Warping young minds with geologic holiday gifts

Over at Apparent Dip, Thermochronic, Brian, and Chris Rowan have been suggesting some ideas for gifts to entice your favorite young person into geology.

I'll bet everyone can figure out who is responsible for each of these suggestions:

- I predict that a full Bouma sequence would be a big seller, but I can also envision a cute 'bottom-absent' turbidite, and a tough-looking, but lovable, mass transport complex.

- It's the cuddly magnets the kids go for.

- I've been working on a children's book in my head about the "Brave little biotite."

So now I need to wear two hats at once, and play "that weird mom whose kid talks about volcanoes on Mars."

My son is the proud owner of a stuffed T. Rex and a velociraptor puppet. (The velociraptor is kind of scary, and has been banned from the bed. T. Rex, however, does a lot of cuddling when he isn't RARRRRRing.)



I bought this book, Geology Rocks! 50 Hands-on Activities to Explore the Earth for one of my nephews. Activities include "A Quake-Proof Contest!", which involves building blocks and a washing machine, and playing plate tectonics with graham crackers.

His older brother got this for his birthday: Magic Tree House: Tsunamis and Other Disasters. (My sister actually suggested the series, and when we saw the tsunami book, well...)

And I swear I saw a plush trilobite for sale at GSA a couple years ago. I couldn't find it this year, though. The closest thing I've seen on the web is plush Martian life (complete with scientific disagreements about its meaning!), and a few non-extinct invertebrates. At GSA, I was left bringing home things like the official IRIS slinky, a dinosaur-in-an-egg from (I think) Mississippi State, and a spinning light thingy from the Planetary Geology division.

I think the best geologic gift for a little kid, though, would be a great big magnifying glass and a box full of interesting things to look at. (A piece of pumice, maybe, or polished piece of granite, or some sand.) And if you're around the kid, take him or her outside and go exploring. (Have you ever followed critter tracks in the snow, to try to figure out how many legs an animal had, or what it ate? Snow is good for talking about relative ages, too. And, yes, I do ask my four-year-old whether he thinks the rabbit hopped by before or after it stopped snowing. And layers of snow make very nice folds as they start to slide down the car's windshield, so there's even the potential to get into structural geology!)

But I'm open to other suggestions (or for clever ideas that just need the right marketing person).

(If you're shopping for adults, Andrew Alden at about.com has put together a list of geologic gift ideas. Some of them sound pretty good for older kids, too... I like the idea of a plate tectonic globe, or some geologic puzzles.)

Teaching: more on weather journals

John Fleck asked for more info about my weather journal exercise. Here it is.

Every semester, I end Earth Systems Science by talking about weather and climate, and instead of giving quizzes, I make the students keep a weather journal.

Here's what I ask them to do:

1. (3 points) Keep a journal of the weather that occurs for the next three weeks. Every day, record:

➢ maximum and minimum temperatures (temperatures at Durango airport are available from the National Weather Service)
➢ clouds -- how much of the sky is covered (as a percent), what types of clouds are present
➢ precipitation -- does any occur? In what form (rain, drizzle, snow, hail, etc.)? Is it continuous in time or space, or does it occur as showers? How much falls?
➢ wind -- speed (qualitatively) and direction
➢ any other interesting phenomena

Detailed weather observations from the Durango airport are available at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/KDRO.html . You may use the NOAA observations as a source, but I would also like you to include your own observations.

2. (2 points) Explain the weather patterns you observed. Check out weather discussions at the National Weather Service web site (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/) for information about national and global weather patterns.

Why do I do it that way? Well, mostly because that's what I brainstormed the first time I taught the class. But I wanted to create an assignment that would get the students to look at the world around them, and think about what they were learning in class, and connect them together. So when they wake up in the morning and see this:



... they have some idea why there is frost on the car windows but not on the house windows (as was the case at my house on Saturday). Or so, when the smoke from the Durango-Silverton train hangs down in the valley on a cold morning, they realize that they're seeing a temperature inversion.

