conferences could tell you. When I was an undergrad, my role models were Shelby, Mary, Dave, and Ed; in grad school, I added Elizabeth, Louie, and Gary to the list. So when I got my Ph.D. and waltzed into the classroom a week later, I introduced myself as "Kim," and that fit in perfectly with Ray, Pat, Tom, Lucy, and Grant.

But here's the thing. There's something cool and grown-up about being invited to call a respected authority figure by his first name. But what happens when the authority figure doesn't look right - when the authority figure looks more like your sister than your dad? I didn't realize this immediately, but I've seen plenty of hints that women professors have to prove themselves before they earn the respect that male professors get the moment they walk into the classroom and hand out the syllabi. I may have undermined my teaching at my first job by assuming that all I needed to do was explain complex stuff clearly and be tough but fair in my grading - by assuming that I didn't need to prove myself to my students. Just maybe, if I had gone by "Dr. H." when I was 27, I could have avoided getting creepy anonymous notecards on the first day of class.

Going by "Dr." isn't going to earn me respect, any more than wearing Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat will let me sing about it. But maybe by being "Dr." to a group of kindergarteners, I can help change their expectations. And in twelve years, they might walk into my classroom and feel all grown-up when I tell them that they can call me "Kim."

Prepping students for class discussions

2009-02-03T06:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a lot of help from geobloggers and other friends, I was able to give my students some interesting examples of proposals yesterday. Tomorrow, I'm hoping for a good discussion of the various ways that proposal-writers pitch their ideas to people with money. I've told students how to write proposals before - for eight years, actually - but I'm never fully satisfied by what goes on in class. I've told them about the typical structure of an NSF grant, but none of my most recent grants (from a local non-profit and from the college's small pot of money) have followed that model, and neither have successful student grant proposals. So I'm trying to have a different discussion this time, and I need the students to read and think about the proposals if the discussion is to be useful.

I am terrible at leading discussions. If the students come into class ready to ask questions and argue, things go well; if they aren't, I don't know what to do. Sometime in the mid-90's, I got a useful suggestion from Barb Tewksbury at a GSA workshop: give the students some kind of pre-discussion exercise, something to focus their thinking. Not the discussion questions themselves, but some kind of springboard. (There's an explanation of one technique for doing this at SERC: Just in Time Teaching.) But I'm not very good at applying the advice.

This semester, I want to make better use of all the writing examples I've collected, so I'm trying to do various pre-discussion assignments. In this case, I wanted students to read both the calls for proposals and the proposals themselves, so I asked students to think about the audience, and look at what was included or left out of each proposal, and then to look at the proposal's structure. When we get to class on Wednesday, I'm going to pair students up - each proposal (or set of short proposals) was read by two students - and ask them... something. Maybe, rather than asking them the same questions I asked as preparation, I'll ask something different: who is the audience for each proposal, what does the audience care about, and how does the proposal sell its idea to the audience. There are six groups of proposals total, so there should be time for each of the teams to report back and for the class as a whole to try to make generalizations.

I didn't ask the students to write anything down before class, and that may hurt the discussion. (If the students have to turn something in, even if it's just part of a participation grade, they're more likely to take the assignment seriously.) I thought about doing all this online - I can set up discussion boards in our course management software - but I decided not to. (I like the idea of online discussions, but my students don't all have good internet connections at home. Things that work where students live in dorms with wifi don't work so well for rural commuter students who have dial-up, if anything.) So we'll see whether I made a mistake by not planning any kind of obvious accountability into the pre-class assignment.

I hope I learn something from this - my own ideas about what makes an effective proposal are as vague as definitions of obscenity: I know it when I see it. At the very least, maybe my students will learn to recognize what works before they send off a proposal that doesn't.

(Of course, the best way to teach students to write is to make them write (and give them lots of feedback), and believe me, there's plenty of that in this class. I'm just tweaking things to try to make it more effective.)

Artistic* response to Redoubt and Asama alerts

2009-02-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

* Kindergarten art, that is.

My five-year-old was looking on while I read the geology blog feed this morning, and was impressed by the images of Redoubt and Asama on Eruptions and The Volcanism Blog. So he responded with his own volcano art:

Those are two giant rivers of lava on each side of the volcano, and an extremely shallow sill feeding the eruption. And I think the magma chamber is sitting on top of a loosely packed gravel deposit. This is the first of four pictures, which illustrate show lightning strikes that penetrate into the mantle, a gigantic landslide (which somehow ends up on the opposite side of the volcano from its scarp), and a hurricane that eventually cools the lava.

This may be evidence that my child will grow up to work on a combined re-make of Dante's Peak, Volcano, and In the Path of a Killer Volcano.

(By the way... why does WGBH have a picture of Pu'u O'o on the cover of a movie about Pinatubo now? The original image was the right volcano, if I remember correctly. BTW, if anyone is looking for a good volcano movie to show in class, I recommend In the Path of a Killer Volcano, even with the wrong volcano on the cover. Real life is more dramatic than fiction in some cases.)

The dam and the Sichuan Earthquake

2009-01-27T19:56:00.000-08:00

I get Science via Pony Express plowing through snow over the Continental Divide, I suspect, so I didn't see this news article until a couple of days ago:

A Human Trigger for the Great Quake of Sichuan?

The article is behind a paywall, so I'll try to summarize it: Last year's devastating M 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan, China may have been triggered by the Zipingpu Dam. At least, that was implied by an AGU talk (which I didn't see) by Christian Klose, and by an independent article in the Chinese journal Geology and Seismology. Klose's argument is that the weight of water changed stresses on the fault in exactly the wrong way: it increased the shear stresses (which make the fault more likely to slide), and decreased the normal stresses (which prevent slip). His evidence includes the type of fault slip (especially the initial slip) and the depth of the majority of the aftershocks. I don't have quite the right background to evaluate his evidence (especially based only on the abstract), but Science reporters Richard Kerr and Richard Stone describe the reaction at AGU like this: "Klose's listeners were intrigued but far from convinced. They wanted to hear more details about changing water levels and local, lower-level seismicity."

This isn't the typical fluid-induced earthquake, caused by an increase in pore fluid pressure. The Sichuan earthquake nucleated 20 km below the ground surface, and that's an awfully long distance from the water source near the surface. It sounds as though the size of the reservoir, the location of the reservoir compared to the fault, and the direction of fault slip may have combined in just the wrong way... if the reservoir was what made the fault slip then.

The dam would still be a trigger, rather than a cause, for the earthquake. The cause, ultimately, is the collision of India with Asia. (As Klose states in his abstract, "This region has been tectonically loaded for >10kyr.") But the dam could explain some of the surprising things about the earthquake - for instance, why a fault that was thought to slip every 2000 to 10,000 years would have gone now, with such horrible consequences.

It's intriguing and scary... and terrible. The earthquake was tragic enough. If humans were responsible for triggering it... well, I don't want to think about it.

(Except that I'm teaching a course inspired by John McPhee's book The Control of Nature in May, and I'm trying to decide which possible case studies to use this time.)

(H/T to Sciencewoman, who told me to watch for this news article... two weeks ago. I've finally seen it!)

Arm-waving in class is good

2009-01-25T20:01:00.000-08:00

I wave my arms a lot. Maybe too much, given how often chalk flies out of my hands. Fortunately, that might be a good thing pedagogically, according to a recent column in the Journal of Geoscience Education (Kastens et al., 2008).

Because structural geology is, at its core, a spatial discipline, I'm constantly using my hands to try to help students see what I'm seeing in a rock, or on a map, or in a thin section. Sometimes that means pointing at things when I name them. (Those are "deictic gestures" to people who study them, and they're useful for helping students understand what I'm talking about, even if I'm using words that are new to them.) And sometimes I use my hands to mimic a shape: a fold, a tilted rock layer, a pair of offset sides of a fault. (Those are "iconic gestures.")

It's good to hear that the hand-waving is useful, but I worry a little about applying some of the advice for instructors. It makes sense – point at things, keep the gestures consistent with the words, use gestures to show shape or movement, act out instructions, make sure students can see the gestures. But I wonder whether some of my gestures are just too weird or confusing, especially because I have a bad habit of confusing left and right (or east and west, and it doesn't help to have lived on both coasts of North America). I also worry, sometimes, that I'm asking awkward things of students when I enlist their help in modeling some shapes. (It's hard to show multiple planes and the lines that are perpendicular to them with only two hands, and for better or worse, I am not Kali.)

The advice about instructor gestures made sense, but it was the advice about student gestures that I found most thought-provoking. The authors suggest paying attention to the gestures students make – when students make gestures that don't match their words, they're at a point where they could learn. Forcing students to gesture apparently doesn't work (which is too bad for me – I frequently ask students to show me the orientation of a layer with their hands). But setting up situations where students are more likely to gesture – making them explain a map, or show one another the reasons why they think a rock formed in a certain way, can be good. (It sounds like I need to keep doing some of the time-consuming activities in my intro class – discussions in which the students work with one another on confusing samples or diagrams.)

But I probably should avoid dropping the chalk, or falling over the garbage can – at least, unless I'm acting out the experience of an earthquake.

Reference: Kastens, K.A., Agrawal, S., and Liben, L.S., 2008, Research in Science Education: the role of gestures in geoscience teaching and learning: Journal of Geoscience Education, v. 54, p. 362-368. (Although many columns in this series are available online, this one is not, at least as of January, 2009.)

Citing references outside academia/government?

2009-01-24T19:34:00.000-08:00

Here's another question on writing done by geoscientists outside academia. How do you give credit for work done by others?

In academia (and anywhere else where research is done, including government and industry), citing references is necessary both to put work in context and for ethical reasons. And in classes, it's a huge deal. But the typical citation styles used by geoscientists (whether the USGS style, AGU, or other journal styles) can be pretty distracting - you're reading a perfectly clear sentence, and then it's broken by an entire line of parenthetical references:

(Hatch, 1987; Hatch, 1988; Moench et al., 1995; Rankin, 1996)

My students frequently complain about this reference style - the names don't mean anything to them. So I wonder about other audiences, especially in industries where your audience wants to get to the point, as quickly and clearly as possible.

There are plenty of cases beyond academia (and government or industry research) in which a geologist is likely to rely on work done by someone else. New field work is expensive (and drilling holes even more so); if you can use existing maps, published geochemistry or structure or stratigraphy, I imagine that a good mining or petroleum geologist could identify likely targets. There might be useful information in USGS maps, state survey data, dissertations... all sorts of places besides proprietary data. And if demand for a commodity makes new types of plays profitable (such as is going on now with shale gas or coal-bed methane), then I imagine that all sorts of old studies could become valuable (such as dissertations on joints in the Marcellus Shale, or old proprietary data about areas that weren't economic a couple decades ago). So, if you're working in exploration, and you're writing an internal report about an area that deserves further exploration, how do you cite the old studies? (Do you write an executive summary that management can skim, and give references in documents aimed at other geologists?)

(If you haven't guessed, I'm still thinking about justifying the academic writing my class is doing. I've become more and more aware that I'm not training academics, for the most part, and my own experience just isn't adequate.)

Stuff I've written elsewhere

2009-01-20T06:46:00.000-08:00

I have a guest post up at Sciencewomen (which is a great women-in-science blog, written by two very cool women, in case you're not already reading it). It's about a day in the life of a professor at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI, in NSF-speak).

And I haven't posted here in a week.

(Meanwhile, in related news, here's an article in the science pages of the New York Times: In 'Geek Chic' and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science. I'm surprised it doesn't mention the new head of NOAA, though.)

New blog carnival: Carnival of the Arid

2009-01-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

Hey, geoblogosphere! There's a new carnival coming up: Carnival of the Arid.

From the call for posts:

Submissions should have something to do with a desert somewhere in the world. (If you’re not sure whether your work is desert-related, check out this definition at Wikipedia, and if you’re still not sure, send it in anyway.) Submissions can be scientific in nature, or history, or travelog. Images are welcome, photographic or otherwise. Discussions of culture and politics are welcome if they’re desert-related. The one restriction, other than geographical, is that — at least when I’m compiling it — paeans to destroying the desert probably won’t make it. (Developers and ORVers take note.) Paeans to preserving or protecting the desert are fine, as are alerts of current pressing issues.

Sounds like something the geoblogosphere could definitely contribute to - and broaden our audience, in the process. So those of you who have lived in or taken pictures of deserts*... well, here's carnival for you.

*Apologies to any desert-rat geobloggers to whom I didn't link!

Wildcatting for water in New Mexico

2009-01-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

This joke runs through my head every time I drive to Albuquerque.

Q: What's the easiest thing to grow in the desert?
A: Subdivisions.

In the eight years I've lived here, I've watched the northwestern suburbs of Albuquerque expand along the southwestern side of US 550. It's still a beautiful drive... there are just a lot more houses there, beside the new Home Depot.

Albuquerque sits on the Rio Grande, which you might think would be a great source of water. But water rights along the rivers of the western US are complicated, and Albuquerque has historically used groundwater as its primary water source. This year it began using water pumped across the Continental Divide from tributaries of the Colorado River - New Mexico hadn't historically been using the water it was allocated through the Colorado River Compact. But for a growing city, it's not enough.

So now deeper groundwater - brackish water, saltier than you would want to drink - is being considered as a possible water source.

Albuquerque journalist John Fleck has a fantastic piece (ad-gated) in last weekend's Albuquerque Journal about the laws - or rather, lack of laws - governing the deep water:

All up and down the wild mesa lands and valleys to the west of the Albuquerque metro area, holes are being drilled and claims are being staked by developers who believe they can bring the brackish water to the surface, clean it up and use it to water subdivisions stretching to the horizon.

When the Legislature convenes Jan. 20, it will again be asked to deal with the problem, closing the loophole in state law that leaves the deep, brackish water unregulated, creating what the state's top water official, state Engineer John D'Antonio, has called "a free-for-all."

He also has some more details in discussions in his work blog. It's great thinking, combining an understanding of economics and human behavior with a realistic picture of groundwater:

The most obvious example comes with hydrogeologic connections between the deep brackish water and shallower aquifers, or surface water. Through fractures in the bedrock, it is possible that when you pump out the deep aquifer, water could drain down from shallower aquifers above, or even from surface water.

Hooray for understanding the potential problems associated with fluid flow through fractured media, and for communicating those issues to the rest of the world.

The entire issue - drilling for brackish groundwater - is just stunning to me. I mean, I know that there's water in rock down deeper than the stuff we think of as aquifers. (There's even water in what little pore spaces exist in metamorphic rocks.) But I'm not used to thinking of it as useful to humans. In the coal-bed methane fields south of Durango, brackish water is pumped out to release the methane, and is disposed of as waste. (Not dangerously toxic, but something that generates an outcry when there are rumors of it being pumped into rivers.) But it's water - and it may be useful too.

Albuquerque's already thinking about it. And it makes me wonder how Colorado, or Arizona, or other states in the high desert think about currently useless water - and whether a population that commonly thinks that groundwater consists of underground lakes is prepared to address the problem.

Job opportunities: AWG's Geologist in the Park program

2009-01-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Association for Women Geoscientists has just announced their Geologist-in-the-Park positions for 2009. These are temporary positions, usually for the summer, for women geoscientists to work with the staff of specific national parks, sharing their expertise. In the past, the positions have been aimed at professionals or graduate students, but all the announcements this year invited advanced undergraduates to apply.

The specifc positions for 2009 are:

NPS Headquarters and Unspecified Parks of applicant’s choice
Storm Hazard Analyst

The GIP will assist with a project assessing the storm vulnerability of natural and cultural resources in coastal national park units and contribute to ongoing research or develop a unique project within the larger on-going NPS study. A thorough understanding of how past storm events have impacted coastal parks is critical to improved management of these resources, particularly within the context of rising sea level, a cycle of increasing storm frequency and continued coastal development. The participant is encouraged to submit brief outlines (less than one page) for potential projects in specific coastal parks. This project is an excellent opportunity to fund storm hazard research that would benefit both the participant and National Park Service. The work location is flexible. The participant may work either in the NPS Lakewood CO office, independently from her home, or in a park. More information about park units can be found at http://www.nps.gov/

Applicants should be advanced undergraduate or graduate students whose educational background and career objectives are in coastal environments. Applicants must have completed basic undergraduate course work toward a degree in geology, biology, environmental science, engineering or a related field. Students who are beginning graduate or undergraduate thesis projects, are especially encouraged to apply. Professional level applicants are also welcome to apply. Experience with ARCGIS 9.x is preferred.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
Geologist

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is a World Heritage Site and includes part of one of the best preserved Permian-aged reef complexes in the world. The rock has preserved an ancient sponge-algal reef and the environments associated with the reef. The park also contains Carlsbad Caverns, one of most spectacular caves in the world.

The GIP will conduct field mapping onto aerial photographs and topographic maps at a scale of 1:24,000. This includes measuring stratigraphic sections, bedding attitudes, fault orientations, and other measurements. The participant will use a GPS to identify the locations of measured sections, geologic contacts, fault locations, and other field measurements. The participant will also use GPS to georeference measured sections and field study sites from previous published studies. The work will involve hiking over rugged desert terrain in a variety of conditions that may include a wide temperature range (40-100 degrees, depending on time of year), high winds, and inclement weather. Elevations may range from 3,000 to 5,000 feet.

Applicants should be advanced undergraduate or graduate students whose educational background and career objectives are in geology. Applicants must have completed basic undergraduate course work toward a degree in geology, and must have some experience with basic geologic field mapping techniques. Applicants must be able to read topographic maps and be able to navigate unmarked terrain using a compass, maps, and aerial photographs. Students who plan to pursue geology as a career, or those with a strong interest in field geology or carbonate geology, are encouraged to apply. Professional level applicants are also welcome to apply. The applicant should be able to work well independently and be comfortable working solo in rugged, sometimes remote terrain (a field radio will be supplied and must be carried by all personnel working in the backcountry).

