Amazing stuff...



I found out about this incredible art via Michael Welland's book Sand: the Never-Ending Story, which I just finished reading. [The book is superb, and everyone should read it, but more on that later.] For the moment, just watch this incredible thing. This is art, real art: simple in the extreme on one hand (a ball rolling through sand), but complex in the extreme on the other hand (the two dimensional images that emerge and evolve over time are terrific), and its underlain by some reasonably complex computing. Here's artist Bruce Shapiro talking about his work:



Like what you see? Then download this video and watch it. Showing the "Sisyphus III" sand plotter in time lapse photography set to music, you really get a sense of what this thing is capable of. ...Mind-blowingly cool.

Labels: art, books, sediment

You must see this!

Labels: glacial landforms

For the penultimate post in my Ecuador travel series, I hereby recount the story of climbing the mountain called Iliniza Norte (16,997 feet above sea level: the tallest peak I've ever summitted).

We began by driving up from the town of Chaupi, where we were staying at a hostel, to the trailhead above treeline in the paramo ecosystem...


We had hoped for awesome weather, but as with our previous peak bagging in Ecuador, the clouds were here too, making a ceiling that we headed up into...




Heading up into the clouds; the valley below fades away...


...and we start to see snow.






We went up a long, steep snowfield for probably two hours... It was frustrating going: take one step forward, slide two steps backward. The snow got thicker and thicker...

Eventually, when we got close to the summit, we got off the snowfield and onto some rocks. I was surprised to feel how my energy spiked at the prospect of rock-scrambling. The long slog up the snowfield was boring and repetitive, but this was totally engaging as a physical/mental workout. Here's Lily and Diego climbing up:



At the summit, there's a steel cross with various doodads attached...


This is the highest point above sea level I've ever experienced. When I stood on the summit, my head was above 17,000 feet in elevation!



Silly video of the summit team making celebratory noises:


Then Diego said, "I think we go down now, because of thunders."

The guy knows his stuff: as soon as he had said this, we heard a ba-boom from off in the white clouds somewhere... Yikes. Okay, time to head down.

Descending the rocks:


When we got to the snowfield, another peal of thunder sounded, and this one was louder than the first one. The snowfield, fortunately, made for easy going -- we essentially skied down it. It was pretty exciting... Flashes of lightning, booms of thunder (sometimes within a microsecond of one another), adrenaline pumping, running/sliding/skiing downhill as fast as we could.

We did not get hit by lightning.

After we got below cloud level (and into a valley where we felt a little less exposed to lightning strikes), we could see that the lower elevations had gotten some frozen precipitation too: a mix of snow and hail:











When we got back to the vehicle, we found it covered in hail:


Now for the adventure after the adventure: driving down a steep, twisting, muddy mountain road that's coated with hail and host to numerous roaring streams of runoff. It was almost as intense as descending the snowfield amid lightning bolts: the vehicle slid and knocked against a mud embankment at one point, and it was all seriously sketchy. Diego said he had never seen anything like it.

Here's some video of a raging torrent of meltwater/runoff flowing over a road surface that's decorated with white hailstones:



We did not crash the car.

Back safely at the hostel, we took hot showers and drank beer and congratulated ourselves for clearly being such daring adventurers. Whew... the next morning, we took our weary selves back to Quito.

One more Ecuador post to go... on lichens... stay tuned.

Labels: ecuador, ice, mountains, snow, south america, travel, volcano

Today, I would like to share with you some spectacular images that I took using a new toy, a Nikon binocular dissecting microscope with digital camera mount. These photos show a limestone in which you can find a large number of the single-celled foraminifera called "fusilinids." These benthic forams are about the size and shape of grains of rice, and here you will be looking at them in cross-section, seeing the spiral shape with numerous internal chambers that helps support their cytoplasmic bulk. Remember that these are macroscopic, not microscopic: each fusilinid is a single cell the size of a rice grain!




Now, you might be wondering why I'm so keen on showing off fossils. After all, this isn't a paleo blog... But there's more than just fossilization going on here. These fusilinids have also been squeezed. The weight of overlying sedimentary strata has compressed this rock perpendicular to the bedding plane, (top to bottom, in all these photos) and some of the fusilinids got crammed against their neighbors. Now, fusilinids make their skeletal material from the mineral calcite, and calcite can go into solution when the pressure is high enough. In places, you can see where one fusilinid has penetrated into its neighbor, dissolving the neighbor away as it intrudes. The following two images are close ups of the upper image. Photo #2 is from the lower left of the first image; Photo #3 is from the upper right of the first image:






In both, you can see where the edge of one of these internally-spiraled, ellipsoid-shaped fusilinids has dissolved its way into a neighboring fusilinid, disrupting the neighbor's internal architecture and symmetry. Insoluble minerals like dark-colored clays build up along this dissolution horizon. Here's one more photo for good measure:




Pretty cool, eh? The fossils serve as strain markers, hinting to us about how much of the rock's calcitic volume has been lost.


I would like to thank the Nikon representative who demonstrated the camera for me, Stanley M., for taking the time to show how the device works, and for allowing me to make some images before I had officially bought the thing.

Labels: fossils, limestone, structure

Last week, I mentioned the impending launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory... Well, last night at the launch, things didn't work out so well...

NASA Satellite Fails to Reach Orbit (New York Times)
NASA satellite crashes (Los Angeles Times)
Seven years' work on satellite crashes and burns in 12 minutes (Scotsman)
NASA satellite launch fails (Newsday)
and from NASA themselves, the grim Launch Mishap Ends OCO Mission

What a bummer. All that potential knowledge, snuffed out before we even got a chance to see it.

Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, news, satellite imagery

In Environmental Geology lab last week, we were playing with dirt... and sand... and gravel... and other granular materials, piling them up to see the angle of repose.

One of my students, Kristen P., brought in little "Monopoly" houses so that her experiments carried a bit more significance...




I thought this was very clever -- it made you "care" more about the angle of repose when someone's "home" was at stake... Good work Kristen!

Labels: humor, mass wasting, nova, teaching

Even if you don't have iTunes, the NOVA-Annandale Science Seminar series will be televised...

Check at our new webpage: http://www.nvcc.edu/annandale/scienceseminar/

Specific video: Dick Pellerin on math's many uses; Me on my western roadtrip.

