Friends of volcano monitoring on Facebook

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.

High points

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.

Geologists' 100 things meme

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.

A not-quite-geology haiku

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.

Five most important minerals to know

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

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.

Tag clouds for papers

I didn't write a Sunday Stroll yesterday, because I spent it doing spring cleaning. (Wheee! Giving away baby toys to a preschool yard sale!) I may write something late, because I heard a hummingbird on Saturday.

So: making tag clouds for papers must be a meme now, because Brian, Lab Lemming, Maria, and ReBecca have all done it. So here's Hannula et al, 2000:

al along andalusite around biotite chlorite complex conditions contact deformation dominant east et fault fig foliation formation garnet generally grade growth however intrusion lineation metamorphic migmatite mineral monroe mountain movement muscovite northeastern occurred parallel peak pluton porphyroblasts pressure pseudomorphs rocks s2 s3 samples sillimanite staurolite suggest vermont victory west zone

created at TagCrowd.com

It passes the suck-up test, because none of my committee members ever worked in this area (or even in this mountain range), and all my co-authors were undergrads. It fails the waffle words test, though: "generally" and "suggest" are both in there. (I'll let "dominant" slide, because I was talking about rocks with multiple foliations, so it's a legitimate term in this case.

Here's Hannula (um... 2002? 2003?), from the Journal of Geoscience Ed:

32nd asked baker based bridge concepts course different distance enjoyed expect explicitly groundwater however hypotheses hypothesis involved labs lane learned least list making maps method models observations projects pumping question research results revised river rock scientific semester smelter students test think tombstones top topographic trimble types understanding used water weathering

created at TagCrowd.com

This one included text from a number of labs, so it's a bit strange. (32nd is a street number used for reference in a topo maps lab.)

Seven things you didn't know about me

I was tagged by Chris R. for this meme. So... here it goes.

1. My high school biology teacher was a young earth creationist, and I have never had a biology class that covered evolution, though I used to read the last chapter of grade school textbooks - the one that talked about human evolution - on my own. My high school history teacher tried to make up for our inadequate science education by starting Ancient History with the Paleozoic.

2. I chose my undergrad college because the glossy propaganda included a picture of a snow sculpture of a lake monster.

3. I chose my graduate school because it does not snow there. Not in April, when I visited. Not in January. Not at all.

4. Within three months of arriving in grad school, I missed snow so much that I decided to do field work in northwestern Alaska.

5. All of my academic jobs have been in ski towns, even though I am a Nordic (not Alpine) skier.

6. After my first job interview, I was told that I was not enthusiastic enough about teaching, and that I should consider applying for jobs at research universities. So the next time I got an interview, I asked lots of detailed questions about the courses I would be teaching, and I went to the interview with a lot of ideas about the classes. (I got that job, and I have never applied for a job at a research university.)

7. At one point, I knew how to ask for beer in French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. However, I prefer to drink red wine.

I'm not going to tag anyone, because I don't want to put anyone on the spot. But if you want to play, consider yourself tagged.

That "number one on google" meme

I'm late to this meme, but I finally played the I rank number one on Google! meme (originated at The World's Fair).

And here are my results:

1. All of my faults are stress related
2. joy field work
3. structural geology wow
4. sound of mylonites
5. over-excited yeti

Didn't need to use quotes on any of them... which, I guess, implies that I use some unusual combinations of words. Though, really, it's kind of disappointing that "structural geology" and "wow" don't belong together all the time.

I mean...