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado
Paleontologist
May 26 to August 14, 2009

The Florissant Formation preserves an abundant flora and fauna of fossil plants and insects that were deposited in late Eocene (34 million-year-old) lake shales. The participant will assist with ongoing projects relating to the paleontologic resources of the monument. Primary responsibilities will be on a new excavation project to collect fossil plants and insects from the late Eocene Florissant Formation, and on the monument's ongoing project to inventory and monitor fossil sites. Other duties may include some of the following: preparation and curation of fossil specimens, inventory of collections, updating database from field observations, compilation of a manual to document fossil sites, and assisting visiting researchers. The participant may have an option to use up to 50% of the time for research if they have a research plan defined and approved beforehand, and especially if they can develop it into a graduate thesis project. Work time will be split between office, lab, and field, according to project needs.

Applicants should be advanced undergraduate or graduate students whose educational background and career objectives are in paleontology. Applicants must have completed basic undergraduate course work toward a degree in geology or biology, with an emphasis in paleontology. Students who plan to pursue paleontology as a career, or those who are beginning graduate or undergraduate thesis projects, are especially encouraged to apply. Professional level applicants are also welcome to apply. Experience with Access database is preferred. The applicant should be able to work well independently.

The deadline is usually April 1, but this year the deadline will be flexible, and the first well-qualified applicant is likely to be hired for each position. If you're interested, contact the park in question as soon as possible for more information.

The Lab Lemming has a job (and good advice)!

2009-01-11T06:44:00.000-08:00

Fingers crossed here, but it looks like the Lab Lemming has a job. And he's also got some advice worth remembering:

My best leads and tentative offers came from non-geologists with whom I had interacted professionally- representatives of instrument manufacturers, contractors, government agency personnel, and even academics.

The lesson here, far as I can tell, is to be nice, professional, and competent no matter whom you’re dealing with. ‘cause you never know which of those people will be the one who is hiring when it all comes crashing down again.

In a rough economy, it's worth remembering that.

Scholarships and research support for students, undergrad and grad

2009-01-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

Many geoscience organizations offer various scholarships and/or research grants to undergrads and/or grad students. I'm putting together a list for my students, and in my hunting, I've found lots of stuff for grad students, as well. So I'm going to post what I've found here, in case some of my readers are worried about funding their education next year.

I'm just going to list sources that have winter or spring application deadlines. Check the web sites for each organization for full details about application deadlines, qualifications, etc.

Scholarships (undergraduate and/or graduate students)

Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship
Up to $8000 scholarship for undergraduates majoring in a discipline area related to oceanic and atmospheric science, research, technology, or education. Deadline: January 30

AEG Scholarships
Several scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students. Deadlines: February 1; April 15 (two different deadlines for two different scholarships)

AIPG Scholarship
$1000 to four undergraduate geological sciences majors. Note: some sections of AIPG also offer scholarships to students within their region. The Rocky Mountain section has a fall deadline. Deadline: February 15

Society of Economic Geologists Graduate Student Fellowships
Graduate student support for students studying economic geology. Deadline: February 15

NAGT Scholarships for Summer Field Courses
$500 towards the cost of an intensive field course. (The same application is used for the AWG Crawford Field Camp Scholarships.) Deadline: Feb. 16

Society for Exploration Geophysicists Foundation Scholarships
Variable funding for undergraduates and graduate students interested in pursuing a career in applied geophysics. Deadline: March 1

AWG Chrysalis Scholarship
Degree completion funding for women graduate students whose education has been interrupted for at least one year. Up to $2000. Deadline: Usually March 1

AGI Minority Participation Program
Minority students in the geosciences. Includes mentoring. Deadline: March 1

NAGT Far Western Section Scholarships
Undergrad, grad, and summer field course. Restricted to students in Hawaii, Nevada, or California. Deadline: March 1

AWG Susan Ekdale Memorial Scholarship
$1500 to defray summer field course expenses. Restricted to women students who are either attending college in Utah, or who are Utah residents. Deadline: March 28

AWG Penelope Hanshaw Scholarship
$500 scholarship to undergraduate or graduate students. Restricted to women in Delaware, Maryland, DC, Virginia, or West Virginia. Deadline: April 30

AWG William Rucker Greenwood Scholarship
$1000 scholarship to undergraduate or graduate students. Restricted to minority women in Delaware, Maryland, DC, Virginia, or West Virginia. Deadline: April 30

AWG Minority Scholarship
$5000 to an undergraduate minority woman. Deadline: June 30

Organizations with scholarship deadlines in the fall:
AAPG
AWG Winifred Golding - paleontology
AWG Janet Cullen Tanaka - Washington state

Research grants for students
AAPG Grants-in-Aid
Research support for graduate students (MS and PhD). Deadline: January 31

Society of Economic Geologists Student Research Grants
Research support for graduate students (MS and PhD). Could also support "exceptional BS Honors or 'BS Titulo' projects." Deadline: February 1

GSA Graduate Student Research Grants
Support of MS and PhD research. Students can now only receive one grant as a MS student, and one as a PhD student (with some exceptions - check out the website). Deadline: February 1

GSA Northeastern Section Undergraduate Research Grants
Restricted to undergraduate students in the NE section of GSA. Deadline: February 28?

Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research
Graduate student grants up to $1000. Students from any country may receive support. Deadline: March 15

Four Corners Geological Society Masters Grants
Grants for students working on MS theses related to geology of the Four Corners region. The application for this year isn't on the web site yet. If you have questions about this, you can ask me and I'll pass them on to the new officers. Deadline: April?

AWG Osage Chapter Scholarship
$500 grants to undergraduate women students at a college in the Osage Chapter area (~Kansas). Deadline: April 1

Mineralogical Society of America Grant for Student Research in Mineralogy and Petrology
Two awards of up to $5000 each. Graduate and undergraduate students can apply, and compete with one another. Deadline: June 1

Note: I found these by checking the websites of all the geoscience organizations that I could think of. There are probably many resources that I'm missing.

First day of classes resources on SERC

2009-01-09T07:52:00.000-08:00

My classes start Monday. I'm part-time this semester - it's a decision I made last year, when I wasn't sure how to manage after-school care for a kindergartener - so I'm only teaching one course. That means I'm not nearly as frantic today as I normally would be. But if others out there are frantic and need ideas for stuff to do on the first day of class (or later), you can steal stuff from SERC.

Heather MacDonald (one of the driving forces behind the Cutting Edge teaching and mentoring workshops) just sent reminders about these sites:

The First Day of Class modules

Teaching Introductory Geology

Teaching with Google Earth

I have a confession to make: I don't do a very good job on the first day of classes. Most of the time I default to explaining the syllabus, unless I have a flash of inspiration. My best exercise is probably in Structural Geology - I hand out a bunch of deformed rocks and ask groups of students to describe them and try to figure out what happened to them. I use the exercise to give students something concrete to think about while we discuss theoretical concepts like stress, strain, and rheology during the first few weeks. (The first time I taught about structure, one of the students raised his hand in the middle of a long, math-filled lecture, and asked "What does this have to do with rocks?" I try not to forget that question.) I don't have great starting exercises for most of my other classes, though, and I especially wish I did something more effective with my intro class.

This semester, all I'm teaching is my writing class. I've got a captive audience, so I'm not going to try to be exciting and innovative. The students will probably be really freaked out about needing a senior thesis topic OMG NOW, and the best thing that I can do is try to calm them down and convince them that the point of the class is to help them figure out what they want to do.

And maybe I'll use some of my part-time schedule to steal other first-day-of-class ideas for next year.

Research Experiences for Undergraduates: 2009 opportunities

2009-01-08T19:13:00.001-08:00

Hey, undergrads. Want to spend this summer doing research? Want to go someplace cool (like Mongolia, or Svalbard, or coastal Maine, or the mountains of Colorado)? Want to work on something that isn't available at your institution, like applied geophysics or seismology? If so, you might be interested in a Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

Each year, the National Science Foundation funds some number of research projects that are designed to introduce undergraduates to research. Some of them are at universities, some are run by small colleges, and some are held at research institutes (like Los Alamos National Lab or the Carnegie Institute of Washington). Students from all around the US can apply, and can spend part of a summer working on a research project. They pay a small stipend for the work - not big money, but perhaps not a bad deal in a tough economy. And they are good ways to find out if a particular type of research is for you.

Application deadlines come up at different times throughout the winter. If you're interested in seeing what's available, the NSF website has a list hidden deep in the depths of the site. (I hunted it down to show to my juniors, and thought that it deserved to be pointed out.) It looks as though some of the links are to old programs - check the sites to see if there is information for 2009 applications or not. (And if you're interested in other sciences, there's a link to the broader lists here.)

Want to share proposals with my students?

2009-01-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

In the comments on my post yesterday asking about non-academic proposals, Suvrat asked if I was going to show my students examples of successful proposals. The answer is yes... and I'm looking for help in showing students a wider variety of proposals, both from academics and non-academics.

I've written proposals and gotten them funded, from NSF, from internal pots of money, and from local foundations. But I'm just one person, writing proposals for my pet projects, and I know from reviewing for NSF and from serving on a foundation's grant-awarding committee that there are many styles of proposals that work.* I'm planning to ask other members of my department if they would be willing to share their proposals with my students as well, but there are only six of us, and we're at a teaching-intensive institution. And my students already know a lot about what we do, because they're talking to us about possible senior thesis topics.

So I'm asking around for other examples. For academics, would any of you be willing to share a successful proposal (from any organization, large or small) with my students? I'm willing to hide any part that you don't want to share, and I promise not to steal research ideas - I don't have time to steal ideas from other people, honestly - or to tell my colleagues about work you plan to do. In return, you get to sell your research to 15 juniors who may want to do graduate work someday. (And I've found that students can really be influenced by examples of research that they see. That's another reason to avoid focusing on my work - I don't want my students to feel pushed to become my clone.)

For non-academics... well, I imagine that it's trickier to share proposals or bids for contracts, especially for people doing exploration work. So don't offer anything that would be against the policies of your employer. But if anyone has examples, or ideas for how to create my own, or would be willing to replace identifying information with imaginary places, I would love to show students something non-academic and realistic.

For everyone: here's how I'm thinking of using examples. I want students to think about what proposals have in common, and what's different depending on the type of work and the audience. So I'm thinking of assigning pairs of students to look at different proposals, and asking them to figure out who is the audience, what's the proposed work, how the work is justified (or what kind of details are offered as supporting evidence), and what things are left out. (Any ideas about what else the students should look for?) Then I'm planning to spend one class discussing the similarities and differences between proposals.

The students will have the opportunity to write their own proposals to different audiences in any case - they need to get their advisor's approval for their thesis proposal, and they get a grade from me, and if they need money to complete their project, they have to write proposals for funding, as well. (The college has some money for undergraduate research, but it's awarded competitively, and the committee that reads the applications includes people from all over the college. The differences between successful departmental research proposals and successful funding proposals can be an educational experience. Also frustrating, as learning experiences frequently are.)

Thanks to anyone who is willing to help. If you want to share materials privately, my e-mail address is shearsensibility AT gmail DOT com. (Replace AT with @, DOT with . , and take out all the spaces.) Or alternatively, you can find my work e-mail by googling my real name.

*There are also many that don't work. I've learned a lot from my own rejections (and from reviewing).

Proposals (etc) outside academia?

2009-01-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

If you're working as a geoscientist outside academia - in oil & gas, in mining, as an environmental consultant, for a government agency, for a non-profit organization, or in some other career - do you write proposals? Not NSF grant proposals, like your professors constantly did, but some kind of writing to get permission or funding to start a project?

I'm asking because I'm about to start teaching my department's writing class again, and the class is designed to develop writing skills while writing a proposal for a senior thesis. When I arrived here and took over the class, it was a general education requirement (writing within a discipline). That's changed recently, but after I tried to make it more relevant by using it to prepare students for their research, the department decided that the class was too important to drop from the major. So I'm still teaching it, but I want to make it as valuable as possible to all my students - not just those who plan to go on to graduate school.

Thus my question. I tell students that writing is a skill that they will be able to use regardless of what they do. (My usual line is "If you can write, do math, and think critically, you should be able to do a lot of different jobs, not just the ones you think you're training for.") Part of my argument is that people have to write in all sorts of different careers. Geologists have to write reports discussing what they've found - even recent grads have told me that they spend a lot of their time writing reports. But I also tell students that writing proposals (or maybe bids, in the case of consultants) might also be part of their work. But I don't have direct experience with them, so I don't know much about the details.

So, for those of you who work outside academia: do you write proposals? At what level - are proposals written by people at a certain level of the organization, but not by the underlings? For those of you who have written your own proposals (which would probably include anyone who has been to graduate school), have you been able to translate your experience to the professional world? What kind of advice would you give to undergraduates who are learning this kind of writing for the first time?

Horizontal columnar jointing, Wolf Creek Pass

2009-01-01T11:39:00.000-08:00

Callan's post about columnar jointing and rust blisters reminded me that I've got a photo that I've been meaning to show since the 2007 GSA meeting.

Driving from Durango to Denver means crossing at least three passes. My favorite one is Wolf Creek Pass, over the Continental Divide in the San Juan Mountains. After several years of roadwork, there are some fresh roadcuts on the western side that show mostly a lot of young sediments, but some volcanic rocks, as well. This one caught my eye as I was driving up to the pass:

It's a dike cutting through pretty loose sediments - not surprising for the rocks in the eastern San Juans. But what caught my eye was the fracture pattern:

Those are horizontal columnar joints. As Callan showed in his photos, most columnar joints are nearly vertical. But that doesn't have anything to do with gravity - it's the result of cooling of a near-horizontal layer, like a lava flow. The joints form perpendicular to the cool surface. And in the case of this dike, the cool surface is vertical.

This is a neat roadcut for other reasons, too. There's baked sediment at the contact with the dike. And the sedimentary structures are nice, too. Even a squashed-rock person like me can make out some old channels, and the clasts in the conglomerate are volcanic rocks. I don't know if either the clasts or the dike have been dated, but I bet there's a pretty short time between deposition of the sediment and intrusion of the dike.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The thrust belt in my driveway

2008-12-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

It's snowed a lot in the past two weeks. Somewhere around two feet of snow fell between the last day of classes and December 26. Good for ski areas, but a lot of work to shovel. Fortunately, structural geology can make all kinds of difficult labor fascinating.

When you push a shovel through a relatively thin layer of snow, it piles up next to the shovel in a wedge shape. Push the shovel along, and the wedge gets longer and thicker, but it maintains the same shape: a triangular wedge, with a consistent angle at its front end.

Photo: a wedge of folded and faulted snow in my driveway, 12/22/08.

You see similar shapes in belts of thrust-faulted rocks from mountain belts all around the world, from the Himalayas to the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachians to Taiwan:

The cross-section above is from a classic paper by Davis, Suppe, and Dahlgren (1983) that explains what's going on mechanically in these wedges. The shape of the wedge is governed by a balance of horizontal forces: the push from behind the wedge; gravity, which would tend to flatten out the wedge (by moving material from the higher back part of the wedge to the front); and the frictional resistance to sliding, which tends to keep the front of the wedge from sliding along, causing the wedge to be steeper. The other big assumption is that the wedge is always just about to fail: its internal strength exactly balances the stresses that compress it. This means that the nature of the material also makes a difference - cohesive sheets of material behave differently from loose sand.

There's a lot of underlying math behind the explanation of wedge mechanics, but the cool thing about it is that it all boils down to a pretty simple concept. If the friction at the base of the wedge and the mechanical behavior of the rock (or snow) stays the same, the wedge should maintain the same shape. It can get bigger, but the front of the wedge should keep the same angle. That simple geometry has a lot of predictive power. It tells what should happen in a mountain belt that's eroded by a lot of rain or glaciers, compared to one that's in a rain shadow. It's been used as one explanation for the exhumation of high-pressure metamorphic rocks. And it solved a long-standing problem for structural geology: how could huge masses of rocks slide along a nearly flat plane for immense distances, as had been observed in places like the Canadian Rockies.

And it turns snow shoveling into an analog modeling experiment. Take a driveway made of smooth concrete. Drive a truck over it, and pack down snow in parallel ridges. Then let it snow another couple inches before shoveling the driveway. The results of the experiment look like this:

The wedge started out small. It's hard to see the exact structure forming - are there thrust faults beneath the folds on that surface? But it formed a nice taper, and slid along fairly easily. (Note the highly rigorous descriptions of basal friction from this experiment.)

I pushed the shovel a bit more, and the wedge got longer and thicker, but kept the same shape:

But then I reached the old tire track, and it suddenly got really hard to push that shovel. And the wedge looked like this:

The taper of the wedge suddenly got steeper, at least until I got past the tire track. But by that time I was experiencing significant edge effects, both from the top of the shovel and the snowbank beside the driveway, so the experiment ended.

The different snow storms led to somewhat different wedge shapes. Over Thanksgiving, we had a couple inches of wet snow. It formed a cohesive layer, and I could see the individual fault blocks. (I even had some tear faults separating thrust faults with different offset! Unfortunately, I didn't have the camera yet.) Before AGU, we had an inch or so of powder, which compacted somewhat when I shoveled it. And on Christmas night, we had about five inches of wet, heavy snow, and I stopped doing experiments because moving it was a lot of work, and besides, it kept falling over the top of my shovel.

My students still think that snow is for skiing, not for experimenting with structural geology. But if you've got to shovel, you might as well have geeky fun at the same time.

Reference: Davis, D., Suppe, J., and Dahlgren, F. A., 1983, Mechanics of fold-and-thrust belts and accretionary wedges: Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 88, n. B2, p. 1153-1172.

Photo note: I adjusted the levels on all the snow photos, because I haven't figured out how to take good photos of snow with my new camera yet.

Fresh dinosaur tracks

2008-12-25T20:05:00.000-08:00

It's snowing. A lot. This morning, there was even a little snow on the walk under the eaves, outside my front door. And some tiny dinosaurs had been hopping there, looking for seeds in the dead plants:

Can I count this toward my list of geological things I've done?

(Also, since ice is a mineral, is snow a sediment or a volcanoclastic deposit? I know it's not metamorphic until it's been buried in a glacier, or at least buried in the snowpack and recrystallizes.)

I hope everyone has had and is having great holidays.

The stuff that comes home from a conference

2008-12-19T20:41:00.000-08:00

I don't pick up as much stuff at conferences as I used to. I've stopped checking baggage unless I'm traveling with my kid, and I never have room to bring home books and flyers and toys. But it's hard to come home without picking up anything:

Counter-clockwise from top left: AGI's new materials for attracting students to the geosciences; my meeting program (with my scribbled notes from one session inside it); a publisher's book list; a CD from William Prothero, who spoke in my session; a free mini-fieldbook; a public transit map; a sticker from GSA; my name badge (along with a holder that I forgot to recycle); and a cool magnetic shapes game for my son (because it's never to early to learn about rotational symmetry, even if it's 7-fold).