Labels: geology, meetings, nova, science and society, travel

GeoTripper asks about where should be the top places geologists should visit? Or more specifically: What are the places and events that you think should all geologists should see and experience before they die? What are the places you know and love that best exemplify geological principles and processes?

He's asked this question before, and it set off a satisfying kerfuffle in the geoblogosphere. "Satisfying" because lots of geobloggers chimed and shared their experiences (like me). "Kerfuffle" because it's fun to say... Um, also because the original "Geologist's Life List"was pretty America-focused. A few days later, I posted a series of suggestions for revisions to the list, and now I repost them in honor of the upcoming Accretionary Wedge, with some addenda and modifications:

Specific places

1. Do an Appalachian transect through the following physiographic provinces: Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Valley & Ridge, and Appalachian Plateau
2. Visit the Chalk (England, France, Ireland...)
3. Visit Iceland's Thingvellir Valley to see the mid-Atlantic divergent plate boundary
4. Visit Mt. Fuji, Japan
5. Visit Great Barrier Reef, Australia
6. Visit Ayers Rock (Uluru) Australia
7. Visit the Himalayas (Kashmir?)
8. Visit the Tibetan Plateau
9. Visit the Gobi Desert
10. Visit the Sahara Desert
11. Visit the Sonoran Desert (for the saguaros)
12. Visit the Atacama Desert
13. Visit the Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter)
14. Visit Beijing or Shanghai (for the perspective on what really dirty air looks like)
15. Visit the big island of Hawai'i
16. Visit Yellowstone
17. Visit the Galapagos Islands
18. Visit Madagascar (for the lemurs)
19. Visit Patagonia
20. Visit the Andes
21. Visit the Alps
22. Visit the Canadian Rockies
23. Visit Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska (and/or neighboring Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory)
24. Visit Denali, Alaska
25. Visit the Aleutian Islands
26. Visit Mount Everest, the highest point above sea level.
27. Visit Chimborazo, Ecuador (furthest point from the center of the Earth, due to the equatorial bulge)
28. Visit Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain above its base.
29. Visit Antarctica
30. Visit the Siberian Traps
31. Visit the Deccan Traps
32. Visit the Columbia River flood basalt province
33. Visit Sumatra/Krakatau/Java, Indonesia
34. Visit the South Island of New Zealand
35. Visit the Dead Sea
36. Visit the Giant's Causeway, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
37. Visit the Great Rift Valley of East Africa
38. Visit the Nile River
39. Visit the Mississippi River
40. Visit the Amazon River
41. Visit the Grand Canyon
42. Visit the Owens Valley, California (or anywhere in the Basin & Range, but the Owens Valley is pretty darned special, and geologically diverse)
43. Visit Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada (walk on the "Moho")
44. Visit Siccar Point, Scotland (for the unconformity)
45. Visit Gibraltar, "UK"
46. Visit Vesuvius, Pompei, and the Pompei-to-be, Naples
47. Visit Victoria Falls
48. Visit Racetrack Playa's sailing stones, Death Valley
49. Visit Devils Tower, Wyoming
50. Visit the Moon

Geological features

1. A tectonic triple junction (Mendocino, CA is an example, or northern Burma, or Panama)
2. Tower karst (Guilin, China, or southwestern Thailand are examples)
3. Experience a regional flood
4. Experience a flash flood
5. Experience an earthquake
6. Ediacaran fauna fossils in situ (possibilities include the type locality of the Ediacaran Hills in Australia, or Charnwood Forest in England, the White Sea region in Russia, or maybe the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland)
7. Vertebrate fossils in situ
8. Visiting a laggerstatten site (e.g., Burgess Shale, Chenjiang, Sirius Passet, Solnhofen)
9. An alpine glacier
10. A continental glacier (ice cap or ice sheet)
11. A kimberlite pipe (preferably with diamonds, and good luck with that)
12. A coral atoll (take your pick)
13. A meteor impact crater (not a buried one, either)
14. A big river delta (Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, or any of the dozens of others)
15. Barrier islands (Padre Island, Texas, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina come to mind, but I'm sure there are others on other continents)
16. A craton (Canadian shield, Kaapvaal, North China, etc. etc. etc.)
17. A big estuary (Cook Inlet, Chesapeake Bay, Bay of Fundy: all North American examples. Give me some others)
18. See some karst.
19. Kayak (or other boat) through a fjord.
20. See a dropstone.
21. See an ophiolite.
22. Visit a major stike-slip fault (San Andreas in USA/Mexico, or North Anatolian in Turkey, or Tan Lo (sp?) in China)
23. Visit a nappe or thrust sheet (Glarus Thrust in the Alps, Chief Mountain/Glacier NP in Montana, Blue Ridge in Virginia/North Carolina)
24. Visit a really big cave (Mammoth, Lechugilla, or some other that I don't know about on another continent)
25. (#25-29 on this list is derived from Christie at the Cape's post on this topic...) See a famous "big wave" e.g. Maverics or Dungeons, breaking.
26. Watch a glacier calving into the sea.
27. Listen to singing beaches or dunes.
28. Walk across and observe a metamorphic aureole (like the classic Barrovian sequence in Scotland.
29. See a tidal bore.

Activities and experiences

1. A world-class natural history museum (London Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History all come to mind.)
2. Meeting of a classic scientific society (Royal Society, Explorers Club, Cosmos Club...)
3. Do some original research.
4. Present your research at a meeting of other scientists.
5. Publish your research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
6. Visit an original copy of "map that changed the world" (William Smith's geologic map of England, Wales, and part of Scotland)
7. Experience a big earthquake (greater than 5.0 sounds like as good a cut-off as any)
8. Experience a volcano erupting something other than gases (lava, pyroclastics)
9. Go ice fishing (or just out onto a frozen lake/pond/sea/ocean and ponder the improbable nature of ice and how it freezes from the top down, preserving the living things underneath, like fish. Without this odd property, it would be tough to maintain freshwater lake life at high-latitudes/elevations through the winter months.)
10. Compare and contrast El Nino and La Nina by personally living through both in the same spot. (e.g., Peru, southwest U.S., Papua New Guinea, Australia)
11. Go on an oceanographic research cruise for more than two weeks at sea.
12. Experience a hurricane/typhoon/cyclone (preferably surviving it)

I welcome your additions and comments! Or just tune in for the Wedge when GeoTripper posts it.

