Geology and science fiction: what do I think?

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.

Metamorphic rocks of "Middle Earth": boring, or magical?

I love movies with big landscapes, and the New Zealand landscapes of The Lord of the Rings are some of my favorites. So I just had to click on Brian's shared link to a geology.com news post, linking to a Discovery Channel article about 'Middle Earth' Mountains: Steep and Strong.

Executive summary: New Zealand has steep mountains but few landslides. What gives? (Or rather, what doesn't give?)

The answer is: metamorphic rocks. Or rather, the answer is the rapid uplift along the Alpine Fault, which has brought hot young rocks to the surface very rapidly. Many other places with metamorphic rocks (such as New England) have much gentler topography, because they aren't tectonically active. But New Zealand is blessed with the best of both worlds: an active plate boundary, and rapidly exhumed metamorphic rocks.*

Not all metamorphic rocks are strong - many break along cleavage or foliation planes, weakened by flaky sheet silicates (such as biotite, muscovite, and chlorite). But the weakest rocks, those with a lot of sheet silicates, come from metamorphism of aluminum-rich clays. If you metamorphose something that hasn't undergone much weathering - say, a sedimentary rock with a lot of volcanic fragments like a greywacke** - there will be fewer sheet silicates (especially muscovite).

So what are these strong rocks that can hold up spectacular mountains without failing in landslides?

A new survey of the mountain ranges that form the spine of New Zealand confirms the steepest are made almost entirely of tough but otherwise unexciting rocks called greywackes and schists. (Source: Discovery.com)

Ta-da! Greywackes (or maybe meta-greywackes?) and schists. And...

Hold on a minute. What was that modifying phrase?

...tough but otherwise unexciting...

Unexciting? Unexciting?

Those, my friends, are fighting words. (As bad as the gratuitous volcano slander happening on ScienceBlogs.)

And worse, I can't blame a biologist or the faceless media for the slander. It came from an avalanche researcher... a fellow geoscientist:

"They're pretty boring rocks," confirmed avalanche and landslide researcher Oliver Korup of the Swiss Federal Research Institutes in Davos, Switzerland. They are simply petrified deep sea sediments that have been pushed up to form the mountains, he said. "They don't even have fossils."

Ok, then. Let's take a look at what they're calling boring:





(Images are screencaptures from The Fellowship of the Ring. There's obvious CGI on the second one, but the rocks, I suspect, are real.)

If these are boring rocks, I don't think I could handle the adrenaline rush from seeing exciting ones.

It's not just that metamorphic rocks are strong. It's that they remember. They've been through a lot - they still contain traces of their history as sedimentary rocks, sometimes in their textures, sometimes only in their chemical composition. They've been buried and heated and squashed, but they haven't succumbed to melting (or at least, not entirely). Their minerals tell the story of their burial and exhumation; their structures tell of the strains that they have endured. It's hard to tease out their stories, and much of what they experienced has been erased by more recent events. But still - these are rocks worth understanding. These are rocks with sisu.***

So no, it's not elfin magic that makes the mountains of New Zealand strong. It's the magic of things that seem boring and simple on the surface. More hobbit than elf, probably, in Tolkien's world. But wonderful, all the same.

*Chris Rowan did his dissertation on paleomagnetism in New Zealand, and although he is probably less likely to sing the praises of metamorphic rocks than I am (because metamorphic rocks are lousy candidates for paleomag), he knows the tectonics much better than I do.

**Why do many online definitions of "greywacke" describe it as a primarily Pale[a]ozoic rock? Is it because the definitions were written by British geologists, and greywacke is associated with mountain-building, and Britain was shaped by Paleozoic mountain-building? I bet the New Zealand greywackes aren't Paleozoic...

***Thanks to Joe Kopera for introducing me to the word sisu. A Finnish word that can be used equally for metamorphic rocks and some of my favorite literary characters - I love it.