Any suggestions as to where I should put the sticker? I'm considering my computer and my coffee cup at the moment. (The car is officially a sticker-free zone.)

(I had to use the new camera, even if it's for something that will make Chris Rowan jealous. I promise to show pictures of things like rocks or minerals soon, as penance.)

AGU non-blogging

2008-12-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

I'm at AGU (after a rather eventful travel day that included a cancelled flight and a broken de-icer, among other things). I'm not live-blogging it, but maybe if I have time, I'll blog about at least one of the sessions I went to:

Early morning: Teaching Geoscience in the 21st Century posters. (Saw a few posters, had long conversations - mostly about teaching - with people I knew from the Teaching Intro Geoscience workshop. I have more ideas to steal now.)

Late morning: Exhumation of High- and Ultra-high Pressure Rocks: the cross-disciplinary view. I will blog more about this if I find the time - this is the research that I wish I had gotten into as a grad student, and which still fascinates me.

Gabbed with former thesis student. Ran into some grad school friends in the hall. (Scientists have a reputation as anti-social. It's a big lie.)

Early afternoon: Plate motion and its relation to deforming zones. I find high-precision GPS data fascinating, and wanted to learn more about it. I'm not in this field (and never have been), so I don't have a good handle on what is new and exciting (other than being able to really truly see active deformation, which is exciting enough for me). I probably won't blog in detail on it, but it was an interesting session.

Late afternoon: Teaching Introductory Geoscience: Staying Relevant in the 21st Century II. This was my session. Maybe I'll blog about what I'm doing at some point. I won't blog about the other talks, because I was busy trying to remember what I was going to say in mine. (I have this problem in sessions all the time. It's a shame, because I miss learning interesting things related to my own research interests.)

Ran into a college friend who I thought had become a biologist. Gabbed.

Had a late dinner with geology bloggers. (Scientists are social, remember.)

And now I'm here, and need to go to bed, so I can get up, have a too-short day, and run back to the airport to go home.

AGU has grown a lot since I was here last - I wish I was staying longer.

Geologists' 100 things meme

2008-12-14T02:50:00.000-08:00

The geologist's 100 things meme, from Geotripper.

Bold the ones you have done:

1. See an erupting volcano [Kilauea, barely oozing lava at the time, but still thrilling.]
2. See a glacier [A couple in the Alps, including the spectacular Gornergrat. One had signs showing the location of its toe through the years. It had receded a lot - and I visited it in 1991.]
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland [Yellowstone.]
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. [The local K-T boundary is an unconformity. I think. If it's not, then I've seen it.]
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage [It was a stream, really, and it wasn't a safe distance.]
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia [I'm fairly claustrophobic, so I've only been into caves with lights and tours and stuff. Most recently, Lehman Caves, which are beautiful.]
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile. [The most impressive was the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, which I visited on an undergrad field trip.]
8. Explore a subsurface mine. [As a tourist, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan most memorably.]
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California). [Coast Range ophiolite.]
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too). [The Adirondacks.]
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere. [Remnants of Glacial Lake Vermont. Not a good place to chew silt and clay - there was a cow pasture above the exposure.]
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada. [Yosemite.]
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website). [Japan, and the coast of Maine.]
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) [Upper Peninsula of Michigan.]
18. A field of glacial erratics [Do the woods behind the house where I grew up in Maine count?]
19. A caldera [Long Valley, Yellowstone, Silverton, Lake City...]
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord [Technically Somes Sound in Acadia National Park is a fjord.]
22. A recently formed fault scarp [Borah Peak earthquake.]
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta [There are small ones into every reservoir around here.]
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole
27. A glacial outwash plain [Where the glaciers in the Alps were receding.]
28. A sea stack [Coast of Oregon.]
29. A house-sized glacial erratic [In the woods in Maine.]
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide [Only the Atlantic-Pacific one in the US. But I have to cross it all the time.]
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals [Only in museum displays.]
33. Petrified trees [Only in the department rock collection; not in the field.]
34. Lava tubes [Hawaii.]
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. [Only from the rim.]
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible [Only from the air.]
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event [Not in progress, but recent.]
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game).
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century [I've seen the Northern Lights and one of the spectacular comets of the 1990's at the same time. Possibly the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed.]
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane [A small one. I didn't know at the time that "typhoon" and "hurricane" were the same things.]
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

There are several of these that I haven't done, but which I could do within a day's drive of my house. Kind of embarrassing - I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere but Maine, by this point.

My five-year-old is losing his apatite

2008-12-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

My five-year-old has cavities. Four cavities. Two on his lower left, where his back teeth rub together, and two little ones in the same spot on his lower right and upper left. I've never had any cavities myself, so I may be more worried about the next dental visit than he is.

"Does he drink a lot of juice?" the hygienist asked me.

"No..." I frowned. "But I've been letting him brush his teeth himself. He might not be doing a very good job."

"The chewing surfaces look fine," the hygienist said. "He's got to get the sugar between his teeth to get his cavities. Usually it's fruit juice that does it."

"He drinks mostly milk and water," I said. "What else could it be? We don't do very good job flossing his teeth, I know. And... we were on well water until this summer. I never got the water tested for fluoride, and the dentist didn't want to give him extra fluoride, because the groundwater around here varies alot." I didn't go into detail about the diverse bedrock geology that contributes to the variability in water chemistry. I was busy feeling guilty because I had treated the problem as something to solve by knowing more about the bedrock, when I should have just sent the water to the local health department for a fluoride test.

See, I don't know much about teeth, except that brushing and flossing every day is good, eating lots of sugar is bad, and the enamel coating consists mostly of the mineral hydroxyapatite. And that tooth decay happens because sugar-eating bacteria excrete weak acids, which slowly etch the hydroxyapatite and destroy the enamel.

Apatite is a mineral that all geologists learn at least in passing – it defines “5” on Moh’s hardness scale, it’s the most common of the phosphate minerals, and it’s got a funny name. And it’s present in a lot of different types of rocks, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. I usually miss it when glancing at a thin section, but find it on a microprobe, when I’m actually looking for tiny grains of plagioclase feldspar. But most of what I know about apatite comes secondhand, from collaborating with thermochronologists, who use apatite to figure out when rocks cooled to near-surface temperatures. (Well, that’s near-surface to someone who likes to work on metamorphic rocks.)

When I was in grad school, apatite was mostly used for apatite fission-track dating*. Apatite is mostly a calcium phosphate mineral, but it can contain tiny amounts of uranium. When the uranium decays by nuclear fission, it damages the crystal lattice of its host apatite grain. If the temperatures are high enough, the lattice is able to heal, but at low temperatures, the apatite grain collects these damage zones called fission tracks. You can’t see the fission tracks in a normal thin section – you need to separate the apatite grains, mount them in epoxy, polish them, and etch the surface with an acid. Then the heroic (and very patient) thermochronologist counts and measures all the little etched tracks. But there are complications. And one of those complications has to do with the amount of fluorine that substitutes for the hydroxy (OH-) ions in the structure.

I don’t remember exactly what the complication was. But I’m willing to bet that fluorapatite isn’t just harder than hydroxyapatite. I’m not sure, but I think that fluoroapatite doesn’t dissolve as easily in acid.

My son's cavitities are in baby teeth, which is a good thing. ~~They will fall out before enough fission tracks can accumulate in them to be countable.~~ They will fall out and be replaced by adult teeth. Which are currently growing. Which is why the dentist prescribed supplementary fluoride tablets, for a little while, at least.

In the meantime, the hygienist and I came up with another hypothesis for the source of the sugar.

“Ummm,” I said. “When he started kindergarten, he was able to choose from white milk or chocolate milk. I think he drinks chocolate milk a lot.”

“Chocolate milk has sugar in it,” she nodded.

In fact, I think he’s been drinking chocolate milk nearly every day since starting kindergarten. I had encouraged him to try the white milk, and to save the chocolate milk for special occasions. But, well, he’s five. There are a lot of special occasions.

But now, maybe he’ll listen to me when I tell him that chocolate milk will destroy his apatite.

* Since I left grad school, a new method, (U-Th)/He dating, has been developed and become an incredibly powerful tool for thermochronology.

What does a scientifically literate person need to know about the geosciences?

2008-12-12T07:42:00.000-08:00

What, exactly, are the earth sciences about, anyway? Even using the name "earth sciences" is a way of waffling - geology, geophysics, and geochemistry obviously fit, but what about paleontology, the oceans, climate, the atmosphere, other planets...? I don't have a clear answer for myself (although I should - I teach the only college-level Earth Science course that some future K-6 teachers take), but NSF has brought together a group of earth scientists to figure it out. They've put together a draft document, opened it for one round of comments in October, and now (starting December 15) they are looking for comments on the final draft. The draft itself (and links to a page for commenting) is available here: The Earth Science Literacy Initiative.

Here are the nine Big Ideas that they have proposed:

1. Earth science explores our planet.
2. Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
3. Earth is a complex system of interactions between rock, water, air, and life.
4. Earth is a continuously changing planet.
5. Earth is a water planet.
6. Life evolves on a dynamic Earth and continuously modifies Earth.
7. Humans depend on Earth for resources.
8. Humans are threatened by Earth's natural hazards.
9. Humans have become a significant agent of change on Earth.

The meat of the document comes in the supporting statements within each Big Idea. Check it out and comment (starting Monday).

There will also be three sessions at AGU where you can discuss it:

Monday 2:10 - 2:25 pm, Room MC 3011:
Oral Session ED13D: Earth Science Literacy: Building Community Consensus

Tuesday 8:00 am, Hall D:
Poster ED21A-0601: Earth Science Literacy: Big Ideas and Supporting Concepts

Thursday 6:15 pm, Moscone West 3005
Open Town Hall Meeting: Developing a Framework for Earth Science Literacy

(H/T Barb Tewksbury.)

Can't go to AGU? Here are some ways to get your fix.

2008-12-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

Not going to be in San Francisco next week? Don't want to miss out on the American Geophysical Union meeting? Here are some other ways to keep up with what's going on:

AGU will have live webcasts of one or two sessions each day:

Monday, 15 December,
0800h–1000h, U11C - MESSENGER at Mercury: The Second Flyby I

0830h–1930h, U15A - Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture: The Spread of Scientific Knowledge From the Royal Society to Google Earth and Beyond

Tuesday, 16 December
1020h–1220h, U22B - The Great 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake: A Multidisciplinary View II

Wednesday, 17 December
0800h–1000h, U31B - Episodic Tremor and Slip I: Field Studies; A Growing Cottage Industry

Thursday, 18 December
1020h–1220h, U42B - Interaction of Earth Reservoirs

Friday, 19 December
1020h–1220h, H52B - Arsenic and Other Metals as Contaminants in Hydrologic Systems

(I may have to turn on the Mercury session on Monday morning while I'm frantically writing my final exams. Planetary geology is just plain amazing.)

For commentary, Erik Klemetti may try live-blogging from his new iPod. And last year, one of the RealClimate contributors live-blogged some of the climate sessions - I don't know if they're planning to do the same thing this year. As for me - I'm not going to try to blog the meeting; I learned at GSA that I would rather talk to people face-to-face when I've got the chance. If I see anything that I want to share, I'll try to post about it later. (I blog on a geologic time scale anyway, so I figure that I can keep talking about things I saw at this year's meetings for the next billion years or so, right?)

Goals for the next year

2008-12-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

It's still the beginning of December, and I know the tradition is to review the last year before AGU, and do resolutions after. And the geoblogosphere is doing the first-post-of-the-month meme. But it's not just the beginning of the last month, the end of classes, and the week before AGU for me. It's also my 42nd birthday, and in celebration of the number 42 and the answer to life, the universe, and everything, I'm going to skip straight to plans for the next year.

In the next year I want to:

- Put more miles on my bike, skis, and feet than I do on my car. ("Better start taking long bike rides," says my husband. Bad news, because I prefer to run. But I was doing 20-mile weeks a few years ago while training for a marathon; I would like to get back to that kind of mileage.) If I can't pull it off, I want to at least do two running races: the Mother's Day 10K trail race (with free chocolate) and the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot. Both start within a bike ride's distance of my house, too.

- Get one paper sent off to a journal. I know this doesn't sound very ambitious, especially for people who are still actively in the job hunt. But for me, it's more about not feeling guilty than about being a super-productive scientist. Finish the paper, stop feeling lousy about myself.

- Follow through on at least one really crazy idea. Could be a research idea, could be a teaching idea, could be some kind of non-work thing that I'm scared to try. (Husband says I should do this 42 times, but when I say follow through, I mean really follow through. It could take a year or more to really give a crazy research or teaching idea a chance.)

- Avoid unpleasant interpersonal politics. I've been lucky this year - I've been on good committees, my department is getting along, and the geoblogosphere has been pleasant. I'm going to try to continue the pattern.

- Post more pictures. I got a new camera for my birthday. Now I need to learn how to use it (and how not to break it).

Oh, and unrelated: for an AGU meetup, how about at the Thirsty Bear (661 Howard St., SF) at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, December 17?

Geobloggers at AGU

2008-12-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

Geobloggers (and anyone else who wants to come) are planning to get together on Wednesday night (one week from tomorrow!) at AGU. And... well, we haven't made any plans beyond that. Let's make some.

Here are my constraints: I'm giving a talk that ends at 5:30 pm, and my session ends at 6. (And it would be kind of rude to give my talk and run.) I think Brian's session is earlier in the afternoon?

I don't have any suggestions for where to meet - I haven't been to San Francisco since 1999 (which wasn't even this century, and yes, that does make me feel old, especially today). Apparently the Moscone Center is twice as big as it used to be, too. So Bay Area locals (Brian? Andrew?) - any suggestions for a time and place? AGU has also gotten even larger in the past nine years, so I'm guessing that restaurants are hard to find (except that San Francisco should still be better than Houston after a major hurricane... well, unless there's an earthquake this week, which I most fervently hope there is not).

Edit: How about the Thirsty Bear at 7 pm?

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Old dogs and new tricks

2008-12-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

I've just realized that I'm going to be giving my first AGU talk (ever) in a week and a half.

It's actually kind of scary, even though I've spent way too many person-hours talking to darkened rooms in my career. (And even though I'm not going to be trying to impress potential employers; this will be my first AGU meeting when I don't need to look for a job.)

Field work: this might be heaven or this might be hell

2008-12-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

I love field work. No, really, I do. But when I tell stories about it, they always end up being about running out of food or wrecking vans or collecting samples of giant mosquitoes by slamming a field notebook shut or not being able to find a single sample of high-pressure metamorphic minerals except trapped as inclusions in a garnet. (And that was just my PhD area.) I've thrashed through ice-storm-damaged woods, taking an hour to walk a mile, in search of non-existent staurolites. I've fallen into streams. I've broken a canoe paddle while trying to cross a melt-swollen river. I've post-holed through snow banks. I come back from the field covered in mud, sweat, scratches, bruises, and occasionally blood from where my hammer missed the chisel and slammed the back of my hand.

Which makes me wonder, while lying in a tent with an aching back and wondering whether that sound outside is a hungry bear or just a vole with insomnia, whether it's worth it.

Then I come back to the human world, where people care about things like other people's shoes*, and I think: worth it? Are you kidding?

Photo: me, someplace where the temperatures are cold and the rocks are hot. In other words: someplace close to heaven.

(For the November Accretionary Wedge.)

* Edit: a story, in explanation. In my second or third year in my previous job, I was a junior faculty member on one of those campus-wide committees. Before one snowy winter meeting, I found myself outside the meeting building with the committee chair, a faculty member in another department on campus. She said to me: "Isn't the etiquette of Vermont winters funny? It's inappropriate to look at other people's shoes until they've had a chance to change them." I was flustered and had no idea what to say; I generally changed into indoor shoes because my winter boots were snow-covered, muddy, and made my feet sweat. It had never occurred to me that I was being judged by my footwear.

I failed to successfully negotiate the social boundaries between effective teaching, interesting research, and the expected image of a female faculty member. My favorite field area was in northeastern Vermont - although it was in dense, bug-filled woods, it was the first place where I found surprising results and struggled through to models that were my own, not my advisor's or another mentor's. And I haven't been back there since I was denied tenure.

I've found a new, beautiful place to work. I haven't had the thrill of finding things that are unexpected yet. But there are beautiful views, and in Durango, nobody cares what I wear.

National Student Exchange

2008-12-04T20:18:00.000-08:00

Fort Lewis College has recently re-joined the National Student Exchange, a program that allows students at many colleges and universities in the US and Canada to study at another institution in North America. Geology students usually get to study in another part of the continent (or sometimes the world) during field camp, but NSE makes it possible to spend an entire year in another geologic setting.

Most of the schools that participate are public colleges and universities. There's a complete list on NSE's web page. If anyone is interested in coming to Durango for a year and wants information about how the geology courses at Fort Lewis would fit into their home institution's major, please feel free to contact me. (shearsensibility AT gmail DOT com, or in comments, or by googling my name and sending me an e-mail at work).

Opportunities for grad students interested in working in national parks

2008-12-04T18:50:00.001-08:00

From a friend who now works for the National Park Service: Park Break.

If you're a grad student interested in a career working in a national park, you can spend spring break learning about national park management and research careers. Park Break is designed to give graduate students experience that could lead to work in a national park. And for geoscience students, it could lead to a summer internship through the GeoCorps program.

Applications for Park Break are due by December 31, and applications for the GeoCorps program are due by January 31.

Experience with non-PV solar technology?

2008-12-02T20:27:00.000-08:00

Does anyone out there have experience working with non-photovoltaic solar technology? Anything from the theoretical to building your own solar hot-water heater? I've got a writer friend who is working on an article on solar thermal technology. She's especially interested in talking to people who have experience with small-scale projects (like a water system for a home), but she's interested to talking to anyone who can help her understand the background, too.