Labels: blogs, field trips, geologists, geology, travel

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON : Meeting 1430

John Wesley Powell Auditorium, Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Ave N.W., Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, 25 February 2009; Refreshments 7:30 pm; Meeting 8:00 pm
_____________________________________________________

Julie O'Leary, Carnegie Institution (DTM): Water storage and transport in the mantle: constraints from the H isotopic composition of ocean-island basalts

Jeff Pigati, US Geological Survey (Denver): Snails, cienegas, and the science of wetland deposits in the American Southwest

Barbara Anne am Ende, The Aerospace Corporation: Is thermal imaging practicable for finding caves and abandoned mines?

Labels: gsw, meetings

Started by Lockwood, perpetuated by Silver Fox... [UPDATE: Geology Happens, Geotripper, Hypocentre & Phreatic Ramblings have chimed in, too. The latter even posted about a huge paleofalls...] As per the geoblogospheric standard, the idea is to bold the ones you've been to.

#10 Lower Calf Creek Falls, Escalante National Monument, Utah
#9 Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
#8 Upper Whitewater Falls, in southwestern North Carolina
#7 Snoqualmie Falls, between Snoqualmie and Fall City, Washington
#6 Havasu Falls, Supai Village, Havasupai Indian Reservation, Grand Canyon, Arizona
#5 Shoshone Falls, Twin Falls, Idaho
#4 Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon
#3 Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite National Park, California
#2 McWay Falls in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, California
#1 Niagara Falls, Niagara, New York

Bonus Waterfall #1 [via Lockwood]: Salt Creek Falls, Oregon
Bonus Waterfall #2 [via Silver Fox]: Palouse Falls, eastern Washington
Bonus Waterfall #3 [from me]: Deer Creek Falls, Grand Canyon, Arizona (photo above)

For the record, I kind of don't get the appeal of waterfalls. I mean, they're cool and all, but they don't strike as particularly complex (and therefore, not particularly interesting)... I mean: gravity, right? ...It pulls water downhill... What's the big deal? (I had a conversation this summer along these lines at Waterfall #9 on this list, with a similarly-minded fluvial curmudgeon.)

...But people love them - When I poll my Physical Geology students at the end of the semester about what their favorite part of our Billy Goat Trail geology field trip, only a third or so invoke the migmatite, a third or so cite the physical challenge of climbing "The Traverse," and a third or so claim that viewing Great Falls was their favorite part. To each their own, I reckon: I'm glad they got something meaningful out of the trip... but I can't claim to understand it.

In my twisted worldview, Deer Creek Falls is interesting not merely because it's scenic (and a great place to go swimming), but because the waterfall issues from the Great Unconformity, and thus has geologic significance: It satisfies the intellect as well as aesthetic sensibilities.

Labels: arizona, california, grand canyon, new york, wyoming

Very cool -- I think I want to design an Environmental Geology lab that uses Google Earth to access and evaluate this data. Kudos to the Vulcan Project for putting it together.

You can open these layers in Google Earth by clicking here.

Labels: climate change, CO2, coal, global warming

That is the Richat Structure in Mauritania. It's wild looking. Dave has posted on it previously, so I won't add to his ample discussion here, except to say, "Whoa. That is seriously cool."

Labels: africa, deserts, structure

I found this image the other day on Geoff Lloyd's research homepage:



A couple of weeks back, I showed you another image depicting structural geology in the British Isles: the gorgeous hand-drawn diagram by Voll (1960). There are some differences between these two similar diagrams. As an exercise in thinking about how to depict rock structures on the two-dimensional space of paper or computer screens, I think they are worth taking a few moments to examine. Let's compare and contrast...

Similarities:

• Similar perspective (block diagram with the "front" at lower-left).
• Diagram is drawn with the short end along the strike of the structures, and the bulk of the diagram across strike.
• Both depict structurally complex rocks that vary across strike.
• Both use landmarks to give the reader perspective on where on the land's surface these subterranean structures are changing from one motif to another.
• Both are isometric, with the horizontal scale of the block being equal to the vertical scale.

Differences:

• This one was drawn by computer; Voll's was by hand.
• This one is in color; Voll's was in black and white.
• Voll's was generalized to show variations in rock fabric over a large distance; this one is reflective of specific localized data. (I like how it even side-steps a short distance where it apparently wasn't physically possible to go completely perpendicular to strike; see for instance the short jump at the Maer Anticline, and another larger jump at marker 0740 on the scale.) Voll's diagram, in contrast, smooths out those particular rough spots in the data to produce a seamless "summary."
• Voll's was one long wedge; the one is even longer, and as a result has been split into three separate views that are graphically stacked but connected with dotted line, so you can display them in a square- or retangular-shaped space, but can follow along with the overall story from "front" to "back." I think this is a good compromise, graphically speaking.
• Voll's showed the upper and side-facing-us views of the rock units; while this one shows the lower and side-facing-away-from-us views of the rock units, with occasional structures projected out into space between them to show their three-dimensional shapes.

Other thoughts? Observations about these two gorgeous depictions summarizing countless hours of field work? I like rock art; and thinking about rock art -- If you have thoughts, please share them in the comments area below.

I'd like to point out that some other informative sketches have been popping up elseswhere in the geoblogosphere lately: See (in chronological order): here, here, here, here, here and here.

Labels: art, england, structure

In prepping for a mass wasting lecture this week in Environmental Geology, I checked out YouTube's "avalanche" offerings. Found a couple of cool videos:

Cheesy music on this one...

French skiers chatting on this one...

Labels: mass wasting, snow

Enjoy!

Labels: meetings, nova, tech

Ha! The crazy things people do... Looks like LEEDS certification may hold the same moral high ground and real-life meaninglessness as the USDA "organic" label. Check out this gallery at Treehugger.com

Hat tip to the CCAN blog for alerting me to this.

Labels: blogs, energy, environmental

Walking to my car the other day, I looked up at the embankment on my street, and noticed some geology there I hadn't seen before. Yesterday, with my camera, I climbed up the embankment (~15 feet) to investigate. Fortunately there were some trees to hold onto.