And I didn't want to make the assignment too complicated - I didn't want them to need access to a barometer, or for them to get up in the middle of the night to measure the temperature.

So does it work? Well, it's hard to say. A few students make great, detailed observations. Other students do the bare minimum. And it seems like it's pretty hard to connect the local observations to bigger picture questions - I would need to have them look at the National Weather Service web site daily, or something.

I also hope that the weather journals will give me some concrete examples of things to discuss in class. I started class this morning (on humidity and the dew point and ways that clouds form) with a picture of frost on my car, and we talked about that (and about the experiences of students who have grown up in more humid climates with a lot of dew). We still didn't end up talking about some of the more interesting things I saw over the weekend, such as the fog that formed at dusk on Friday, after the sun had started sublimating the new snow. (I think - though I'm not certain - that I was seeing something like the crazy freezing fog that Albuquerque had last winter, when the snow sublimated and raised the relative humidity near the ground, and then the cold air near the ground condensed it into fog.)

This morning, however, I asked how many students had described frost in their weather journals. Only a couple students raised their hands. So it doesn't seem like most of them are paying very close attention. They've got a few more days, though, so maybe their observations will improve.

The wild turkey and the breccia

If it hadn’t been for the wild turkey, we would never have found the breccia.

We were working our way toward a section of a fault zone where two entirely different senses of movement had been described. We had already taken an interesting but physically challenging route to the area, and as a result, we were hurrying to the spot where we expected to find the interesting rocks. And then we saw the turkey.

She – well, at least we thought it was a she – was moving rather slowly across an open area, dragging a wing. I had seen that kind of trick before, when I worked beyond treeline in Alaska, so I figured that she probably had chicks that she wanted us to avoid. So, polite geologists that we were, we decided to follow her.

She led us in a wide circle, back up the hill we had been coming down. No matter, we thought. We could always take a longer route once she was satisfied that her babies were safe.

And then we saw the outcrop. A great wall of rock, on the west side of the saddle. We went and looked at it... and there it was. The fault zone we had been chasing.

We followed it up the hill, found patches of deformed granite caught in the fault zone, and took samples. We haven’t analyzed them yet. Maybe they’re significant. Maybe not.

But we wouldn’t have seen them at all, if it hadn’t been for the wild turkey.

(Image source: Utah's Hogle Zoo. I forgot my camera that day. Oops.)


Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US, and happy Nov. 22 to everyone else.

Teaching: understanding graphs

Do you remember when you first learned to read a graph?

I don't. And that might be a problem for teaching.

I'm not talking about the various weird graphs that geologists use. (Stereonets, Ar release spectra, U-Pb concordia plots, ternary phase diagrams... ) I'm talking about a nice, straightforward, x-y plot. Two dimensions, commonplace variables like temperature and time, no logarithmic scales or ratios between variables or anything like that.

(Image source: Global Warming Art)
I started thinking about this while explaining a weather journal assignment to my Earth Systems Science class. I cover weather and climate at the end of the semester, in the slot that always gets shorted when I run out of time. But I figure that weather is something that the students ought to be able to observe, at least qualitatively, and I want to give them a reason to read the book and think about it, even when I don't get to all the material in class. So I have them keep a weather journal: every day they have to record temperatures, cloudiness, precipitation, wind direction, and anything they find interesting. The goal isn't to teach them how to professionally record weather observations - the goal is to get them to observe the world around them and relate what they see to the explanations from their book.

This year, I lost nearly an entire class because the students asked one good question: when, and where, and how, should they make their observations?

It's always a bit dangerous when students ask a good question that I don't have a canned answer for. They get to see me think on my feet - not always a pretty sight. And this time, to try to explain my thinking (and perhaps inspired by reading graphical arguments on Tamino’s blog), I started drawing a graph.