I vaguely remember talking about semi-off-the-grid ideas when I was in high school. (A friend had an indoor swimming pool that may have been partly solar, but I think it was also heated by a wood stove. That was Maine, and the sun doesn't shine as much there as it does in Colorado.) But although I know people from grad school who rebuilt diesel engines to run on used cooking oil, it's been a long time since I've talked to anyone who does their own passive solar. (Beyond south-facing windows, that is.)

If you've got experience or know people who do, could you e-mail me (shearsensibility AT gmail DOT com), so I can pass contact information along to my friend?

How important are GRE scores for geoscience grad school?

2008-12-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

I took the GREs twenty years ago this month. Twenty years! I spent an entire day of my Christmas break in a big lecture hall at the University of Maine, filling in bubbles with my #2 pencil.

The world has changed in the past twenty years. GREs are taken on computers these days, and the bizarre but fascinating logic problems are gone. ("Jenny likes cabbage, but Fred is allergic to horseradish. Who is seated beside Louise?") There's a new writing section, along with the verbal and math sections. And there's no longer a geology subject test. So I've become less and less capable of giving any kind of reasonable advice to students about how to prepare for it. And because I don't read grad student applications, I don't have any idea how grad schools look at the current version of the test.

When I started grad school, I got the impression that the GREs weren't particularly important for anything except competing for NSF graduate fellowships. Research is not a multiple choice exam, and the ability to fill in little bubbles (or whatever mouse-click has replaced it) is no substitute for creativity, perserverence, and the ability to take a lot of criticism. I've gotten the impression that the things that matter for a graduate application are 1) a coherent statement of purpose that fits with the research interests of a faculty member; 2) good grades in relevant coursework (maybe geo, maybe math or chemistry or physics); 3) strong letters of recommendation; and 4) maybe research experience, although it's become common enough at the undergraduate level that it might not mean as much these days unless it's incorporated into the statement of purpose. The GREs - well, the general test is taken by everyone, from physicists to literary scholars, and it would be hard to come up with a test that could identify people who would be skilled at both subjects. I remember the verbal section as being essentially the SATs with longer words (but not geology jargon), and the math section as being algebra. I took it, I sent off the scores, and I never thought about the test again*. Until students came to me worrying about it.

So here's my question to the rest of the world. Based on your experience, do GRE scores matter? Do some schools put more weight on them than others? Is there a minimum cutoff score for some schools, or are they used as a tie-breaker between otherwise similar applications? Or are they a form of practice at jumping through hoops, preparation for things like dissertation formatting instructions?

*Well, other than to score geek points against my soon-to-be-ex college boyfriend. But once I got to grad school, I didn't think about the scores.

My research history, in time and P-T

2008-11-26T20:09:00.000-08:00

I like Chris Rowan's idea of placing his research on a geologic time scale, so I stole his image and edited it:

Since I did some geochronology (actually, a major part of my PhD was explaining that it was impossible for my data to be meaningful), I felt like I should include the bad data as well as my preferred ages for events.

But the time scale doesn't have enough dimensions for my research, so here's version in pressure-temperature space.

All the green is actual data from Vermont. The blue arrow is supposed to represent my PhD work, except that the rocks were really lousy for finding any kind of data, and I didn't work on the low-pressure ones that told a better story. The red is Colorado, both my senior thesis and current work with senior thesis students. The yellow is one rock deformation experiment that a couple of my undergrad students in Vermont did one summer. And I figured if I was going to include the really low-pressure stuff, I ought to include the water quality stuff I've advised, but it doesn't really fit on the diagram.

Ophiolites and ocean crust: slow tectonic shifts in textbook science

2008-11-24T19:50:00.001-08:00

For more than fifteen years, I've been making my Plate Tectonics students read Assembling California by John McPhee. In part, I'm just using my dastardly professorial powers to inflict one of my favorite writers on helpless students. In part, I just want students to read lines like "You need a new geologist. You need a Californian." But mostly, I want students to think about ophiolites and the ways that scientists change their minds.

All of the textbooks that I've used simplify the ophiolite sequence in the same basic way. It's oceanic crust, stranded on land where we can see it and touch it and measure its structures and sample its minerals. Sediments, pillow lavas, sheeted dikes, massive gabbro, layered gabbro, layered peridotite, deformed mantle rock. The field geologist's answer to the layers recognized by seismologists on the ocean floor. The record of sea-floor spreading, one of the many pieces that fell into place as plate tectonic theory came about.

Getting that ocean floor onto continents where geologists can study it without submersibles or seismic waves is tricky. I remember arguing about California's Coast Range Ophiolite with my officemates (probably at Friday Beer after the high-pressure-metamorphism seminar). It's inland of the old subduction complex of the Franciscan Formation, so did that mean that it represented the closure of an old ocean basin? Or was it shoved up onto the continent as some kind of flake? Or, well, how do you do that mechanically, anyways? (Big picture tectonic arm-waving works better after beer. Increase pore fluid pressure and all that.)

Sometime in those nineteen years during since that seminar, the consensus understanding of ophiolites has changed. It hasn't been something that makes headlines, but in study after study, it's turned out that the trace element geochemistry has the wrong fingerprints for the ocean floor. Most ophiolites - even the famous ones like Troodos on Cyprus or the Semail ophiolite in Oman - most ophiolites formed above subduction zones.

I had heard rumors about this from igneous geochemists before, but an article in last month's GSA Today went further. If the geochemistry says that ophiolites aren't rocks that formed at mid-ocean ridges, well, we really shouldn't be using them to study what happens at mid-ocean ridges. We can't even use the sheeted dike complexes - sheets of cooled magma that intruded one another so that only half of any original dike is left - to talk about sea-floor spreading. At mid-ocean ridges, the rates of magma production and spreading are tied together, but above subduction zones, they're the result of two different processes. It's possible for the plate above a subduction zone to spread, if the downgoing plate sinks faster than the over-riding plate slide across it. (That's happening, for instance, near the Mariana Trench. And it's one of those complicating bits of tectonics that doesn't match the stories that get told in introductory classes, and that can serve as a GOTCHA! for partly-informed skeptics. But we know about trench rollback, and it's been incorporated into geologists' understanding of tectonics for a couple decades, even if we don't explain it that well to students.) The spreading of the over-riding plate might look like a mid-ocean ridge in the rock record - it's all extensional tectonics, after all - but the relationship to magmatism is different. Not the same relationship, not the same process. Still interesting... but not a way to study the way that oceans grow. Sorry.

So touching an ophiolite isn't touching a bit of old ocean floor, after all. And we don't need to argue about how the rocks got on top of the subduction complex if they usually are formed there. And a lot of tectonic arm-waving was for naught.

And the textbook science changes.

Reference:

Robinson, P.T., Malpas, J., Dilek, Y., and Zhou, M., 2008, The significance of sheeted dike complexes in ophiolites: GSA Today, v. 18,. p. 4-10. (Available for free online here.)

Random demographic graphics

2008-11-20T19:36:00.000-08:00

I've just installed Office 2008 on my Mac in the hopes that it would make it easier for me to read files that people send me from PCs at work. So far, I've discovered that the Mac and PC interfaces are not at all the same, which explains why my students have been so frustrated when they've tried to do assignments on their home computers.

I'm going to get familiar with Excel by graphing the demographic data from the closed survey on my sidebar. Warning: includes default color schemes and gratuitous 3D pie charts.

Two-thirds of my readers are younger than me. That doesn't surprise me, but it means that I can't make Usenet jokes and expect people to get them. It also may explain this:

Well, not exactly. It looks like the quadrant compass is going the way of Usenet and geosynclinal theory. We're gradually replacing our quadrant compasses as they break... but I'm still going to make all my students convert all their measurements back and forth, because I'm a Big Meanie.

(Also, doesn't that graph look like it ought to have "One ring to rule them all..." inscribed on it?)

The next two graphs should have an axis labeled "number of responses" - I thought the total number of each of these was more interesting than the percent.

I'm not sure if "employment" is the right title for this graph. (I'm also not sure how many of the grad students also described themselves as employed in academia.)

Edit - By the way, "pre-college" is short for "pre-college educator" here. I was curious how many people were K-12 (or earlier) teachers, especially because Earth Science isn't taught in high school in many states (including Texas and California).

And finally, I have no idea why this bar graph insists on putting "other background" on top of "geoscientist." Perhaps it knows that geoscientists are down to earth, or something lame like that.

I know that this pair of questions left out some possibilities. (People who became geoscientists after a background in something else; people who majored in geology but got a job doing something different.)

And now I can delete those surveys from the side of this blog.

Field nightmare

2008-11-19T18:40:00.000-08:00

I dreamed about teaching field camp last night.

I've taught field camp in several places, but one of my favorites is near Hoback Junction, Wyoming. We camp in this Forest Service campground with views of the Wind Rivers and a hot spring just up the road. The road up to it was in bad shape last time I stayed there, but it's still a gorgeous spot.

The problem with the campground, at least the last time I stayed there, was that you can't make reservations ahead of time, and there's no group site, so it's possible that we won't find a good spot for all the students to camp near one another.

And that's how my dream started. We got to the campground fairly late, only to find that three-quarters of it was closed off with deep piles of snow still on the ground, and all the remaining sites already filled. We drove around looking for a spot, and ended up trying to turn around somewhere down at the end of one of the campground loops.

And that's where we met the RV. It wasn't just any old RV. It was... well, it was immense. Bigger than an 18-wheeler. Tougher than a tank. And driven by someone who didn't look where he or she was going.

The RV was headed straight for my Subaru*. And it didn't stop.

In the end, my Subaru was crunched to half its original length. (I woke up before considering the possible analogy between shortened Subarus and regional strain analysis of collisional tectonic belts.)

So: academic nightmares by geology professors. (At least I didn't dream that I showed up for field work a day late, with no clothes, and sat on a cactus.)

*Don't ask me why I was driving my Subaru at field camp. Normally I drive a 15 10-passenger van loaded with students and gear. And, yes, I have a complicated history with vans, which many people can tell stories about. But there wasn't a van in this dream.

Geology and science fiction: what do I think?

2008-11-17T19:54:00.000-08:00

I'm finally mostly caught up on work, so I can answer Peggy's questions about science and science fiction.

Questions for Science Bloggers

* What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?

Yes, I read and watch science fiction. I've enjoyed it since I was a kid, probably because I found other worlds interesting. (Especially in comparison to the sort of petty interpersonal politics that dominated grade school, junior high, and high school.) I was fascinated by big and different.

As an adult, I like stories that imagine societies different from ours. Science fiction (and also fantasy) seem like great ways to explore human-ness by imagining what happens if things were a little different. Maybe the difference is some kind of technology. Maybe the difference is a cultural attitude. In a way, it's like experiments in science.

* What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?

I don't think science fiction is particularly good at promoting science. (One word: Frankenstein.) An awful lot of science fiction seems to reveal a fear of the unknown, a fear of tampering with nature or with going too far in trying to understand something. It's not true of all science fiction (or fantasy), but I've seen it in places as different as Tolkien and the new Dr. Who.

Whether it harms the cause of science... well, honestly, I don't think that science should be a cause, really. Science is a sort of organized curiosity about the natural world, and it's sad to live amongst people who are uncurious and afraid of learning new things. But the introspection can be a good thing, as long as it doesn't become some kind of trite repetition of the story of the Tree of Knowledge.

* Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?

Geology is rarely explicitly part of science fiction. (Any time a different world is imagined, geology could be used to build a world that makes sense. I've rarely seen an imaginary world that makes geologic sense, unfortunately.) Off the top of my head, I can think of only one set of books that does geology well (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson), and I have yet to run across a student who is familiar with them.

As for movies: I guess The Core could count as a science fiction movie (as well as a bad disaster movie). I've encouraged students to watch it and criticize the geology, but it's so goofy that it's difficult to get much science from it. I haven't seen the new Journey to the Center of the Earth, but I've watched the old version with geology students. Again, it was fun to laugh at it, but it was so wrong that it was hard to know where to start with a critique. And I mention The Day After Tomorrow in class to try to explain why the textbook talks about deep ocean currents in the context of climate, but mostly we end up laughing about Jake Gyllenhaal running away from wolves in New York rather than critiquing the science in detail.

* Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?

Anyone who wants to read more about geology should just subscribe to Chris Rowan's geoblogosphere feed, and choose their favorite blogs for themselves.

Geology, fiction, and science fiction

2008-11-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

A post of links, because I'm trying to get some intro exams graded:

Magma cum laude has a great post discussing the portrayals of volcanoes in several books. And Biology in Science Fiction and Almost Diamonds are asking scientists and science fiction writers some questions in preparation for a panel at the ScienceOnline 09 conference. I think the discussions could be linked, easily.

Meanwhile, Erik Klemetti reminds us that real volcanoes can be as dramatic and tragic as fiction in his remembrance of the 23rd anniversary of the destruction of Armero, Colombia. And for science fiction writers who want to put a good subduction zone into their books, Brian Romans has a detailed three-part debunking of subduction denialists, which has led to a call for posts about geologic pseudoscience.

A not-quite-geology haiku

2008-11-12T12:53:00.000-08:00

There's geology haiku meme going around. I'm doing lab work today. Or, well, trying. This isn't very haiku-like, but it reflects my day:

Time for some data -
the spectrometer is warm
but the shear gas won't flow.

KIDS THESE DAYS

2008-11-11T18:32:00.000-08:00

Tonight's bedtime story was Where the Wild Things Are. My five-year-old is beginning to read words, so he wanted me to show him the words on the cover.

They're all in capital letters:

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

"That's shouting," my son said.

"Huh?" I said. I mean, there was some shouting earlier (thus the book), but we hadn't been shouting right then.

"The letters. That means shouting."

"Did your dad tell you that, or did you learn it at school?"

"My teacher told me. All capital letters means shouting."

They're teaching netiquette in kindergarten. (Maybe he'll learn not to feed the trolls, too. Either that, or they will start making LOLcats in art class.)

Wait! Field season isn't done yet!

2008-11-10T07:39:00.001-08:00

Well, actually, I guess it probably is for this year:

(image deleted, because I screwed up my saving and linking)

There are two inches of snow on the ground. (I would take a picture, but I still don't have a camera.) Total daytime accumulation of 1-3 inches is expected, according to the National Weather Service. More snow possible tonight and tomorrow morning, and a mixture of rain and snow tomorrow afternoon.

Yay!

Except my mapping class is still mapping. And some of them didn't start the most recent map, because they were voting last week.

The high temperatures are supposed to be above freezing today and tomorrow, so maybe it will all melt down here. Or maybe I'll need to go into the field next week, and talk about the cross-sections and the report this week (before some people have done their mapping).

I would make jokes about global warming going away, but someone would probably take them seriously. (Snow in late October or early November isn't that unusual here at 7000 feet.)

Thinking through carbon sequestration

2008-11-09T19:19:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to figure out what to say to my classes about carbon sequestration. As Brian mentioned in a comment, if we're going to lock carbon dioxide in rocks (well, artifically*), geologists are going to need to be involved.

I ought to be able to think through the problem from first principles. Carbon dioxide is part of all sorts of natural systems, after all. When it dissolves in water, it makes the weak acid that is responsible for much of the natural weathering of silicate minerals. It's released by metamorphic reactions, and the relative amounts of carbon dioxide and water in metamorphic fluids is important in determining which minerals are stable. It's one of several gasses that dissolve in magmas, and is important in its own ultra-weird magmas: carbonatites, which erupt molten baking soda in the East African Rift (and which concentrate rare earth elements in old deposits). At low temperatures, carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate ions make a fascinating buffer system. (I don't think I explained that one very well, the one time I taught environmental geochemistry. But it's still a fascinating system.)

And that's just the chemistry. There are also questions about fluid flow through rocks and fractures, and about possible rock fracture associated with high fluid pressures. It's hard to know exactly where to start, especially because the info sources that I've read don't try to explain things from first principles.

So how, exactly, is this carbon sequestration supposed to work, and how does it relate to all the various CO2 factoids that I've accumulated over time?

The answer depends on the rock and fluid involved, it seems. A number of possible environments have been proposed, and the issues are somewhat different for each one.

1) Use waste CO2 to enhance recovery of oil and gas. I was vaguely aware that carbon dioxide was used to help recover more oil from old oil fields (mostly because CO2 is produced near Durango - it's actually a commercially produced commodity). I didn't know much about how it works, though - was it used to increase the fluid pressure in the rock, and force the oil out, or did the CO2 dissolve in the oil and change its properties? It turns out that both happen. Yes, the carbon dioxide changes the fluid pressure. But it also dissolves in the oil and makes it flow more easily, which makes it possible to recover more of the oil.

This is already being done - in fact, carbon dioxide is produced commercially to be used in oil fields. So it makes sense to capture waste CO2 and use it instead. (Perhaps this should be considered CO2 recycling rather than sequestration, however - I assume that CO2 dissolved in the oil comes back to the surface with the oil. Not that there's anything wrong with recycling - make less waste, use if for useful purposes instead. But it doesn't take the CO2 away forever.)

2) Pump the CO2 into coal. The methane that adsorbs onto the surfaces of coal has become a commercially important source of natural gas (especially in the San Juan Basin, just south of Durango). Traditionally, the methane is released by pumping water out of the coal. But carbon dioxide also adsorbs onto the surfaces of coal. Maybe CO2 could be used to enhance coal-bed methane production, too.

This technique is being tried in my backyard. If it works, it's got a lot of potential, because coal-bed methane and coal-burning power plants (as a source of carbon dioxide) can be very near one another. (In fact, there are currently two coal-fired power plants near Farmington, New Mexico.) I don't know much about the surface chemistry of coal, so I don't have a good sense of what factors could make this work or not.

3) Pump the CO2 into deep, salty formation water. This is the target of the experiment that Lee Allison described today. I'm not entirely certain of the characteristics of the ideal "saline formation" sequestration project. I think the idea is that a) the salty water is isolated from useable groundwater, probably by some kind of low-permeability cap (like a classic oil reservoir would have); and b) the salty water would make a good chemical buffer for the carbonic acid. I'm not sure of the chemistry of the buffering - this is where I wish that I remembered the complications that happen in the systems of carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate when there's something in the system other than calcite and carbon dioxide. (I'm guessing that the high concentration of dissolved solids helps buffer the system, since the focus isn't entirely on limestones.) I'm also not sure how the dissolution of carbon dioxide in water affects the potential for problems with increased pore fluid pressure. (Increasing the amount of fluid in rock can make rock break. If you want to get oil out of the rock, this is a good thing; if you want to keep carbon dioxide from escaping, I'm guessing that it would be bad. Unless you can make the reservoir rock more permeable without breaking the less permeable cap?)