Sure enough, it was as I suspected: dikes of granite (subvertical in orientation) that, along with the schistose bedrock they cut across, had totally weathered to saprolite.

Keys for scale:


Originally, these dikes were emplaced during the late-Ordovician eastern-North American episode of mountain-building called the Taconian ("Taconic") Orogeny. Later, when they got exposed at the surface (or close to it) they began to "rot."

Hand for scale:


Here's a video showing how readily these dikes formerly known as granite deform by crumbling into pieces:


The main chemical weathering process that has happened here to make this possible is the hydrolysis of feldspar to produce kaolinite, a clay mineral. Large single crystals of potassium feldspar in the granite are now large amorphous masses of kaolinite, which has no strength when stressed.

Labels: dc, granite, igneous, metamorphism, ordovician, weathering

What happened to these poor hand samples?

My friend and colleague Pete Berquist shot this video of his (successful) attempt to make lava in his own backyard with an acetylene torch:

Note how the basalt makes runny lava, but the granite yields lava so viscous it doesn't even drip!

Pete works at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia. He also posted some photos online here.

Labels: basalt, granite, igneous

NASA is launching a new satellite next week to monitor the atmosphere's carbon flux from a outside-the-planet perspective. It's called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). Hopefully this will complement and give context to our current ~100 monitoring stations around the world (point measurements) for a truly global picture of our atmosphere's carbon inputs and outputs.

According to the NASA OCO website, the satellite will map the globe "once every 16 days for at least two years. It will do so with the accuracy, resolution and coverage needed to provide the first complete picture of the regional-scale geographic distribution and seasonal variations of both human and natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions and their sinks-the reservoirs that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it."

I can't wait to learn what we don't currently know about the carbon system. This is a tool that's long overdue!

Labels: climate change, CO2, satellite imagery

Just got a batch of images from the NOVA photographer, Kevin Mattingly. I particularly like this image of last spring's Field Studies class at the Billy Goat Trail:

Here, we're overlooking the upstream end of Mather Gorge, checking out some ~360 Ma lamprophyre dikes exposed there -- but offset on either side of the river!

Labels: devonian, field trips, national parks, nova, piedmont, teaching

I discovered Julie Zickefoose's blog today. She's on NPR from time to time, which is why her improbable name may sound familiar. She's got a cool blog. I really liked this post -- the tales of walking outside with friends, sharing nature and settling indoors with pets and hearth -- it just warmed me up inside!

Labels: blogs, critters

National Geographic has a gallery of seven "missing link" species whose fossils have been discovered since Darwin proposed the origin of new species by means of natural selection. It troubled Darwin that the fossil record didn't show more explicitly the transitions between species, but he proposed his hypothesis anyhow. Good hypotheses make testable predictions, and this is a nice example of how the ensuing 150 years of paleontology have validated the notion of species' change through time.

Labels: art, evolution

Science Seminar: The Tropical Reefs of Roatan

Friday February 20, 2009
CE Forum 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm

Jill Caporale, NOVA Faculty
Dianne Heath & Robert Schreiner, NOVA Students

Join Professor Jill Caporale and her students Dianne Heath and Robert Schreiner as they discuss the reefs, dolphins and mangroves of Roatan, Honduras. Jill Caporale believes that getting students out in the field is the best way to for students to learn and rekindle their "natural sense of wonder."

Jill Caporale has taught Biology and Natural Science at Northern Virginia Community College as an adjunct and full-time faculty since 1988. She has taken students to the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Reefs of Honduras. This year she will be returning with students to investigate the tropical waters off the coast of Roatan, Honduras. So, if you have ever wanted to snorkel coral reefs and swim with dolphins come listen to their talk, or better yet, sign up to go this summer.

Sponsored by the Lyceum and the Math, Science Engineering Division

Labels: meetings, nova, reefs

As you'll recall, when I left off with my Ecuadorian travelouge, Lily and I had summited Pasochoa, and then taken a day-hike in Cotopaxi National Park. Next up, a new mountain that has about the same elevation as Mt. Whitney (highest peak in the lower 48 United States): about 14,500 feet. To climb this extinct volcano called Ruminahui (Roo-min-ya-wee), we headed up a ridge between two adjacent glacially-carved valleys.















Me with clouds and background glacial valley:


Diego (our guide) on the trail:


Up on top, there was less vegetation, but more cloud... and snow was falling.

The bedrock was a volcanic breccia that had been cut by numerous andesitic dikes:






You can see some blurry snowflakes in the previous photo. Here's a cold-looking Lily with her boots on an andesitic dike:



Here's a couple of close-ups to show the cross-cutting relationships between the andesite dikes and the volcanic breccia:





Here's a short, not-especially-great video wherein I point out a few things that don't really show up all that well. Still, you get to see it snowing!

A big "thanks" to NOVA's king of digital video, Richard Attix, who helped me rotate this video and crop out some unintended footage from the raw video we shot on the mountain that day.

Cold hikers:



"Sheesh! It's cold up here!":



On the way down, we also took some time to check out the plants. Here's one called "Orejas de conejo" ("Ears of the rabbit"):

Here's one that smells exactly like chocolate!


In fact, Lily was able to harvest this chocolate bar from it!

Okay, not really. It's money that grows on trees, not chocolate bars.

So that's the story of our second successful summit... now there was only one more to go... the legendary Iliniza Norte. Photos from that hike in a couple of days...

Labels: ecuador, glacial landforms, mountains, plants, sediment, south america, travel, volcano

I've been really digging my iPod. Yeah, yeah: "late adopter" and all that. But it's really cool!

The podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts) available for free are diverse and awesome, and I'm finding them much more interesting, rich, and deep than traditional radio. I've got music podcasts, science podcasts, story podcasts, and humor podcasts. In the interest of sharing the love, here's what I'm listening to:

All Songs Considered - From NPR, an every-few-days podcast showcasing new and interesting music from a wide variety of genres, often accompanied by insightful commentary from host Bob Boilen and his guests.

Morning Becomes Eclectic - From KCRW in Santa Monica, California, Jason Bentley (no relation) hosts an excellent radio show of... well... eclectic music. The only shows they podcast are the ones where guest artists are performing live in the studio, but that's fine by me -- there's some real gems here. (Although, I'll admit that I miss the former host Nick Harcourt.)