It wasn't a very good graph - it was qualitative, illustrative of an idea rather than a compilation of data. But it showed (maybe) what I was trying to illustrate: that temperatures vary throughout the day, so perhaps they should describe their observations qualitatively, and then look at the National Weather Service official maximum and minimum daily temperatures for comparison from one day to another.

I don't know whether the graph made sense to the students or not - I don't have a good technique for quickly assessing whether students understand what I'm saying. I’ve recently learned that graphs don’t make immediate, intuitive sense to a lot of people, and I didn’t take the time to slowly explain what I was showing them. If the graph made sense, then the discussion might have been effective – I asked the class to tell me how the temperature should change throughout the day, and built the graph pretty slowly, so I hope they thought through the problem with me. But if they didn’t understand the graph... well, I might as well have been lecturing in Klingon.

So I’ve been thinking about what I could do to improve their graph comprehension (and to assess whether I’m doing it effectively). The weather journal assignment might be a good place to start – it should be relatively easy for them to graph the daily minimum and maximum temperatures over these three weeks. I wonder if they could use the graph to look at other things – maybe qualitatively annotate the graph with wind direction, wind speed, precipitation, types of clouds, so they could look for patterns? (It seems like that is one of the uses of graphs: they show patterns.)

But when I start thinking about what to make them graph, maybe I’m getting away from the point. What kinds of activities help them really understand what they’re doing?

- Does it help to graph points by hand, or is that simply tedious and frustrating?

- Does it help to graph data they’ve collected, or data related to things they’ve experienced, so the numbers are associated with what they measure?

- How much data is enough, and how much is too much? It seems as though there might be a balance between having enough data to see a pattern, and having so much data that the exercise becomes tedious. (If the students graph data from a spreadsheet, the tedium disappears... but the kinesthetic experience of plotting the dots, and the spatial sense that comes with it, might diminish.)

- If I ask questions about the graph, how do I avoid mistakenly teaching them that correlation = causation? Or is it ok to first see that correlation can help one to figure out causation, and then explain the fallacy?

- Are they going to be too burned out after Thanksgiving to handle an addition to their assignment?

(Side note: there’s a project in the works at SERC to create online modules to give math practice to students in introductory courses. Graph-reading is one concept that the developers may add. If you’ve got math concepts that you need geoscience students to understand, take the survey for the project.)

Back in the day, we used to walk uphill both ways to use a computer...

One of my senior thesis students is using some freeware written by an academic for her senior thesis research. Now, I love freeware, and I am in great debt to people like Rick Allmendinger and Frank Spear and Rod Holcombe and others who write software and then let the rest of us sponge off their hard work and programming expertise - for free.

But occasionally, relicts of operating systems past appear and confuse the heck out of undergrads used to web apps and commercial software packages.

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

Today's relict was PostScript. Now, I confess that I've never known much about PostScript, except that it was associated with printing, and that my maps in my dissertation always gave me a "PostScript error" when I tried to print them out. (That was back when we had to walk uphill both ways to the laser printer... *shakes cane at young whippersnappers who have just finished dissertation drafts, hooray!* ) Well, in the process of figuring out how to view the images (open them in Adobe Illustrator, and then edit them to our hearts' content), I ended up looking up the history of PostScript, so I could explain why a piece of software that I first encountered in 1990 would use that particular image format, rather than formats she had heard of.

And that led to stories about using a Mac that didn't have a hard drive.

And at that point, as my student looked at me in horror, I realized it.

I have become one of those people who talks about how it was in the "old days."

(And this was just a few weeks after a student looked at my eighteen-year-old solar-powered pocket calculator and teased me about it, and I threatened to give him a slide rule instead.)