And this doesn't include ideas about using carbon dioxide to speed the weathering of silicates. (I think that's partly what's going on with the suggestions to sequester carbon dioxide in basalt, for instance.)

So I'm not sure how to discuss the issue in intro classes. I think I need more information. I would like to tell them about the ideas that have been proposed, however - particularly because some are happening in our own backyard.

*Carbon is naturally locked in rocks like coal, oil shale, and limestones. We let it out when we burn oil, coal, or natural gas, or when we make cement. But natural processes don't remove carbon as fast as we burn it for energy. So if we want to use fossil carbon for energy, and we don't want to deal with the consequences of putting all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we've got to do something to speed up the process.

Geoblogger meet-up at AGU?

2008-11-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

Lee Allison asked if there is going to be a geoblogger meet-up at AGU. I know that Christie and Brian are going to be there, and I think Ron is organizing a session and Julian submitted an abstract. And Andrew is local to the Bay Area. (There are also some pseudonymous bloggers who have mentioned being there. I'm not leaving you out on purpose - I'm just letting you choose what info you want the world to know.) I'm sure I'm leaving other people out, too.

I'm arriving Tuesday afternoon and leaving Thursday afternoon (and I really want to catch up with some of my former students!), so I don't have a lot of flexibility. But would anyone be interested in meeting for dinner on Wednesday night?

Teaching intro geoscience workshop at AGU

2008-11-08T07:32:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, I received this message from Anne Egger, who is co-organizing two sessions and a workshop at AGU in December. I'm going to be speaking in the second session (and I'm looking forward to the poster session as well - the posters look interesting, and I like poster sessions for pedagogy discussions), but I'm not going to be at the meeting in time for the workshop. I found this summer's workshop very useful, though, and I expect that the one-day version will also be great.

Teaching Introductory Geoscience in the 21st Century

As part of the Cutting Edge program, we are offering a 1-day workshop on teaching introductory geoscience on Sunday , December 14 , in San Francisco, the day before the AGU Fall meeting begins.Many faculty have introductory courses in their teaching repertoires, and those courses span a wide range of subject areas, including physical and historical geology, environmental science, oceanography, natural hazards, and courses that follow a regional or topical theme. This workshop will bring together faculty from a wide variety of institutional settings and backgrounds with the common goal of sharing ideas about improving the pedagogy and content of all of our introductory geoscience courses. The 1-day workshop both builds on and serves to disseminate the results of an identically-titled workshop that took place July 14-17, 2008.

Conveners: Cathy Manduca and Anne Egger

DEADLINE TO REGISTER: Friday, November 21
NOTE: You do not need to be registered for the AGU meeting to attend this workshop.

More information about the workshop can be found here:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/intro-agu08/overview.html

To register, go here:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/intro-agu08/registration.html

Goals and Format
During this 1-day workshop, we will explore the following topics

• How can we maximize the long-term impact of our introductory courses?
• How do we engage students in the real process of science even at the introductory level?
• What are some approaches to designing a new course or breathing new life into an existing course?
• How can we make activities we currently use in our courses more effective?
• How do we approach challenges like teaching large courses, courses with no lab component, or courses in urban settings with nary an outcrop in sight?

The workshop format will include plenary talks, large and small group discussions, and time for planning changes to your own course and activities. In addition, all participants will contribute to development of the online collection of introductory teaching activities for the classroom, lab or field. In doing so, workshop attendees will consider what makes effective activities and assignments and will review and make suggestions for improving submitted materials.

Demography, geoscience jobs, and crystal-ball gazing

2008-11-06T19:06:00.000-08:00

When I got the latest Geoscience Currents from AGI, I immediately printed it out and hung it on the wall in the geology majors' study room.

Here's why:

AGI collected information from a variety of groups that keep track of various employed geoscientists and graphed their membership by age. (They don't have information from any mining industry groups; SEG in this case is the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, not the Society of Economic Geologists.) Hydrologists are the only group that has significant numbers of 40-something geoscientists; my generation was not hired to work for the oil & gas industry.

I hung up the page because of this line from it: The majority of geoscientists in the workforce are within 15 years of retirement age. But after I hung it up, I wondered about the assumptions being made about future employment opportunities.

When I was a senior in college, I had The Conversation with my academic advisor: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" He suggested that I go to graduate school. His generation had been hired to educate the Baby Boomers, he said, and his generation was going to retire soon. There would be lots of academic jobs to replace people like him. If I went to grad school then, in 1989, I would get done just in time.

I did go straight to grad school, though I would have taken a job if I had found one. But when I graduated, jobs were hard to come by. I know a lot of talented geology grad students who left the field after their post-docs went nowhere. My advisor's generation did retire, yes, but there were many more grad students than there were retirements. And there weren't many jobs in industry, and the USGS wasn't hiring, and academic departments were being closed.

The situation for industry jobs now may be different. There are far fewer undergrad geology majors than there were in the early 1980's. The supply of young geologists may very well be lower than the demand.

But it's a matter of supply and demand, not of needing to replace the exact number of geologists who are about to retire. How many geologists will the oil & gas industry need for the next thirty years? What if oil production has peaked? What if concerns about global climate change combined with high oil prices drives a shift to different energy sources? How many geologists will oil & gas need during busts? How many will the mining industry need? (And what will they be mining?) My Magic Garnet Ball isn't clear enough to tell. (~~Stupid inclusions.~~)

I know that "the market" is taking a beating right now, but I still look to it for signals that industry really needs geologists. Are people being hired with bachelor's degrees? What are they making for salaries? Are companies offering to pay students to go to grad school, or do they expect students to prepare themselves for a job that may or may not be there in two or three years? Are PhDs with some industry experience getting new jobs when they are laid off (and how long does it take to find a new job)?

I've adjusted the things I cover in structural geology to try to fit the needs of students who might work in groundwater, in oil, or in mining. I want my students to be ready to take jobs if they are available. But I wonder whether we are being honest about the future. I can't predict the stock market... and geology jobs are as much at the mercy of economics as other jobs are.

Edit: Andrew at about.com discussed a related article in GSA Today here. (The GSA Today article discusses the age distribution of GSA member, and has as a take-home message that my generation of geologists needs to take over leadership roles in geoscience organizations. The Structure/Tectonics Division of GSA has had multiple volunteers for leadership positions from my generation in the past two years, at least. My generation of academics is barely post-tenure, though, despite being old-school already. We're not used to people taking us seriously.)

Spooky geology

2008-10-30T20:45:00.000-07:00

Happy day-before-Halloween. (All Hallow's Eve Eve?)

I've got a ridiculous amount of candy (though I'm in town now, and I'm not calibrated for trick-or-treaters other than the Small Human). I've got a costume for the Small Human. I don't have a costume for myself, however. (Small Human wants me to go as a bat. Given today's stories about the causes of white-nose syndrome, though, I don't have the heart for it. Poor little guys.)

A few years ago, I encouraged my intro class to dress up as something geological. I forgot to do it this year (and it worked better when the class suggested the idea), but I got to wondering...

What would be the scariest possible geologic costume?

I think I would have to go with liquefaction. There's an earthquake, the ground turns to quicksand, buildings and people sink into the ground, and then the sand solidifies around you so you can't breath.

And then the dogs come out and eat your head.

(Images of the 1692 Port Royal earthquake from http://www.longjohnsilvertrust.co.uk/projects/henrymorgan.htm .)

Braaaaaaaains.

I'm not sure exactly how the costume would work, though. I could encase myself in sandy plaster and stop breathing... but maybe that wouldn't be a good idea.

On second thought, maybe I'll go as some obscure geology jargon that deserves to be re-animated. Nothing like a good word to eat a brain.

Braaaaaaaaains....

Earthquake in Pakistan

2008-10-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

BBC: Scores dead after Pakistan earthquake
Scientific American 60-second-science post

There were two moderately large (M6.4, M6.1) earthquakes within twelve hours:

The earlier one had an epicenter right beside a populated valley - Khanozai, Pakistan. (Unfortunately.)

The second one had an epicenter beneath some spectacular plunging folds (WOGE-worthy, except that I'm posting the picture out of turn):

Both earthquakes had similar focal mechanisms. North-south compression (along the India/Asia collision), earth-west extension, along a strike-slip fault (again, common in Asia - see Tapponier et al., 1982, for example). Based on the aftershock locations, I would guess the NW-striking solution is the real fault. I'm curious about the relationship of the seismogenic faults to the plunging folds, though. I don't have a quick explanation... and I'm just starting to talk about faults in class this week. I would love to show the Google Earth images, but the folds show up so well on the satellite images that I should be prepared to answer questions about them in a semi-coherent way.

The earthquakes are also right at the place where the folds near the plate boundary make a sharp bend:

(By the way, does the apparent strike of the fault line up with the boundary of that basin by Kandahar, Afghanistan? It's the brown area west of the earthquakes; I don't have the cities layer turned on in my image.)

I'm not sure how that affects the faulting, either.

Reference: Tapponier, P., Peltzer, G., Le Dain, A.Y., Armigo, R., and Cobbold, P., 1982, Propagating extrusion tectonics in Asia: new insights from simple experiments with plasticine: Geology, v. 10, p. 611-616.

Edit: There's discussion of landslide potential from these two earthquakes at Dave's Landslide Blog: post #1; post #2.

Got a new science building? Want to tell me about it?

2008-10-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

The science departments here are in a building phase. Chemistry got a new building a few years ago, biology is getting a new building right now... and just this morning, we learned that physics, engineering, and the geosciences have the go-ahead to start really planning a new building ourselves.

So now we want to know what cool things other institutions have done recently. If you know of a new science building (and especially a new geology, physics, and/or engineering building) from the past ten years, especially one that uses green building standards, make innovative pedagogy possible, or facilitates undergraduate research*, we'd like to talk to you (and maybe visit your building). (Has anyone taught with a Geowall, or learned with a Geowall? How about the new microscopy labs with digital cameras and computers, which make collaborative learning possible in optical mineralogy and petrology? Those are a few things that I know about, but I would like to know about what things are so new that I haven't heard about them, as well.)

You can contact me at my work e-mail (just google me - you'll find it) or at shearsensibility AT gmail DOT com.

*The president is interested in knowing what research universities do as well as knowing what undergrad institutions do. He wants to make sure we're thinking for the future, which is a good thing, since that's what planning's supposed to involve.

Making AGU plans

2008-10-22T13:02:00.001-07:00

I'm going to AGU for the first time since 2000. I've tended to go to GSA instead, but AGU has been getting more and more interesting (even for someone who's primarily a geoscience educator rather than a researcher, at this point). In the past, AGU has seemed like a meeting for specialists, and if there wasn't a session on something I was actively involved in, the talks were difficult to follow. (I was completely lost by a talk about lightning that I saw on a whim eight years ago. No pictures. You know I'm a geologist... I go to talks to see the pretty pictures.)

I'm talking late (like 5:15 pm) on Wednesday. And that complicates things, because it's final exam week, and my exams are scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday. And flying in and out of Durango is time-consuming at best. I'm looking at giving my Structural Geology exam, then trying to get to the airport and get an early afternoon flight that will connect to San Francisco. And then... well, I can't realistically make it back in time for a 7:30 am Thursday intro exam or for my practical exam time for my sophomore mapping class. (Fortunately, the sophomores have to schedule individual times, so I've got flexibility there. The intro class... well, I can ask someone else to hand out the tests for me, I guess.)

I was planning to go for one day, max, because San Francisco is expensive and I've often felt out-of-place at AGU. But I'm wondering whether the conference has changed, and whether a hopeless generalist would be able to stay busy all through Thursday. (There are a number of structure sessions, even if I don't want to leave my broad area of expertise.) Those of you who go to AGU - would it be worth staying another day, to learn content for teaching (as opposed to keeping up with research related to mine)?

And are you going to AGU? Want to meet up? (That's a question both for old friends and for geobloggers.)

Edit: I've booked my flights, arriving late afternoon on Tuesday and leaving in the evening on Thursday. (There aren't actually red-eye flights to Durango, but there are flights leaving after 5 pm that connect to Durango. Wow.) So can we have a blogger get-together on Tuesday or Wednesday evening?

I've voted. Have you?

2008-10-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

Colorado, like many other states, allows people to vote early, either by mail or at a special polling place. This year, the county clerks have been encouraging everyone to vote by early or by mail, because there is an incredibly long list of referendums, and they anticipate long lines on election day.

So I voted yesterday. (And the referendums really took forever to read.)

If you're voting by mail in Colorado, rumor has it that you need to put two stamps on the envelope or it will be returned. (That's what my local free weekly paper claims, at any rate.)

Now I just have to keep hanging up on robo-calls and push polls for a few more weeks. (Life in a swing state. Always exciting.)

Meanwhile, I've got to decide how to let students miss part (or all) of my field methods lab so they can stand in line. We're not allowed to campaign at work, but I don't think that excusing absences on election day is the same as campaigning.

(BTW, I am not at work now. Sitting at home and grading is working, but it doesn't count as state time if it's after 9 pm. And the computer is mine, not work's.)

Web resources for teaching with Google Earth

2008-10-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

I just got an e-mail from Barb Tewksbury (actually, two e-mails; I'm on two mailing lists) telling about some new pages that she has added to SERC's Cutting Edge websites. She's been using Google Earth in Structure, and she's added a portal to collections of Google Earth teaching ideas (and great locations).

Teaching map interpretation with Google Earth
A collection of Google Earth mapping locations

There are a number of other Google Earth activities on SERC, too.

Given the fun of Where on Google Earth, plus Ron's expertise with imagery and experience using Google Earth in the classroom, and Chris Rowan's geopuzzles, I thought that the geoblogosphere might have some great ideas to add to the collection. (As for me, I've got a new Google Earth extra credit assignment this term; I give the students a latitude and longitude, and they have to tell me about it. I'm still working out the bugs, though, and I've got this immense intro class project that I still need to finish uploading to SERC before I try to write up anything new.)

Edit: I forgot about Hypo-theses' post about draping undergrad mapping projects onto landscapes in Google Earth. Neat stuff. Check it out.

Four Corners Geological Society talk tomorrow

2008-10-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

I'm the speaker at this month's Four Corners Geological Society meeting in Durango. (The title is "Stitching plutons or magma-enhanced deformation: reaction textures, deformation, and thermal modeling from the aureole of the Victory Pluton, NE Vermont." I realize that 1) the title is way too long, and 2) at least one person reading this blog will wonder whether I have actually done anything in the past eight years. The answer, btw, is that I'm trying to wrap up some things related to the Vermont work, and I thought the FCGS members would be more interested in hearing about that than about pedagogy research.)

If anyone reading would like to come, it's in the basement of the College Union Building (the "Sub-CUB Pub"). There's a social hour at 5:30 pm, dinner at 6:30 pm, and the talk at 7:30 pm. Normally we take RSVP's for dinner, but there should be some extra space. (Let me know, though - I don't think there are many Durangoans reading this, but I could be wrong.) Dinner is $20, the talk alone is $2, and if you're a Fort Lewis College student, the talk is free.

Four Corners Geological Society website

(And to those wondering how I'm adjusting to moving all my old images to Powerpoint, the answer is... well, you know how you can scan slides? I had a work-study student doing that for some of mine, but they were scanned at the size of a postage stamp. When I opened the files, I felt kind of like the guys in Spinal Tap when the eighteen-inch Stonehendge set appeared. Fortunately, I've got new digital thin section photos, and maps and graphs that open in Illustrator, and thermal modeling results that open in Excel. But I had a moment where I wondered whether I could just do the entire thing with slides, except for the part that uses new data...)

Googling for reliable geoscience sites

2008-10-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Chris Rowan is better at Googling than I am. He know how to customize Google searches so they prioritize sites that he considers reliable, and he knows how to share his search engine with the world.

He's looking for suggestions for useful and reliable sites. (Think USGS-level reliability.) If you know of some that he's forgotten, please suggest them to him.

Analogies, analog modeling, and squashed chocolate

2008-10-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

While I was away, Callan asked about geobloggers' favorite analogies. Several other people responded. I'm a week late to the party, but I want to play, anyway.

A few weeks ago, I bought a chocolate cookie from one of my former intro students at the local farmers' market.

"You like chocolate, don't you?" she asked.

"Ummm. Yeah." (I didn't have the cookie in my mouth quite yet, but I may have been drooling.)

"I remember you talking about it all the time in our class. Especially about leaving chocolate in a hot car or putting it in the freezer."

So when I came back from GSA, it was time to give my (one, tragically brief) lecture about rock deformation. (That's the sad thing about teaching Earth Systems Science. I can't spend weeks talking about my favorite things.) It's maybe a bad idea to try to explain one's entire specialty in a single lecture after spending week listening to experts talk about the newest, coolest stuff in one's field. In any case, I was having a harder time than usual distilling the subject into its most basic essences.

When I've only got one lecture to do all of structural geology, I spend most of my time talking about faults. Faults can have earthquakes; earthquakes can kill (or at least make life very unpleasant). But I try to explain that ductile deformation exists, and the whole bottom half of the continental crust (not to mention the mantle) deforms that way.

I don't try to explain ductile deformation with rocks. It's hard to imagine something as hard as a rock squishing, even when the rock looks like this:

Photo: disharmonic folds in marble below the Snake Range decollement

So I resort to describing other materials. Silly Putty is great for describing ductile behavior, but it doesn't explain how cold materials behave differently from hot materials. (Well, I don't think it does. I've never put my Silly Putty in the freezer.)

Chocolate, on the other hand, is perfect. Put a chocolate bar in the freezer overnight. When you take it out, you need a rock hammer (or some other implement of destruction) to break off pieces. Cold chocolate is brittle.

Leave the same chocolate bar in your car, though - not tonight, because it's cold out tonight, but maybe during the day tomorrow. Take it out. If it's still solid, it will probably bend in your hands without breaking. (It might have melted, in which case it's now igneous chocolate, which has its own appeal, but which messes up the analogy.) Warm chocolate bars are ductile.