The Moth - An incredible storytelling podcast featuring one person per episode telling a true story, live onstage & without notes. These are incredible tales from our fellow humans: people who have experienced surreal, heartbreaking, or uproarious things, and know how to describe them to others. An absolutely inspired series. Five stars!

Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me! - The oddly informative NPR news quiz show. Invariably funny, sometimes hilarious. Hosted by Peter Segal, accompanied by luminaries like Carl Kasell, P.J. O'Rourke, and Tom Bodett.

USGS CoreCast - A weekly podcast from the United States Geological Survey, wherein stilted-sounding hosts interview scientists about their work, usually related to some story that's in the current news cycle. Mediocre listenability, but often interesting content.

Nature Podcast - From the acclaimed journal Nature comes this hip, well-produced podcast that features several hosts (male, female, British, American) interviewing scientists about their recent Nature publications and why they matter. Sometimes they give background information, too -- to bring listeners up to speed before the interview. It's detailed enough to be satisfying for a professional scientist, but not stiff or formal. Two thumbs up!

Central Washington University Natural Science seminars - Video of seminars on cool topics like mammoth digs, etc.

American Meteorological Society Climate Change video: Environmental Science seminars - These are a series of science seminars put on by the AMS on Capitol Hill for the benefit of policy makers, captured on video. I often try to attend, but if I miss one, I can get it via the iPod.

The Ricky Gervais podcast - From the talented British comedian comes this sporadic podcast which varies tremendously in content and satisfaction from one episode to the next. When this one is on while I'm driving to campus, the ones that leave me guffawing are the ones where Ricky and Stephen Merchant talk with Carl Pilkington. The three of them have a remarkable style of mutually-insulting comedy.

You can get all of these for free, searching on iTunes. Enjoy!

Labels: environmental, geology, humor, music, news, podcasts and vodcasts, science and society

It was announced at Wednesday's Geological Society of Washington meeting that this year's Bradley Lecture will be delivered by Paul Hoffman, Emeritus Professor of Geology at Harvard University. The lecture is scheduled for the evening of April 22, starting at 8pm at the Cosmos Club.

Dr. Hoffman is best known for his work promoting the "Snowball Earth" hypothesis. It ought to be an exciting evening of geology!

Labels: geology, gsw, meetings, snowball earth

The February meeting of the Potomac Geophysical Society will be held February 19th at the Fort Myer Officers' Club in Arlington, VA in the Campaign Room. This month's talk will be: Listening to a Melting Arctic Ocean - Singing the Blues?, by Peter N. Mikhalevsky, SAIC, VA.

Abstract:
The waters of the Arctic Ocean have been warming since the mid 1990's. Average maximum temperatures have risen by more than 1°C. In the last 20 years submarine measurements of sea ice draft have shown a 40% reduction in average sea ice thickness while satellite remote sensing has shown a 14% reduction in sea-ice extent over the same period decreasing at a rate of 3-5%/decade (thicker multi-year ice at 7-10%/decade). Forecasts indicate that if these trends continue the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free, "A Blue Arctic Ocean" before the end of this century. Significant effort is needed to expand our observational capabilities in the Arctic Ocean to support better modeling, forecasting and improve our understanding of this critical ocean and the linkages to global climate. One technique - acoustic thermometry - has been shown to be a very effective for monitoring average heat content and average temperature in the Arctic Ocean and in particular in the Arctic Intermediate Water (AIW) layer. Two experiments conducted in 1994 and 1999 measured the warming and demonstrated the feasibility of long term observations. Plans are in process to incorporate acoustic thermometry and tomography in in-situ Arctic Ocean observatories.

Dinner Menu
Chicken Marsala (House salad & vegetables, rolls and butter)
Tira Mi Su
Coffee / tea
A vegetarian meal can be substituted by request.

Reception at 6:30. Dinner at 7:30. Talk at 8:30 PM. Allow 15 minutes for security entering Ft. Myer as all civilian vehicles are searched. To ensure access to and from Fort Myer use the Hatfield Gate, open 24 hours a day (https://webmail-1.nvcc.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.fmmcmwr.com/directionsmyer.htm). If you wish to attend dinner ($25), please make reservations with Joydeep Bhattacharyya at 703-676-4373 or via E-mail at Joydeep.bhattacharyya@saic.com. If you wish, please feel free to attend the talk without dinner. Non-members and guests are welcome. Visit the PGS web site at https://webmail-1.nvcc.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.potomacgeophysical.com%2520/ for new meeting announcements, etc.

Labels: climate change, global warming, meetings, oceans, pgs

I've discussed the phenomenon of jointing on this blog before, and how when rocks fracture, sometimes they leave behind structures we can see that tell us something about the jointing process. Where did it start? Where did it stop? To answer these questions, we turn to structures like plumose structure, arrest lines (concentric ribs), and hackle fringes.

On this past Sunday's field excursion out to the Massanutten Synclinorium (Shenandoah Valley), MSSE John Graves and I saw some more nice examples of these phenomena, and as usual, I took some photos of them.

Let's start with this one, which shows plumose structure (and thus joint propagation) starting at the right and heading to the left.



A closer-up shot of this same fracture surface (in the Ordovician Martinsburg Formation):



Here's another one (in the Devonian Needmore Formation):



Sorry -- no sense of scale in that (above) one -- it was a few feet above my head. Total width of the photo is about two feet (call it half a meter).

This one (also in the Needmore) shows some really wavy plumes:



At the end of joint surfaces, we find hackle fringes, these "rough edges" where the little ridges and valleys of the plumose "topography" flare up and out in a spiralling kind of shape. When you slice through this spiral shape, it appears as a series of little itty-bitty joints at an angle to the main joint. Here's some hackle fringes on a joint surface from the Martinsburg Formation:



Each of these represents the edge of the fracture at one point. But then stresses built up again past the rock's strength, and it cracked anew, extending the fracture and producing a new hackle fringe. A closer-up shot (rotated) of the above fringes:



And back to the Needmore again, for a lovely series of hackle fringes that I've shown you before, but I couldn't resist photographing again. But to mix it up a bit, this time I used a penny instead of a quarter for scale...