Postscript: You know, I still don't think anything with a GUI interface ought to count as "old technology" - after all, when I was little, I drew pictures on the punch cards that my dad brought home from work, and I remember a computer the size of a small building, complete with flashing lights and beeping sounds. *shakes cane some more*

Blueberries and Granite

We didn’t bring enough food into the mountains. We were helicoptered in for three weeks, but after one week, we discovered that we had eaten half the food. So by the beginning of the third week, we were on pretty short rations. When another research group arrived, on schedule, to share dinner with us, things could have gotten ugly. But they didn’t, because our visitors brought instant cheesecake, and we were camped on granite in Alaska.

And granites plus recent glaciation meant blueberries.


(Source: Maine State Berry)

I grew up in Maine, so that’s one wild food that I recognize – and eat, whenever possible. Blueberries are cultivated, even commercially grown, frozen, and sent to grocery stores around the country. But the best ones, in my not-so-humble opinion, grow wild on the barren granitic soil of coastal Maine.

Blueberries are difficult to cultivate, because they thrive in very acidic soil. And that’s why they are found on granite. Natural rainwater is somewhat acidic, due to dissolved carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Natural soil water can have an even lower pH, due to the formation of organic acids during the decay of vegetation. The rock fragments that make up the rest of the soil can serve as chemical buffers as they weather – calcite (the active ingredient in Tums) dissolves and neutralizes acid, and other minerals consume hydronium ions as they break down by hydrolysis. But quartz doesn’t. It doesn’t dissolve very readily in surface waters, and when it does, it forms a very weak acid. It certainly is no good at neutralizing rainwater or soilwater (or the acid rain that we worried about in New England in the 80’s). And granite contains a lot of quartz. So granite is no good at neutralizing acids.

But it is very, very good at growing blueberries.

Coastal Maine, north and east of Acadia National Park, is intruded by granite after granite, formed during the middle period of Appalachian mountain-building. Several hundred millions of years later, it was scraped clean by continental glaciation, and since then it’s been doing its darnedest to develop something vaguely resembling soil. (If you haven’t guessed: yes, I have attempted to garden in New England. Yes, I have harvested many rocks. Can you guess why I am a geologist and not an agricultural scientist?)

It’s a lousy place to grow corn. Or broccoli. Or, well, most things. But the thin, acidic soil is exactly what the wild blueberries love.

In coastal Maine, the blueberries are harvested commercially. But I’ve worked around the margins of granites in Alaska and Vermont, and I can tell you: the blueberries grow on all of them. If you know the geology, and you look carefully, you can find them.

And then, when you run out of food, you can eat blueberry cheesecake.

(For The Accretionary Wedge #3, Rocks and Life, hosted at The Other 95%.)

The Open Lab is a bit short on earth science posts

I wish I could remember the times this past week when I've seen discussion of the sciences in general, and a list of what's included... and geology wasn't there. I'm hardly the first geo-blogger to notice and comment. But today I noticed a lack someplace else: The Open Laboratory, the science blogging anthology.

There were posts by geoscientists. There were climate and paleontology posts. There were oceanography posts. There were creation-science-debunking posts.

But geology? Nothing.

When I saw that, I nominated one post, but this is a crazy week for me, and I don't have time to find all the great posts I've read in the geoblogosphere in the past six months. And I'm a newcomer, too - I suspect there were a lot of great posts written before I started actively reading.

So help me out here, and let's keep ourselves from being so invisible.

Maybe if the blogosphere acknowledges that geology exists, schoolkids in California and Texas can start studying the earth sciences, too.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

edit: I remembered one of the places where I saw geology left out of a list: at Wikipedia, in its entry on "special sciences" (as philosophers apparently call them; I had never heard the term before).

Here's the relevant text:

The special sciences are those sciences other than physics that are sometimes thought to be reducible to physics, or to stand in some similar relation of dependence to physics as the "fundamental" science. The usual list includes chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and many others.

Perhaps we should be proud that geology isn't on the list - maybe that means we rank above physics in the philosophers' hierarchy. But I suspect that geology isn't on the list because the philosophers don't even think about it existing, or maybe consider it a form of stamp-collecting.