I've used this explanation for years, and normally I get exactly the responses I want. And this year, the students described the cold chocolate just fine, but when we got to the warm chocolate bar...

"What kind of chocolate?" they asked.

I shrugged. "What kind of chocolate do you want?" I generally prefer dark chocolate, but milk chocolate will do, as well.

"How about a Snickers bar?"

I frowned. "You know, a Snickers bar is great in the field, especially if the bears don't eat it, but I think its behavior is a bit too complicated for this analogy."

"Ok, then, what about a Milky Way?"

The point was not getting across. "No, a Milky Way is still made of too many different things, with different behavior. I think we should make our model as simple as possible to begin with. Because, umm, we want to avoid edge effects or something." I am not a modeler myself, but I had just gotten back from GSA.

"Oh. You mean just a Hershey's bar?"

"Yes. Yes, a Hershey's bar will do."

"How about if it has almonds in it?"

"NO! Just a Hershey's bar."

I have a horrible feeling that the other students in the class will write very confusing essays about caramel, nougat, and almonds. Or at least that they will threaten to unless I feed them.

Edit: I almost forgot that I've seen an example of class experiments deforming candy: the deformation of Charleston Chews, used in Structural Geology classes by Arlo Weil from Bryn Mawr. It's a great experiment/demo/in-class exercise... but I'm told that the smell of the candy makes people feel sick. And I'm trying to get students to make positive associations with rock deformation. So maybe pure chocolate is better for the thought experiment.

THAT wasn't the search result I needed...

2008-10-12T20:13:00.001-07:00

I'm talking about earthquakes in my intro class tomorrow. Most likely, I will tell the story about my experience in 1989 (sitting in a doorway shouting "is this an earthquake?" - which, by the way, is not the currently recommended behavior). But part of me would like to show the GPS monitoring that's being done right now. (Not that I'm quite prepared to explain vectors to my intro students... though, come to think of it, the GPS map would be a great example for anyone teaching about vectors.)

I've had the Earthscope Plate Boundary Observatory vectors plugged into Google Earth for quite some time, but I didn't remember where I'd found it. So I did what I always do: I googled it.

And my blog showed up as the second hit.

So, for anyone who goes looking for "continuous GPS google earth," here are the sites you really want:

Google Earth plug-in
GPS products from the Plate Boundary Observatory
Earthscope: Plate Boundary Observatory

(And yes, I'm doing this because I know I'll lose track of the sites again, and I figure I can always search my own blog.)

Earth Science Week: photo, essay, and art contests for all

2008-10-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Silver Fox and Geology Joe for reminding me that Earth Science Week starts today. The theme is "No Child Left Inside," so the best way to celebrate would be to take a kid outside (or to donate to one of the classrooms from Maria's Donors Choose challenge). But there are other possibilities, as well.

For kids, there are two contests:

For US kids in kindergarten* - fifth grade, there's an art contest. The kids need to create some kind of visual art work portraying themselves as scientists studying the Earth.

For US kids in sixth - ninth grade, there's an essay contest on "Earth Connections." Contestants should submit an essay about how Earth's natural processes are connected to one another in the place where they live.

And grown-ups can play, too. (That is, if they haven't broken their cameras.)

United States residents of all ages can submit photos to the contest on "Earth Science Beyond Your Front Door". And no matter where in the world you live, you can submit photos for the contest on "Exploring Earth Science Around the World". From skimming the contest descriptions, I think the focus is on people exploring the Earth, rather than on the Earth alone.

The deadline for all the contests is Friday, October 17. (That would be nineteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, if you're counting.) Check the official Earth Science Week web page for the details about all of the contests.

*I tried to get my son to draw a picture for this contest. (He's been drawing some wonderful volcanoes lately in his school writing notebook.) Today, however, he said he only wanted to draw a picture of himself as a football player.

Blogging (post) GSA: who reads blogs?

2008-10-10T05:00:00.001-07:00

I'm back from GSA (after a Thursday afternoon flight from Houston to Denver, on which the flight attendants probably could have gotten a lot of laughs by asking "what's in this bag, rocks?"). I'm going to try to write some more about some of the science and education sessions (including one that I wished I had seen yesterday morning, on ultra-high-pressure metamorphism) later, but this morning, I'm going to navel-gaze.

Last year, a couple of people I knew from grad school mentioned that they had run across my blog, but I didn't talk about it with most people. But this year, I think a lot of people in my age range knew that I blog. And it didn't seem something to hide or fret about. (In fact, one of my friends introduced her grad students to me because they read my blog. *waves* You're doing really cool stuff!) And at a discussion of issues for mid-career faculty members, I realized that my blog helps keep science and teaching fresh for me, at a stage in my career where I could easily stagnate.

But I also hesitated to talk about my blog to people I considered mentors of various sorts. Grad committee members, faculty at my previous institutions, a friend who is running an NSF program... I didn't talk about the blog to them. And I wondered why. Perhaps I'm still nervous about being judged. But perhaps it was my perception that there's something generational going on. My friends have used e-mail since grad school (or before), and have had web pages since they got their first teaching positions. Some have their own Facebook pages. The internet is full of many ways to communicate, some useful for some things, some useful for others, and it's not that big of a deal to use it or not. But I still expect other people to say "get off the internet and get back to real work!"

But I may be projecting my expectations rather than observing what other people think. So I've added a poll to the sidebar, to get some sense of who reads this blog. I don't collect any kind of statistics about how many people read - I know Callan and others do, but I don't. And I know Brian asked a similar question (in his old blog last year?). But I'm curious who you all are.

(And as a total aside, I ran into Zoltan Sylvester while getting coffee yesterday morning. We each had the last talk scheduled in our respective sessions, but the rooms were cold and the morning was long. We closed down the conference. Good to meet you, Zoltan!)

Edit: Apologies to the undergrads (and pre-college students) who got left out of the poll. I... well, I hadn't had coffee yet, and somehow thought that undergrads would be obvious from other info.

Blogging GSA:GPS, structural geology, and rates of movement along faults

2008-10-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

When I was a young geologist (back when “Tertiary” was a valid name for part of the geologic time scale), we couldn’t actually watch the plates move. We accepted that they moved, but all the evidence was indirect. Weird magnetic stripes on the ocean floor. Rock magnetization that suggested that the North Pole had moved... but different directions in different places. Offset stream beds, or alluvial fans, or volcanoes.

Now, however, we have GPS. ~~We can find where we parked our trucks~~ We can measure the locations of points on the Earth’s surface over and over again... and we can watch them move.

Isn’t it cool when science turns out to be right?

Except... well, if you look at the data really closely, at scales smaller than plates, the geology and the GPS don’t exactly match up. Look at the faults in southern California, for instance. There’s this big, obvious Garlock Fault... and the GPS tells a totally different story.

The Garlock Fault shows up nicely on the map (and on the topography). But the GPS measurements show the importance of another feature, the Eastern California Shear Zone (ECSZ) (which is related to another feature, the Walker Lane, which shows up in GPS measurements on the western edge of the Basin & Range).

There’s also a problem if you look at the rates of movement along faults in Los Angeles. And if you’re a Californian, and you want to know how likely the Big One is, you might wonder who, exactly, to believe.

There was a GSA session that dealt with that problem. And it turns out that there are a number of ways to resolve the disagreements.

1) What if the slip rates change with time? Or if faults trade periods of activity? (That’s what seems to have happened between the Garlock Fault and the eastern California shear zone, according to a talk by Michael Oskin and Kim Le.)

2) What if the models just aren’t considering the complexity of the fault systems? Modeling faults in 3D does a better job of matching both the GPS and geologic estimates of slip rates. (Those are the results of work by Michele Cook, Scott Marshall, and Laura Dair.)

3) And are we considering the uncertainties in the rates correctly? (They are, after all, a combination of the uncertainties in the ages, the uncertainties in the offset distances, and the uncertainties in attaching ages to features. Eric Cowgill had a great talk that made that argument, and his student Ryan Gold had a nice example of a case in which it was tricky to figure out what displacements went with which ages. Eric's talk also made the point that blocks separated by faults (like in the Himalayas) can change shape internally, as other faults become active and then inactive.*)

I only sat in part of the session, but it seems as though the approaches have potential to be combined. (Could modeling be used to test whether clusters of slip on one set of faults could increase stresses on a differently oriented set of faults? Is there a way that mechanical modeling could be used to predict which faults within a block should be active and which should be inactive?) (Edit on Wednesday: Laura Dair's talk today did that, actually, modeling the evolution of the San Gorgonio Knot in southern California.)

On a human time scale, the absolute rates probably don’t make as much difference as human behavior. (Especially if you’re in southern California. Participate in Shake Out regardless of the slip rates.) But as a scientist, it’s satisfying to see conundrums resolved satisfactorily.

Meanwhile, in a session this morning, Mark Dyson (along with Sarah Titus, Charles DeMets, and Basil Tikoff) had a nice example of a case in which the GPS data, geologic maps, and mechanical modeling told the same story. It’s nice when the science works.

*Eric also had one of the best lines I've heard at the conference: he studies strike-slip faults because normal faults and thrust faults "eat their young" - they create topography, which leads to erosion, which leads to loss of part of the story. I love it.

Edit: Eric told me that he got that line from Ramon Arrowsmith. It's still a great line, but credit where credit is due, and all that.

For geologists, anything can be an adventure

2008-10-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

It was raining at 7:50 am this morning in Houston.

That wouldn't have been a big deal, I guess, except that I'm at the Geological Society of America meeting, staying in a hotel that's a ten-minute walk from the convention center, and everyone else in the hotel was trying to get to the convention center at the same time.

Now, I'm a geologist. I'm not made of halite; I don't dissolve in water. And besides, for my PhD I had to walk uphill ~~both ways~~ through the ~~snow~~ rain for months, braving giant geologist-eating mosquitoes and reindeer that hid behind rocks and pretended to be bears. A little warm fall rain isn't going to stop me.

Except that I had my computer with me, and I didn't want to fry it. So I needed an alternate route.

I suppose I could have called a cab. But I'm a geologist. Cabs are for econ majors. And one of the other geologists mentioned that there was a tunnel system beneath Houston. So I (along with many other intrepid geologists) decided to check it out.

The tunnels connect buildings, and don't follow the streets in any obvious way. But there were maps, and it was fairly easy to see which end of the system was closest to the convention center. So off I went.

It all went pretty well until an intersection near the middle of the system, where there were three different routes that could possibly have worked. I followed some other geologists... and ended up out of the tunnel system. And the escalators that took me back down weren't working. After several tries (and some very nice help from Houstonians), I found the tunnel again. But by this time, I had lost my sense of direction, and took several wrong turns before I finally ended up at a mall about three blocks from the convention center. It took several tries to get out of the mall going in the correct direction (and it was still raining). But after half an hour of being lost underground, I'm finally here.

I wonder if I would have been better off if I had had my Brunton?

Blogging GSA: the future of jobs in geology

2008-10-04T20:25:00.000-07:00

I'm heading for Houston and the Geological Society of America meeting tomorrow. I'm going to miss the Sunday sessions, but people following discussions of the employability (or not) of geology graduates may be interested in the abstracts from this session: Perspectives on an Emerging Workforce Crisis in Geology: Assessing a Looming Irony.

As someone who has lived her entire life in the Ivory Tower (or the Sandstone Fortress, in my current job), but who advises students headed for the Real World, I'm particularly interested in the perspectives of people in the industries that employ geologists. (Links take you to the individual conference abstracts.)

Oil and gas (Exxon-Mobil, BP)
Mining
Consulting engineering
Environmental Geology

(I'll be at the meeting from Sunday evening until Thursday morning. My talk is the last one in a session on Thursday... but at least it's possible to get back to Durango in time to teach on Friday, even when I have to leave in the afternoon.)

Edit: Some quick comments from an academic perspective, on ways that industry can ensure a supply of well-prepared employees. (I will add to this as I have time.
The kindergartener is climbing on me.)

Job fairs and other college recruiting: Colleges usually have some office that helps students find jobs, craft resumes, and so forth. Ours puts on job fairs every so often (like next Wednesday). I rarely, if ever, see geoscience employers listed with the recruiters. (Even now.) And students who have not chosen a major may hear about the opportunities at job fairs. In addition, the college career services offices may have things like electronic job listings, electronic resume services, and so forth, and may make those services available to alums - those things can make the job search process more efficient.

Don't leave those kids inside...

2008-10-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

"No Child Left Inside" is the theme of this year's Earth Science Week, October 12-18. Our geology club is going to work with the after-school program at a local elementary school to do something on Friday, October 17 (the 19th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). On Fridays, the local schools let kids out at 1:30 pm, and parents usually don't get home early, so lots of kids stay at Kid Kamp. Seems like a perfect fit for a rock scavenger hunt. (Or maybe we'll bring the shaking tables down and let the elementary kids build houses of sugar cubes, then knock them down.) The classroom activities here include some fun-sounding ideas. And there are lots of activities at Earth Learning Ideas, too (and on their blog, as well).

And to keep the earth sciences in the classroom during other weeks of the year, as well, Maria has picked out lots of great projects to be funded by the Donors Choose organization.

So let's get those kids dirty.

This one's a fossil of an extraterrestrial...

2008-09-30T20:07:00.000-07:00

Julia posted about an e-mail she recently received, in which her correspondent described finding a fossilized head of a sea horse and a fossil heart. And it reminded me that my other half wanted me to tell a story about a tag that I've used before. So, Jay, this post is for you. (Correct the story if I blow it.)

Back in the early 90's, there used to be a funky art festival in northeastern Vermont called the Bread and Puppet Circus. The group apparently still tours with their giant puppets and political theater, but in the 90's, they held a big weekend gathering at a farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, with various skits and lots of bread (cooked in outdoor ovens). The festival grew to something that involved camping, vendors, and all the trappings of a Phish show except the music.

We went up there in one of its last years as a summer festival. I had just started doing fieldwork a bit south of there, so I combined a geology scouting trip with a cultural event, and Jay and I headed out to check out the scene.

The parking lots were a bit like those at a Grateful Dead show - veggie burritos, drum circles, jewelry, bumper stickers, twirly skirts and bare feet. But there was one guy with a lot of rocks sitting on the ground. I would have avoided him - I have had enough experiences with people wanting to talk about the coming Earth Changes as it was - but Jay likes talking to unusual characters. So we went over to talk to him.

Oh, yes, he had interesting rocks.

"This one is a dinosaur!" (I squinted. It looked like a moss-covered calcareous schist, and no, I don't mean it was a coprolite.)

"This one is a dinosaur egg!" (Well, maybe it was kind of oval-shaped...)

"And this one is the fossil of an extraterrestrial!" (Waits River Formation. Not even a single darned garnet.)

I smiled, nodded, and backed slowly away.

I don't think Jay has ever forgiven me for avoiding that long discussion of alien fossils.

(Jay is traveling for work, which is why I'm talking to him via my blog.)

Geoscience uses for calculus (and beyond)

2008-09-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

I've heard many geology students rant about calculus. It's confusing. It's boring. It's useless, at least for geology. So why do they have to take it, then, other than as a form of ritual torture?

I admit that I don't make students use calculus in my classes. I don't want students to miss an intuitive understanding of a topic because they're bogged down in the math, and I don't want to set up pre-requisites that prevent students from graduating in a reasonable amount of time. So I take other approaches - analogies and demonstrations, mostly - to try to make sense of quantitative subject.

I don't do calculus directly in my research, either - at least, not in the sense of calculating derivatives and integrals. But the fieldwork that I do is based on theoretical work that, in many cases, would be impossible without calculus and other post-algebra math. I don't often have time to go into most of it in class (though I've been looking for excuses in Structure this fall, ever since my students made the mistake about ranting about calculus before lecture one day).

I'm putting this list together off the top of my head, and I know that it's horrendously incomplete. (Partly because I forget things, and partly because my research experience is limited to certain subdisciplines.) If you have examples to add, please do, and I will edit the post to include them. If you sign your post, I'll give you credit for your additions. (And if you've got any references to books or papers or online sources that explain more about the use of the technique, I would love to include them, as well.)

Geologic time

The radioactive age equation is probably the most obvious example of a geologic use of calculus. (It was even in my undergrad calc textbook.) The decay rate (dN/dt) is proportional to the amount of the parent isotope present. That makes a simple differential equation, and leads to an equation with natural logarithms. (It also makes radioactive dating challenging to explain to intro classes. I know I do a terrible job of it, and probably leave students figuring that if they're confused, it's probably wrong.)

Structural geology

Something as simple as the attitude of a layer is actually related to calculus. It's simple (well, with practice) to describe the orientation of a plane, but how many geologic layers are really, genuinely planar? And yet we measure the orientation of planes around the surface of a fold. But we aren't measuring the curved surface - we're measuring a plane that's tangent to the surface. It's actually kind of the derivative of the curved surface, except that it's in three dimensions, which makes it really complicated. (It also makes it a subject requiring 3rd semester calculus.) Lots more information about this (and other shapes) is in Dave Pollard and Ray Fletcher's structural geology textbook, in the chapter on differential geometry. (I found myself trying to explain the chapter by writing about an ant traveling along a wire. I suspect the book could be improved by somehow combining the math and some creative analogies.)

And then there's stress. And strain, actually. Both stress and strain are physical examples of tensors - functions that relate one vector to another vector. To work with tensors, you need to know matrix algebra (which I learned in linear algebra). Tensors are important for describing the properties of all kinds of things that vary depending on direction - the stress experienced by different fault planes, the changes in length of stretched fossils with different starting orientations, variations in compressibility with direction, and so forth. (They apply to subdisciplines other than structural geology, too - the weird ellipsoid called the "indicatrix" in optical mineralogy relates the speed of light to the orientation of a crystal, for instance. And if groundwater can flow through material with different permeabilities in different directions.)

Petrology and geochemistry

Metamorphic phase diagrams show which minerals are stable under various temperatures and pressures. The slopes of the boundaries between the areas where different minerals are stable depend on the properties of the minerals (like the entropy and the molar volume).