Contrastified version of the above, with annotations:



Lastly, remember that I showed you this photo on Monday, from the Billy Goat Trail?



Well, I think you can see some hackles there, too. Take a closer look...

Below, I've zoomed in on the far upper right of the previous photo, and rotated it 90 degrees. I've also transplanted the penny from another part of the photo to maintain a sense of scale, and drawn a quick sketch of the fractures:



I think the little itty-bitty fractures (again, infused with quartz, making them weather out in high relief) traversing the main left-right joint trace are hackle fringes associated with that joint. Anyone care to differ?

Labels: devonian, geology, joints, ordovician, quartz, structure, virginia

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Institutional Memories: The Paleo Art of National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution
by Angela Botzer (National Geographic) and Mary Parrish (Scientific Illustrator, Dept. of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution)

Paleo art has been an important part of the dissemination of the science of paleontology for two important Washington, DC institutions and their audiences for more than 150 years. The presenters will detail fascinating histories of paleo art via the material housed in the collections of their respective organizations.

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009
7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History
10th St. & Constitution Ave. Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. if you wish to join some fun paleontologists for dinner, at the "Elephant and Castle," NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW. Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.

Remaining Dates for 2008-2009 Season: March 18, April 15, May 13

Labels: art, dc, fossils, meetings, psw, smithsonian

Yesterday I mentioned finding a new (to me) outcrop of the Martinsburg Formation's graded beds (turbidite sequences shed off the late-Ordovician Taconian Orogeny here on the east coast of North America). Today, I'd like to share a few images of where John Graves and I went next: up into the heart of the Massanutten Synclinorium, the Fort Valley. To remind you of the relationship between the Shenandoah and Fort Valleys, here's a Google Map I've posted before:



There, defining the ridges of Massanutten Mountain (and thereby separating the lower Shenandoah Valley from the upper Fort Valley) is the Massanutten Sandstone, a Silurian-aged quartz sandstone (in some places it's a quartz-pebble conglomerate) that is correlated to the Tuscarora Sandstone further west in the Appalachian Mountains' Valley & Ridge province.

The Massanutten can show some nice primary structures, including some of the oldest known terrestrial plant fossils (preserved as fragmentary carbon films) and cross-bedding like this:



With regard to the cross-bedding, note that this is "reverse" cross-bedding, which records shifts in current direction over time. At the bottom of the sample, the current was flowing from left to right, and at the middle and top of the sample, it was flowing in the opposite direction, right to left. This sample shows well the distinctive shape of cross-beds: they are tangential to the main bed at the bottom, but are often truncated on top, making them superb geopetal indicators. (They tell you whether your rock is right-side-up or up-side-down.)

I took John on a hike up the Veatch Gap trail, because I wanted to show him the awesome anticline in the Massanutten Sandstone that NOVA adjunct geology instructor Chris Khourey and I had found on a reconnaissance trip out there in May of last year. John and I took a "group shot" with the fold:



And here's John showing those Montanans that we do actually have some cool geology out on the east coast:



So, what's going on here? Well... the Valley & Ridge province of the mid-Atlantic region is defined by folded (and thrust-faulted) sedimentary strata. These folds were produced about 300 to 250 million years ago, during the Alleghenian phase of Appalachian mountain-building. The tectonic cause of this deformation is interpreted to be North America's collision with Africa, closing the Iapetus Ocean and completing the assembly of the supercontinent Pangea.

More locally, the Shenandoah Valley and Massanutten Mountain are structurally underlain by a great fold, the Massanutten Synclinorium. Synclinoria are different from mere synclines because they are more complicated: the overall synclinal shape is "decorated" with numerous smaller anticlines and synclines. It's a big trough-like shape, but wrinkles are "parasitic" on the main fold. So, even within the big "canoe" shape of the Massanutten Synclinorium, there are little bulges and wrinkles that go the opposite direction. This anticline is one of them.

At that point, having seen the anticline, we weighed whether to keep hiking or not.

We opted to press on... and I'm so glad we did. ... Twenty feet further down the trail, we saw another two anticlines!



At its base, this one had a small cave I could crawl into:



And: a short distance further we found a hiker's shelter with an apt name:



Ha! I love it.

More tomorrow, when I'll revisit the issue of plumose structure and hackle fringes.

Labels: appalachians, geology, mountains, msse, ordovician, primary structures, sediment, silurian, structure, valley and ridge, virginia

Coyote Crossing alerted me to this awesome-looking application for the iPhone: a field guide to the birds of North America. On my way back home to the apartment last night, I parked my car in Mt. Pleasant and was walking up the hill to my building, when I saw two of my neighbors pointing a flashlight into the woods (yes, we have woods in DC). "What have you got?" I asked. It was an owl, and they obligingly pointed it out to me. I identified it as a barred owl, and explained the field marks that would allow them to distinguish it from our other big eastern owl, the great horned owl. As we talked, the barred owl flushed and silently swooped through the tree branches and into the darkness. Anyhow, if my neighbors had the iBird Explorer Plus, they wouldn't have needed to rely on an ex-ornithologist walking by at that moment. Pretty cool!

Labels: birdies, dc, gear, tech

Good news!
Google's putting out a way for users to track their home electricity use from their computer. Check it out at the New York Times' "Bits" blog.
Thing is, you need a "smart grid" for it to work, so it's going to be a while before you actually get one in your house.
It's like the dashboard readout on the Prius: constantly giving you feedback about your energy use & efficiency.

Labels: energy, environmental, tech

I'd like to congratulate my friend and fellow MSSE candidate Rob Greenberg for being awarded this year's Outstanding Earth Science Teacher award for the state of North Carolina. (Link goes to GSA website where winners are listed; I read about it yesterday in this month's issue of GSA Today.)

Rob's one of the most enthusiastic people I know, and a gifted educator. He loves geology, astronomy, climate, and is a strong environmental advocate to boot! If you have ten years to spare, you can check out the wealth of materials he has online at his instructional website.

Congratulations, Rob!

Labels: environmental, msse, north carolina, teaching

Yesterday, I mentioned what my MSSE advisor John Graves and I saw along the Billy Goat Trail on Saturday afternoon. Today, I'd like to share some images and insights from our Sunday field trip, out to the Shenandoah Valley and the Massanutten Synclinorium which underlies it.