And... well, mineralogy, petrology, and geochemistry are full of ideas taken from chemical thermodynamics. And thermodynamics is full of multivariable calculus. (How does changing the pressure change the amount of calcium in garnet vs the amount of calcium in plagioclase? The question is a partial derivative.) From my own favorite, metamorphic petrology, there are all kinds of techniques for using metamorphic minerals to tell stories of heating and burial and cooling and exhumation. And none of the techniques would be possible without calculus. (Or, in many cases, differential equations.) I'm sure igneous rocks and ore deposits have similar uses of thermodynamics.

Geophysics

Probably every subdiscipline within geophysics uses calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and so forth.

I've played more with heat flow than with most other topics within geophysics. And heat flow is defined using ideas from calculus. The equation for conduction of heat in one dimension, for instance, relates the transfer of heat to the change in temperature with distance (dT/dx). Add more dimensions, or move the rocks around, and it gets even more complicated. Heat flow equations make it possible to predict how hot a rock can get beside a magma body, or can test whether a continental collision could really result in growth of a certain high-temperature mineral. I love it. It takes arm-waving and gives it substance and testability.

I'm sure there's more. (Groundwater hydrology, for instance, uses differential equations to describe the movement of water and the chemical reactions between the water and minerals.) I need help remember what some are, though.

Sedimentary geology

Brian points out that fluid dynamics is based in calculus. (Tell me more about the modeling of sedimentary systems, though - I mean, most modeling that I know of uses calculus at least, if not differential equations, because changes in time or in space (or both) are part of the model, and if changes are involved, calculus is useful.)

The world's oldest rock is punny

2008-09-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

I finally found time to read the paper describing the new World's Oldest Rock. I wanted to blog about why news reports seemed cautious about trusting its age (for instance, see Richard Kerr's write-up in Science). I need to spend more time thinking through the isotope geochemistry of the heavy rare-earth elements before that's possible, unfortunately. (Maybe a fan of extinct isotopes could help, since the argument is based on decay of 146Sm?)

But the problem, really, is that I got distracted by the mineralogy of the gneiss in question. The rock is described as a "faux-amphibolite," and is made of plagioclase, biotite, quartz, some garnet, and...

...wait...

...cummingtonite.

That's right. The world's oldest rock contains one of the favorite minerals of dirty-minded geology majors.

Other discussions in the geoblogosphere:

The Volcanism Blog
NOVA Geoblog
goodSchist (Chris mentions familiarity with the 146Sm-142Nd system; maybe he could help evaluate the paper)
olelog
About.com geology

(And they did a good job of linking to discussions in the media, so I won't try.)

Open question for readers: surviving calculus

2008-09-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

I just got this question in a comment to another post, and I thought I would throw it out there for readers to help with:

Anyone out there have to take a year of calculus even though it wasn't their strongest subject? How did you survive?

I would love to know answers to this question as well. Not because I'm struggling through calculus myself, but because many of my students are, and I'd like a larger toolkit of suggestions for them. At the end of this summer, I went to a discussion with the math department about ways to help students succeed in the precalculus-calculus sequence, and if anyone has great ideas, our math department has a big education grant and might be able to implement some.

(In the meantime, lacking any better ways to help my students succeed in calculus, I let my structure lab go early - during the stereonet lab, no less - because half the class had a group calculus exam scheduled to start right when the lab was supposed to end, and I didn't want them to go into their exam feeling overwhelmed and confused by stereonet rotations. Oh, and to former students, I was planning to give them a short lab next week anyway, so I'm just going to do rotations and drill-hole problems then.)

My approach has been to point out the connection to calculus concepts whenever I see them. (Strain rate? Derivative! Oh, and how is a graph of stress vs strain rate related to a graph of stress vs strain?) That, and to make the students use algebra as much as possible in a geology context, because it seems like succeeding in precalculus and calculus is often a matter of doing algebra well. It would be nice to have more suggestions beyond the math cheerleading, though.

Congrats to Dave Montgomery - MacArthur Fellowship

2008-09-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

Geomorphologist David Montgomery of the University of Washington has just received a MacArthur Fellowship. (These are the "genius fellowships" that give the awardees $500,000 with no strings attached.)

His book Dirt: the erosion of civilizations has been on my to-read list for a while. (I bet it will be available at the GSA meeting. Maybe there will be signed copies?)

Congratulations!

Open Lab 2008 is taking submissions

2008-09-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

For the past two years, a volunteer group of bloggers has been publishing an anthology of great science blog posts, and publishing it in a dead-tree edition. (Yes, I realize there's something odd about that.) They're looking for posts now:

The call for posts is here.

Bora at A Blog Around the Clock has a list of current submissions. I don't see anything from the geoblogosphere yet. Last year, Chris Rowan and I had posts included in the anthology. The geoblogosphere has grown immensely in the meantime - I hope that many of you will submit your posts (or posts you loved reading) for this year's collection.

Climate change and intro geology textbooks

2008-09-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I got the semi-annual phone call from my textbook rep. What am I teaching next semester, do I need any new books, how do I like my current textbook (Exploring Earth), etc, etc, etc. And then she told me that the book was being revised, and did I have any comments for the authors.

"Yes," I said. "I like the book overall, but I've got one criticism..."

It's in the section discussing global warming. The discussion is good, except... well, except for the waffling.

Here's the intro to the climate change spread of pages. (Bold type is added by me for emphasis. Italics are original in the book - they are the way that new terms are introduced.)

Most data indicate that some global warming is occurring. Many scientists propose that human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests, contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Astronomical factors, such as Earth's orbit around the Sun and an increase in sunspot activity, can also contribute to warming. Other factors may lead to global cooling, such as ash from large volcanic eruptions and an increase in certain aerosols in the atmosphere.

Here's an excerpt from discussion of ice cores:

Many scientists infer that these increases in greenhouse gases are partly responsible for the recent increase in temperature, but there remains debate about this controversial topic.

And here's the discussion of climate modeling:

The simultaneous rises of anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 and temperature may be related. Climatologists use computer models to account for the effects of the various factors that might cause warming. Some model results are consistent with observations of past climates, so may be reliable. Some models suggest that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a contributor to warming in the last century. The relative roles of different factors over the last 100 years, as predicted by these models, are shown by this bar graph.

The facts (and the supporting graphs and discussions of the factors that control atmospheric temperature) agree with my understanding of the science. But the statements are all qualified in ways that leave room for people to argue that we don't really understand the problem. "Many." "Some." And then there are the references to sunspots and the Earth's orbit, which are certainly discussed in the literature, but which may not deserve a spot in the large font at the beginning of the section. And there are the references to debate, and the subtle implications that there could be problems with modeling. (Models "may be reliable." And then again...)

So I told my textbook rep about my complaints about the wording. She was surprised at my particular complaints...

...because she's been getting the opposite complaint. That the statements about climate change are too strong.

She asked if I would be willing to review chapters for the revised edition. I said yes - but that climate change is not my area of expertise. (The youngest rocks I've worked on are around 100 million years old. The shallowest rocks I've worked on were metamorphosed at depths of around 10 km. Young surface processes? Very important, but not my expertise.)

So if you are a climate scientist, and are willing to review climate science for an introductory physical geology textbook, McGraw-Hill needs you. Please, somebody, make sure that introductory geology books reflect the best evidence that's out there.

(Why do I care? Well, I don't like misleading students. And anthropogenic climate change is an important topic beyond the political and economic issues that it raises. The ideas of climate scientists drive research in other areas of geology - see Dave Petley's post today about the possible effects of global warming on landslides as just one example. Waffling about climate change seems like... well, it reminds me of waffling about plate tectonics in 1987. There were plenty of skeptics about plate tectonics in the 80's, but students were poorly served by the textbooks that portrayed plate tectonics as some wacko idea. And, yes, there were books in the 80's that did just that - my undergrad sedimentology book, for instance. I still feel cheated by that book.

I don't want to cheat my own students by teaching them outdated or misleading science.)

Advice wanted: rugged digital cameras

2008-09-14T19:19:00.000-07:00

I went on a lovely hike above 11,000 feet today, checking out the access for a structure field trip in a few weeks. There was a dusting of snow on the north side of some peaks, remnants of a storm a few days ago, and I took a picture of a great angular unconformity (Precambrian gneisses beneath young volcanics).

And I can't show you any pictures, because I dropped my digital camera on the ground and broke it.

(Actually, the story is more complicated, and involves a five-year-old taking photos of an artistic arrangement of hand-held radios on the tailgate of the truck, and a mother with clumsy hands reaching for the camera at the same time as he reached for it. But it doesn't matter. The camera has a dent, and the lenses won't retract.)

So I'm in the market for a new camera. And I'm curious what features the rest of you have found useful. I know I want something with macro capabilities, and with decent resolution. The old camera was very lightweight, but I would be willing to carry something heavier if it were a bit more rugged. I would also like to find something with batteries that I could replace in the field - if I'm backpacking, I can't use my charger.

I am not a great photographer, and even in the days of my entirely mechanical 35 mm, I never got really good at adjusting f-stops and shutter speeds until I got the best image. (I never got the hang of the manual settings on my broken camera, either. I don't know if that means they were poorly designed, or whether I just didn't have the patience to play with them enough.)

Any suggestions for things I should be looking for, this time around?

(And any suggestions for an inexpensive but rugged digital camera that a five-year-old can experiment with? I want to let him explore his interest in still-life images of outdoor gear, but, ummm, not with my camera.)

Student-generated glossaries and intellectual honesty

2008-09-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with an online course management system this semester. (My college adopted the open-source system Moodle last year, and I'm still learning what it can do.) It's got lots of neat little ways I can make online assignments. For instance, tonight my students are doing an open-book quiz relating the minerals from this week's lab to the mineral groups we talked about in lecture. (I think they'll remember more when they've looked up the information themselves, and repeated the quiz until they got everything right, then they would from a rapid-fire list of mineral names during lecture.)

Because I'm using a textbook that doesn't have a glossary at the end of the book, I decided to have students make their own group glossary on Moodle. Every week, each student has to find one new word, enter it onto Moodle, and define it. I've got it set up so that students can read each other's definitions, but so I am the only person who can comment on all of them. (The students can edit their definitions as they go, as well.) After a week and a half of classes, I've been impressed by the terms and definitions that they've found.

In an exercise like this, I expect the students to use all kinds of different sources to understand their terms. The textbook, the lectures, the labs... and the internet. They're doing this online, they've got access to Google, and, well... if I ran across an unfamiliar term outside my field of expertise, I would probably start by Googling it or looking it up on Wikipedia.

As I read the definitions, though, I began to wonder whether any students had simply copied the definitions from other sites. And then I wondered whether it mattered in this situation. (The assignment is being graded based on participation, not on the quality of the definitions. I'm using it to encourage students to study in a particular way, not because I'm interested in their finished product. And, well, glossary entries can only be so original.) But I hear that many people don't think about intellectual property rights on the internet, and I want to encourage students to be honest and to respect and acknowledge the work that other people have done. (Even if those people are anonymous.)

So here's what I'm thinking of doing. I'm planning to go to class tomorrow and tell the students that I'm impressed with their definitions, and that I have an idea that might make them even more useful. I'm going to ask them to include links to any useful web sites that they find, for three reasons: 1) it will make it easier to find the site again; 2) it will point other students to useful web sites, and 3) on the internet, it's polite to link to sources and other related sites.

What do you all think? Linking seems like the polite thing to do these days, and I think it encourages students to acknowledge the ideas of other people. (And I do think that links would be useful for the students, as well. Some students are already adding them, and they're great additions to the definitions.)

Five most important minerals to know

2008-09-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

Following up on yesterday's Fifty Great Minerals meme, Callan at NOVA Geoblog asks a related question:

So let me issue a new challenge for my fellow geobloggers... Which five minerals do you think are the most important ones to know, and why? In other words, if you had to introduce a non-geologist to just five of the earth's multitudinous building blocks, which ones would you choose to share, and offer a justification for each.

It's a great question (particularly during the week when I'm covering minerals in my intro course). I'm going to answer it without reading the rest of Callan's post, so I'm not influenced by his answers.

Quartz: It's made of the two most common elements in the crust (silicon and oxygen). It's in every type of rock - igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. It survives weathering, which makes it a major component of well-traveled sand. It's hard, it's chemically tough, it makes pretty crystals, and it's ubiquitous.

Calcite: Calcium carbonate. Either calcite or its polymorph aragonite makes up the shells of lots of marine organisms, which can then become limestone. It reacts with acids, which means that it's useful to treat an upset stomach or acid rock drainage. It dissolves to make caves, which are beautiful, capable of transporting groundwater (and groundwater pollution) rapidly, and capable of collapsing. It's used to make concrete, and polished slabs in fancy bathroom walls, and (especially as marble) great art. And when it's buried by a continent-continent collision, it carries carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere and into the mantle.

Pyrite: "Fool's gold" is not an ore mineral itself (at least, not most of the time), but it's common in many ore deposits, in slates, and in coal. And when it comes into contact with the water and oxygen, its weathering creates sulfuric acid. It's pretty, it sparkles, and its chemistry creates an important side effect to many kinds of mining.

Clay minerals: This is cheating, because they're a group of minerals, and kaolinite (which has the simplest chemical formula) is one of the less interesting members of the group. They're diverse and chemically complex, but they're one of the major groups of minerals on Earth's surface, because they form from weathering most silicate minerals. They are especially important in soils, because they retain water. Some of them swell when they get wet or dry. Chemical reactions that occur on their surfaces can change the ions dissolved in groundwater. They're important indicator minerals for exploration for ore deposits. And if you heat them to 500 degrees Celsius and 4 kilobars, they turn into really pretty stuff (none of which make my list of Five Most Important Minerals, alas). (You can also make pottery from them at surface conditions, which is also nice.)

And one last one... hmmm.

I'm going to go with olivine, to represent the mantle. I've focused on minerals that are important on Earth's surface, because that's where people live. But most of the Earth is not crust - it's mantle, iron- and magnesium-rich silicate minerals. Olivine is the prettiest and easiest to recognize, and I think the mantle should be proud to have olivine as its spokesmineral.

And if you are one of my students reading this: yes, these are likely to be on a test at some point.

Fifty great minerals meme

2008-09-09T17:54:00.001-07:00

Ok. My AGU abstract is submitted. My quizzes are graded. My powerpoints (both Monday's and tomorrow's) are uploaded onto the course management site, so students can print them if they prefer to do that. (I'll still encourage them to draw.) Lab is done, the kid is at a soccer clinic, and the plants are watered. It must be time for a meme.

From Chuck:

Use bold to indicate minerals you’ve seen in the wild. Italics is for those seen in laboratories, museums, stores, or other non field locations. ~~Ex pet nerds may use underlining to indicate those that they’ve grown with their own two hands.~~ And I won’t bother with stuff you intend on seeing- if you didn’t want to see all these minerals yourself, you’d be spending your precious lunch hour on a physics or biomedical blog.

I'm going to underline minerals that I've probed, dated, or had some other intimate acquaintance with. ~~Because this is a tell-all geology blog.~~

And I'll put an * beside any minerals in my intro class's mineral lab.

50 minerals everyone should see:
Andalusite
Apatite (I'm sure some of my rocks have had apatite, but the &^%# blueschists didn't. Good thing Trevor found some in the other rocks.)
Barite
Beryl
*Biotite
Chromite
Chrysotile
Cordierite
Corundum
Diamond
*Dolomite
Florencite
*Galena
*Garnet
*Graphite
*Gypsum
*Halite
*Hematite (I may have probed this while trying to figure out what was in a rock, too.)
*Hornblende (Ugh. I will never date a hornblende again.)
Illite
Illmenite
*Kaolinite
Kyanite
Lepidolite
*Limonite
*Magnetite
Molybdenite
Monazite (Only probed, not dated. And they were too small to see.)
Nepheline
*Olivine
Omphacite
Opal
Perovskite
*Plagioclase
*Pyrite
*Quartz (I've also probed it when I meant to probe plag. A lot.)
Rutile
Sanidine
Sillimanite
Silver (native)
*Sphalerite
Staurolite
*Sulphur (native)
*Talc
Tourmaline
Tremolite
Turquoise
Vermiculite
Willemite
Zeolite (Which one? Huh?)
Zircon (The ones in my rocks have been too small to see without a microscope.)

Minerals that should be on the list

*Calcite
Glaucophane
Rhodochrosite
*Muscovite
*Copper (native)
Gold (native)

I vote to ditch florencite, willemite, and illite in favor of three of these.

Edit: You know this is a really funny meme to be doing during the week when my intro class is talking about minerals. Especially when I've just finished writing an online assignment (well, open-book quiz, kind of) in which my students are supposed to find out which minerals from their lab are in which mineral groups.

Sometimes it's good to be the department Luddite...

2008-09-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I teach on a chalkboard. With chalk. You know, that white stuff that gets all over your hands and clothes (and fizzes with HCl, though I don't do that in most lectures). I'm gradually building a set of powerpoints, especially for images that I can't draw by hand (photos, maps, cross-sections...). But for the most part, I like chalk.

I like to write student responses on the board during discussion. I like building sketches little by little, explaining things as I go. I like the way chalk forces me to talk more slowly. (One of my students asked me if I grew up Out East. It wasn't my accent - I just talked too fast to be from around here.) Even when I use powerpoint, I find myself drawing on the chalkboard. (Last week I had a beautiful picture that illustrated the places where water is found, and I ended up drawing a lame-looking duplicate on the chalkboard, so I could add labels, and so that I could model Really Bad Drawing for students and show them that they, too, could draw pathetic cartoons in their notes to help them understand and remember the discussion.)

So I was mostly amused when something broke in the campus network today. No faculty could get onto the network. No e-mail, no file servers, no course management pages. Hard drives if the computer was already running. The web, if the computer was already running. But the computers in the classrooms? Nope.

I actually had a powerpoint ready for class, though I intended to spend more time having my intro students compare and contrast some samples. But when I couldn't get onto the network, I just reverted to my old Luddite ways. Chalk, ball-and-stick models of mineral structures, boxes of rocks, and group brainstorming.

I hope the systems comes back, though. I'm having my intro class create their own glossary (because the textbook doesn't have one), and I'm curious whether it has helped them read the book more carefully. (And I'm curious what they say about my new Google Earth exercise, too.)

But if it doesn't come back... well, I've got chalk.

(And someday I'm going to learn how to use a sliderule, because some of my older colleagues claim it is a great way to think about orders of magnitude.)