I would like to thank Rick Diecchio of George Mason University for sharing some key outcrop knowledge with me. I've found that information about good outcrops can be very difficult to obtain unless you know somebody who knows. The information is primarily passed on through the oral tradition, rather than written in sufficient detail in peer-reviewed literature or in field guides (...or posted on geoblogs?).

Anyhow, back in December, on our drive down to the Blue Ridge / Valley & Ridge Symposium in Charlottesville, I told Rick I was organizing a new Massanutten Synclinorium field course. It's a place he's very familar with. He recommended a good outcrop to see the turbidite sequences of the Martinsburg Formation, a late Ordovician clastic unit made of debris shed off the rising Taconian Mountains to the east. Rick drew me a map in my field notebook, and on Sunday I was finally able to schedule a visit. Since John is unfamiliar with the stratigraphy and structure of the Shenandoah Valley (or the east coast in general), we also stopped at a lot of the other stops I'll be taking students to, including the classic "Tumbling Run" section.

Today I'd like to share a sets of photos with you from this new (to me) outcrop of the Martinsburg Formation. Tomorrow I will share another set from the next layer up in the stratigraphic stack, the Massanutten Sandstone. Both outcrops a pleasing combination of sedimentary stratification and structural geology.

Here's the Martinsburg Formation outcrop, just west of the Shenandoah River's North Fork:


This, like the "Pet Store Anticline" that I have previously blogged about, is an excellent place to look at bedding/cleavage relationships. The beds are dipping east, but the cleavage dips steeply to the west, implying the outcrop's position within a much larger (kilometers-wide) cleavage fan.

Here's a eye-catching outcrop that shows the beds weathered out differentially, while pervasively cut by ~vertical metamorphic cleavage:


More beds, of alternating sand and mud, steeply dipping in the Massanutten Synclinorium:

Note how the muddier portions show cleavage development better than the sandier strata.

More pervasively-cleaved muddy layers:


Here's one that confused me. In this predominantly-sandstone layer, you can see that the cleavage is better developed on the right, lower side of the bed. Does this mean that the right, lower-side of the bed is more mud-rich? (and sand-poor?) It did appear to be finer grained. If so, does this imply this bed is upside-down? Ordinarily, I would have thought to only look for the primary sedimentary structure as a geopetal (right-side-up) indicator, but this is the first time it has occurred to me that structural susceptibility based on mineralogy (in this case, susceptibility to cleavage development) could be used as an indicator of younging direction. I should note that this particular photo was taken downhill of the main outcrop, and may well be overturned. It's a synclinorium, after all, not a smooth syncline!


In this photo, the turbidite sequences of the Martinsburg Formation show a cool feature, a primary sedimentary structure known as cross-bedding:

Note that this photo is taken with the photo's long axis ~parallel to bedding, but the reality of the outcrop is that this is all steeply dipping, rotated 90 degrees clockwise (see the inset for "true" outcrop orientation).

...But wait! There's stuff dipping to the left, and stuff dipping to the right! Which one is this purported cross-bedding? Try this labelled version to sort it all out:

Note how at the bottom, the cross-beds curve tangentially to subparallelism with the main bed. They are truncated at top by the overlying layers. This is a good geopetal indicator, and the photo is oriented in depositional position, with the top at the top. Furthermore, if you reconstruct the current direction from these cross-beds (after the strata have been "unfolded" and restored to their original horizontal orientation, it would have come from the east... that is, from the orogen itself (the roots of which are exposed along the Billy Goat Trail.)

The intersection of rock weaknesses along the planes of bedding and planes of cleavage can result in the rock fracturing into long pencil-like bits, a phenomenon known as "pencil cleavage." This is my Freddy Krueger impersonation using the Martinsburg's cleaved "pencils."


John puts his hand up to give a sense of scale to the axis of this small fold in the steeply-dipping strata:


I was all agog over this outcrop, really digging the relationship between the structure and sedimentological elements in the rock. Best of all, it's a very short drive from Tumbling Run, and will replace the hike to the Buzzard Rock outcrop in my Massanutten field trip in April. (For NOVA-area readers, there are still four spaces open in that class...)

Labels: appalachians, mountains, msse, ordovician, primary structures, sediment, structure, valley and ridge

Heh! A gem from Mr. Hrynyshyn.

Labels: blogs, evolution, grants, teaching

For those of you who missed it, here's video of Mike Tidwell's talk at NOVA last Thursday.

Labels: action, climate change, global warming, maryland, nova, podcasts and vodcasts, politics, virginia

This weekend, my MSSE advisor John Graves was in town, and I took him out to a couple of field locations that I bring geology students to. We started off on Saturday afternoon on the Billy Goat Trail, where I went through the usual rigamarole, what with the Iapetus Ocean, Taconian Orogeny, migmatites, and what-not.

We also saw some cool fractures involving quartz, in two different situations, each instructive in its own way.

First, here at the base of the legendary "Traverse," is some metagraywacke that has fractured. Quartz-rich fluids flowed along these fractures, and the quartz they precipitated (presumably in interstitial spaces between grains?) made that particular zone on either side of the fracture more resistant to weathering than the non-quartz-infused metagraywacke. This "fortifying" effect falls off with increased distance from the fracture. Note that you can actually see the crack in each of these high-relief ridges; it's not a quartz vein per se, but a separate, related phenomenon. Penny for scale in both photos below -- one zoomed out, one zoomed in...





Second, check out these photos, of a spot near the downstream end of the Billy Goat Trail, where usually I don't have time to take students. The bedrock here is a migmatitic schist/gneiss. Here, you'll see ~vertical foliation cut by a ~horizontal quartz vein. Once again, a penny is for scale (this time held in place with some chewing gum, as the outcrop surface is vertical, striking at a right angle to foliation). These two structures are both representative of the same stress regime. With a dominant (tectonically-induced) stress directed ~horizontally, the various minerals in the original rock rotated (or grew) into new positions perpendicular to that stress (e.g., ~vertical). But that wasn't quite enough to accomodate the ~horizontal shortening. Some additional strain was accomodated by ~vertical extension through fracturing. That fracture was infilled with hydrothermal fluids that precipitated "milky" quartz, at almost a perfect right angle to the foliation:





John was suitably impressed, and we both appreciated the afternoon hike in EXCELLENT weather (55 degrees F; gorgeous!).