In search of pictures of mud

2008-09-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

It's the end of the first week of class, and I'm looking for some good pictures of... ummm... mud. I'm introducing students to geology this week - yesterday, for instance, we talked about things that affect where people live, and about how water moves around the planet. On Friday, I want to talk about rocks. But I don't want to start by classifying them. I want to start by getting students to look at rocks as records of things that have happened in the past. I've got plenty of rocks, and I've got some good pictures of matching environments (pebbles for a conglomerate, lava for pieces of basalt). But I've got lots of pieces of shale around, too, and I would like to use them, as well.

But, well, I don't take pictures of mud.

I've looked on a couple blogs (Clastic Detritus and Hindered Settling both have great pictures and interests in sediments), but I haven't found the perfect image yet. My comparison rock, for people who know the stratigraphy of the western US, is the Mancos Shale. So I would like to find a picture of ocean mud, if possible. The gooier, the better.

Anyone got some marine mud they're willing to share?

The blogosphere and the first day of class

2008-08-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

Everything I'm doing on my first day of my intro class was inspired by the blogosphere.

There was a great post by Andy Revkin of the NY Times a few weeks ago, talking about disaster memory in elephants and humans. In a drought, old elephant matriarchs lead their groups to far-away water holes that don't dry up. Revkin makes the connection to human memories of disaster: are memories of what to do in a tsunami, or a drought, or a hurricane remembered? He comments that:

As I’ve said here before, it now seems in some ways that scientists are like society’s elders, with awareness of past disasters absorbed from years of studying mega-droughts recorded in tree rings, or coastal destruction etched in layers of sediment, or great earthquakes recorded in displaced stream beds.

He says "scientists." I say "geoscientists," because every one of these examples is the sort of thing that we study. And in a world in which geology is often left behind by adults, limited to memorizing rock types in grade school, those of us who teach general education science courses may have the last chance to give people access to the wealth of knowledge that geoscientists have accumulated.

So that will be the theme of my course introduction: how humans deal with a planet that, though perfect for life, can also be deadly.

I'm going to show these images:

Hurricane Gustav late on Sunday, from NOAA. New Orleans has been evacuated. Buses carried away those who didn't have cars of their own. The Superdome and the Convention Center are thankfully empty. Even if the city floods again (which I hope it will not), hopefully New Orleans has averted a repeat of the horrifying tragedy of all those people, trapped in their homes with water up to their roofs, or stuck in the Superdome with no way to leave the city. Three years is manageable on a human time scale. The wounds have not yet healed. People remember.

But what about disasters that happen less frequently?

The town of Chaiten, Chile, buried in mud by volcanic mudflows after the eruption of Chaiten volcano. Thanks to The Volcanism Blog for this picture.

Chaiten volcano was a caldera, a great circular hole left by an ancient eruption. It had been 9000 years since it erupted last, but in May, when it came to life, the warning signs were clear. The town of Chaiten was evacuated. And 4000 people are still alive who might not otherwise have been. Perhaps Chaiten was close enough to the volcano that the people would have left. But other towns (such as Armero, Columbia in 1985) have been destroyed by similar processes. When disasters happen 9000 years apart, it is unlikely that human memory (even if cultural traditions have been passed on) will be sufficient to tell people what to do. But geologists can be like elephants. We can remember.

And sometimes memory of the past isn't a sufficient guide for the future.

Extent of Arctic sea ice on August 30, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Sometimes physical models provide guides when there is no obvious analogy in the past. The Arctic sea ice is melting. What does that mean, other than drowning polar bears, opportunities for new oil drilling, and arguments over who owns the floor of the Arctic Ocean? I don't have clear answers, but understanding the basics of climate science and oceanography can help make sense of what scenarios are more likely than others.

And then we come home to Durango.

I'm going to make them sketch and think about this picture while I find out who's in the class, and where they're from. I probably won't ask what kinds of stories their families tell, though I'm curious whether the Navajo students, in particular, understand some of their stories as warnings. (I have to show them how to use course management software and stuff as well. And remind them to buy the book.)

I stole the idea from Andy Revkin, and the examples from a recent post by Callan Bentley and older posts by The Volcanism Blog. Thanks, everyone, for good ideas. :)

Gustav and uncertainty

2008-08-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

I'm watching the forecasts for Tropical Storm Gustav with dread.

Image: five-day track forecast for Gustav, from NOAA.

Three years ago this week, I began my first Earth Systems Science lecture with an image of a swirling cloud looming over the Gulf of Mexico. On the second day of class, I was asking students if they knew anyone from New Orleans, and whether they were all right. It was horrifying, particularly because I had used the geology of New Orleans as an example in classes for years, ever since I read The Control of Nature.

But even though Gustav appears to be headed on the absolute worst course for the city of jazz, levees, and elevations below sea level, Forecaster Franklin of the National Hurricane Center added this reminder to the end of Wednesday's 11 pm discussion:

IT PROBABLY WOULDN'T HURT TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT THE AVERAGE 5-DAY OFFICIAL TRACK ERROR IS ABOUT 300 MILES...AND THE AVERAGE 5-DAY INTENSITY ERROR IS ABOUT 25 MPH.

Error. In other words: there are reasonable odds that we'll be wrong, and the storm will hit Houston or the Florida Panhandle.

I'm not a statistician. In fact, I've never taken a statistics class. (I'm embarrassed enough to have bought an undergrad statistics textbook, but not shamed enough to have buckled down and worked through it.) But I am a scientist and a teacher, and that means that I need to somehow get students thinking about uncertainty.

I'm not a weather modeler, so I think about uncertainties more in the context of measurements than of predictions. I learned about the concepts of accuracy and precision in chemistry classes, and about error estimates in intro physics. My geology classes never took on the topic directly. But it should be possible to think about the ideas in geology, as well. How good is that bearing you measured on your compass? When should I count your answer as "wrong" - when it's half a degree from mine? One degree? Five degrees? Even if you weren't balancing on a cliff with shaking hands, would our measurements always be identical? When I talk about uncertainty in class, it's usually in that context.

Uncertainty in weather models is something I know less about. I know, from reading the discussion of the hurricane forecasters, that they look at the predictions of a number of different models (which presumably use different ways to weigh the effects of wind shear and warm Gulf water and other weather systems). I don't know where the 300 mile uncertainty comes from. (Is it the same kind of sense based on experience as I have about the correctness of my compass measurements? Or is there a more formal statistical way to derive the model's uncertainty?)

I hope that Gustav does not become a teachable moment. May the predictions be wrong, and may the storm weaken. And may everyone be prepared, in the event that it is correct.

What kind of compass do you prefer?

2008-08-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

I see that ~~eight~~ nine people have already voted in the poll I put up yesterday, even though I haven't found time to blog about it until tonight.

I'm putting together my classes for this semester. (I don't start until Sept. 1, so I've got a few more days.) One of the classes I'm teaching is our sophomore-level field methods course. The title might be misleading - the course is an introduction to geologic mapping, and leaves out many other things that geoscientists do in the field. (In fact, my intro class will be doing some of them in their stream lab.) On the other hand, geology isn't just a set of technical skills that one is trained to do - a geologist should be able to imagine what's hidden underground*, as well, and the skills in this class are designed as one step towards developing the ability to think spatially.

Geologic maps show what rocks are found near (or at) the surface, but they also provide the information needed to make a good guess at what might be hidden underground. That information comes from the orientations of layers of rock, and of fractures and cleavages and faults. And to find that information, we still use big, clunky, old-school geologic compasses. (GPS is great for figuring out where you are, and we use those, too. But the compass is still a basic piece of equipment.)

When I was young (*shakes cane*), I learned to measure bearings by measuring angles from north or south:

If that arrow in the middle of the circle was... oh, let's say it's the direction a current used to flow. I would have measured the direction of the arrow as being 45 degrees east of south (or in my field notes, S 45 E).

But that's not the only way to measure angles. A circle can be divided into 360 degrees, and compasses can measure bearings around a circle, starting with north and then spinning through east (at 90 degrees), south (at 180 degrees), and west (at 270 degrees), and finally getting back to north, if they didn't get dizzy and fall down in the meantime. Those kinds of bearings are known as azimuths. They're easier to deal with mathematically, because they're one number, always measured in the same direction. They confused me when I first dealt with them, because I'm lousy at memorizing numbers. (I hate combination locks.) I've gotten used to them, though, because I've worked with people who prefer them.

I always used to think that quadrant measurements were more intuitive. I think about directions as "southwest", not as "a bearing between 180 and 270 degrees." And I carry a protractor that measures angles between 0 and 180 degrees easily, but which requires me to subtract larger numbers in my head. (And I make mistakes when I do arithmetic in my head.) I prefer to make my maps in the field - they are tools for helping me think about what's going on, and if I wait until evening (or later) to compile them, I might have to hike miles and miles back to the same spot to collect more data. And that means that my favorite compass is one that gives me numbers less than 180 degrees.

I've seen more and more students who are at least as comfortable with azimuth measurements as with quadrants, though. And at least three of my colleagues prefer them. (And I've got a sinking feeling that I'm just hideously old-fashioned for carrying a quadrant compass.)

I'm not going to trade in my compass. It was expensive, and it still works, and I'm capable of converting the different measurements. (I can almost do it in my head. If I practice enough. Grading 20 labs every week gives me lots of practice.) And I always make students convert their measurements back and forth. (I still need to do the math in my own head, though, to check them.) But I'm curious what the current trends really are. Does anyone prefer quadrant compasses, or are people switching entirely to azimuth? Are the azimuth people primarily geophysicists? (Paleomag is easier in azimuth, I believe.) Are azimuth bearings easier to handle in GIS?

And if I carry a quadrant compass, should I carry a sliderule, too?

*Yes, I realize that may be a structural geologist's bias, but you know... in grad school, I could have been a geochronologist or a metamorphic petrologist. I've become a structural geologist by necessity, because my departments needed someone to teach spatial thinking more than they needed someone to unravel the exhumation histories of metamorphic rocks.

Geologists who don't deny human-caused climate change: my experience

2008-08-20T21:10:00.000-07:00

I’m still thinking about perceptions of how geologists think about climate change. But this time I’m not going to try to explain it. This time I’m going to tell a story.

Before I get started, let me get one thing straight. I’m not going to go through the arguments for anthropogenic global warming, because 1) I’m not a climate scientist, and 2) other people have done it. I’m going to talk about how I came to be convinced. Hold on, because it’s far more convoluted than simply reading a paper and realizing that the conclusions were sound. In fact, I’m going to go way back.

I had been fascinated by glaciers since childhood - I grew up in Maine, and my favorite place, Mount Katahdin, was eroded into cirques and arretes that made it a far more spectacular mountain than one might expect from its elevation (5267 feet). Plus my yard was full of random rocks – so random that I was skeptical about stratigraphy when I first heard of it – and from an early age, I learned to blame the glaciers for making the lawn somewhat dangerous to mow.

My childhood was in the 70’s. I don’t know if I saw that infamous Newsweek cover about global cooling – I was eight years old at the time – but I remember a rather vivid nightmare about running away from an advancing glacier. (Just in case a climate denialist wanders in here and is impressed by my youthful prescience, I was also worried that the Loch Ness Monster’s cousin lived in the shallow, algae-slimed lake in town. I mean, I was eight. I wasn’t reading the scientific literature at the time or anything.)

And then, in the mid 80’s, I went to college in Minnesota. So when I first heard scientific discussions of climate change, it was in the context of understanding the ice ages of the past million years. We talked about glacial landforms in my geomorphology class, but we didn't talk much about what drives climate change. When we did, it was mostly a bit of arm-waving about Milankovitch cycles and about not really knowing what caused climate to change.

I first heard of the greenhouse effect in a student presentation in my Advanced Environmental Geology class in 1988. I don’t remember most of the presentations, but that one struck me as something weird, almost out of the realm of science fiction, but also worth paying attention to.

I started grad school at Stanford in 1989. At the time, Stanford was strong in the solid earth sciences, but had little expertise in surface processes, oceanography, or climate. (There were a couple of hydrogeologists, a micropaleontologist, and an organic geochemist on the faculty, and one grad student was working on marine records of El Nino events. And that was pretty much it.) But the new Dean proposed a program in Earth Systems Science, and there was a seminar series to start it off. I don’t remember most of what was discussed in the talks, but I think that that’s where I began to get the sense that global warming was something that I might have to worry about in my lifetime.

A few years later, after I had started my first job, I heard a convincing talk by Stephen Schneider, as part of a big symposium at a small liberal arts college. I heard Schneider speak again in 1998, I think, while I was on sabbatical (back at Stanford for a few months). And in the meantime, I read science fiction, especially the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson*. (If you haven’t read them, one of the plot points involves collapse of an ice sheet in Antarctica, and political chaos that results from rising sea levels in an overpopulated world.) I also spent the mid-to-late 90’s in a small department with a physical oceanographer and a marine geologist whose research included studies of Arctic Ocean currents and young ocean sediments off the Antarctic Peninsula. They were the only people I knew working on climate-related work, and the possibility of anthropogenic climate change was something that they discussed as an underlying principle, not as a fringe idea.

So throughout the 90’s, I viewed global warming as a problem for the distant future, supported by science, but something that might affect my kids. Maybe. When the Kyoto negotiations happened in the late 90’s, I had spent ten years hearing the same big picture from scientists: more carbon dioxide increases temperature; we are increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we’re going to cause climate to change.

In the early 2000’s, I was shocked to see the future already beginning to arrive, not science fiction any more, but real events. The Larson B ice shelf collapse in 2002 was especially disturbing. There were some other studies that came out at the same time that I can’t remember, but for a while, it seemed as though every week brought a new press release about yet another indication that climate change was already happening. AGU’s statement on climate change came out around the same time, I think. And I was teaching Earth Systems Science myself, so I felt obligated to try to understand climate, even if I had not been formally trained in it. And the papers that I’ve seen since 2002 haven’t shown any sign that the scientific understanding is changing. The science seems to have matured, to arguments over details of why glaciers behave in certain ways, and how various regions respond, and how sensitive is climate to carbon dioxide. But the basic concerns that drive the research don’t seem to have changed since I first heard about the greenhouse effect in the 80’s.

And in the meantime, the Northwest Passage opened.

I don’t study climate myself. I’ve specialized in rocks from the middle of the crust: old, hot, and deep. As far as research goes, I have nothing to add to the discussion. But geology is a related field, and in undergrad institutions, geology departments are the places where climate science is taught, if it is taught at all. And that means that, when climate scientists visit and speak, I pay more attention than I might to a talk by a geneticist or a string theorist.

Until there were signs that we might do something about carbon dioxide, I didn’t hear about people who were skeptical about anthropogenic climate change. And when I encountered them, I had already been convinced by fifteen years of talks by people who were trying to explain their research. I haven’t heard anything from the skeptics that makes me distrust Schneider or my oceanographer colleagues.

And I don’t have nightmares about glacial advance any more. (Now the Loch Ness Monster, on the other hand...)

*I know that being influenced by fiction isn't a good scientific argument. But that doesn't mean that fiction makes no impression on people.

Geologists and denial of human-caused climate change

2008-08-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting post at Real Climate about a session on climate change at the International Geological Congress. Apparently, the session included quite a few speakers who are skeptical about human-caused climate change, which led Rasmus Benestad (the Real Climate contributer who wrote the article) to ask:

What is going on? Is there a higher proportion of geologists that have a completely different view on climate change, or was this a biased representation of the community?

To be honest, I don't know. I do know geologists who are skeptical about human-caused climate change. Most of them are retired petroleum geologists. (That may be due to sampling bias, however; Durango is one of those places where geologists go to retire, and the Four Corners Geological Society is affiliated with AAPG, so I drink with retired petroleum geologists about once a month.) But last fall, I also saw a talk by a petroleum geologist who tried to explain why he was convinced that humans are affecting climate, and saw a number of industry geologists thinking about what he said.

Here's an edited version of what I said in a comment on Real Climate. I'm curious what other people think. Why are many geologists resistant to the idea of human-caused climate change?

I’m a solid-earth geologist (structural geology, metamorphic petrology), and I agree with Steve Milesworthy. [Milesworthy observed that the arguments of skeptical geologists tend to be, essentially: 1) there have been natural warm spells in the past, so the current climate change is also natural; 2) life has survived climate change in the past; and 3) climate science is just modeling and can't be trusted.] But I think there's more too it than that.

The fundamental assumption of geology is uniformitarianism: the present is the key to the past. We’ve recently been trying to convince the world that we’re relevant to humans because the past can also say something about the future: earthquake hazards, volcanic hazards, flood hazards - geology can give a longer-term perspective than history, and tell us that, for instance, a 5000-year-old volcano is potentially dangerous.

Geologists can get misled by uniformitarianism, though. The past helps us understand the future, but only if the same physical and chemical processes are operating. It’s hard for geologists to accept that humans are more than temporary, surface-scratching creatures - that we can affect the underlying physical and chemical processes that drive the geology that we study. And it’s hard to trust ideas that come out of physical and chemical models when they aren’t confirmed by something that we see in rocks. (Geologists will often dredge up the example of Lord Kelvin’s attempt to determine the age of the Earth from heat flow calculations - Kelvin was very wrong, because his model was incomplete, not because models are inherently useless.) And geologists have known for a long time that climate changes, so if it was natural in the past, there’s no reason to blame humans…

…except that there are good reasons to blame humans, and climate scientists have built a convincing case based on many different lines of evidence. (Geologists should respect that; it’s essentially the same way that solid earth geoscientists build big ideas.) You can’t test whether humans cause climate change by looking at a time when humans weren’t around… it’s like proving that magma doesn’t cause metamorphism by looking at metamorphic rocks that were heated by other processes. Geologists should get that, because we think that way, too.

And most geologists who have been in grad school since the late 80’s do accept and respect climate research. If we’re in the same departments, or have climate researchers coming to department seminars, then we hear and understand the arguments. But people who work in government agencies that separate geology from climate, or who work in oil & gas or mining, or who work in academic departments that are strictly solid earth - well, those people aren’t directly exposed to the current thinking of climate researchers. And they are perfectly capable of thinking about climate like geologists did in the 70’s. (Milankovitch, Milankovitch, Milankovitch.)

So geologists should accept climate change, but there are lots reasons why some don’t. The reasons are bad, but they exist.