Labels: metamorphism, msse, piedmont, quartz, structure

Forbes.com has a suite of evolution-related and Darwin-related articles online at their website, in case you're looking for something to do. A diverse suite of topics, including examinations of Alfred Russel Wallace, the evolution of the brain, the intelligent design debate, and the relationship of evolutionary principles to economics, literature, and love.

Hat tip to Cathy B. for the link!

Labels: evolution

Wednesday 11 February 2009; Refreshments 7:30 pm; Meeting 8:00 pm;

the John Wesley Powell Auditorium

2170 Florida Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20008

Featured speakers:

Laurent G. J. Montesi, University of Maryland College Park - Cutting through the plate: rift interaction at the Galapagos triple junction

Marianne Guffanti, U.S. Geological Survey (Reston) - Volcano Hazards Revealed: Three Decades of Nature's Lessons for Applied Volcanology Cheryl Lewis Ames, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History - Species composition and distribution of shrimps at cold, methane-bearing, hydrocarbon seeps in the northern Gulf of Mexico

Andrew Johnston, Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum - Talking about the science of climate change with general audiences

Labels: gsw, meetings

Cool idea. Check it out.

Labels: art, blogs, climate change, global warming, ice, oceans

We now return you to our originally-scheduled photo-travelogue...

On the second day of our Andean mountain tour in Ecuador, Lily and I set out from Tambopaxi Lodge, our comfortable accomodation in Cotopaxi National Park:



We were going for a day-hike, checking out the scenery with our guide Diego while we acclimatized for some more serious mountain climbing in the days to come. The official goal of our hike was to check out two naturally-flowing cold springs, where the agua was pura, and safe to drink. Here's the first one, issuing from the base of a lava flow, with me awkwardly twisting around to raise a bottle of the good stuff:



Spring #2, of greater volume:


Some shots of the scenery:







The extinct volcano Sincholagua:


Me with Sincholagua (and lower cloud cover) in the distance:

A look back at Pasochoa, which we had climbed the day before:


And Cotopaxi itself, the charismatic, active volcano which draws most people to the park:


Critters:

A big insect, maybe a grylloblattid?


Feral horses:


We also saw some cool "primitive" plants (plants with ancient lineages):

Liverworts:


Sphenopsids:


Club mosses:


There was also some geology going on...

Here's a handful of loose lapilli (mixed in with some organics):


Stream deposits on the flanks of Cotopaxi Volcano, showing different water energy regimes. The coarsest layer in the middle represents the fastest moving water (capable of carrying larger particles of sediment):


And here's some flow-banding in andesite:


It started raining on our way back to the lodge, but that was okay, because hot showers and warm tea awaited there. Acclimatization, check! Next up, the peak known as Ruminahui...

Labels: arthropods, critters, ecuador, geology, mammals, plants, south america, travel, volcano

Labels: art, earthquakes, faults, teaching

Sierra magazine has a cool feature this month: photos of people and their appliances, showing how much coal it takes to run those appliances for one month. A very clever visual technique, illustrated by the talented photographer Lauren Burke. Click through to read the accompanying article about mountaintop removal, and how most of us support it daily at home by doing things like blogging. Hat tip to Mike Tidwell, who showed us some of these pictures yesterday during his talk at NOVA.

Also, the New Yorker this month has its ~annual piece from John McPhee. This one is about the author's experience with fact-checking. It's an interesting read if you're a fan of McPhee like I am. Eldridge Moores is mentioned -- although if you watched the video I posted a while back, you've already heard that Aegean /Adriatic plate mix-up story.

Labels: art, coal, geologists, geology, news

Meme bait! Here's the tallest points in each of the 50 United States, with Puerto Rico's and Washington, DC's highest points thrown in for good measure. Elevations are in feet above mean sea level. I've bolded the ones I have personally stood atop:

Cheaha Mt., Alabama 2,405'
Mt. McKinley (Denali), Alaska 20,320'
Humphreys Peak, Arizona 12,633'
Magazine Mt., Arkansas 2,753'
Mt. Whitney, California 14,494'
Mt. Elbert, Colorado 14,433'
Mt. Frissell, Connecticut 2,380'
Fort Reno, Washington, DC 429'
Ebright Azimuth, Delaware 448'
Britton Hill, Florida 345'
Brasstown Bald, Georgia 4,784'
Mauna Kea, Hawai'i 13,796'
Borah Peak, Idaho 12,662'
Charles Mound, Illinois, 1,235'
Hoosier Hill Point, Indiana 1,257'
Hawkeye Point, Iowa 1,670'
Mt. Sunflower, Kansas 4,039'
Black Mt., Kentucky 4,139'
Driskill Mt., Louisiana 535'
Mt. Katahdin, Maine 5,267'
Backbone Mt., Maryland 3,360'
Mt. Greylock, Massachusetts 3,487'
Mt. Arvon, Michigan 1,979'
Eagle Mt., Minnesota 2,301'
Woodall Mt., Mississippi 806'
Taum Sauk Mt., Missouri 1,772'
Granite Peak, Montana 12,799'
Panorama Point, Nebraska 5,424'
Boundary Peak, Nevada 13,140'
Mt. Washington, New Hampshire 6,288'
High Point, New Jersey 1,803'
Wheeler Peak, New Mexico 13,161'
Mt. Marcy, New York 5,344'
Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina 6,684'
White Butte, North Dakota 3,506'
Campbell Hill, Ohio 1,549'
Black Mesa, Oklahoma 4,973'
Mt. Hood, Oregon 11,239'
Mt. Davis, Pennsylvania 3,213'
Cerro de Punta, Puerto Rico 4390'
Jerimoth Hill, Rhode Island 812'
Sassafras Mt., South Carolina 3,560'
Harney Peak, South Dakota 7,242'
Clingmans Dome, Tennessee 6,643'
Guadalupe Peak, Texas 8,749'
Kings Peak, Utah 13,528'
Mt. Mansfield, Vermont 4,393'
Mt. Rogers, Virginia 5,729'
Mt Rainier, Washington 14,410'
Spruce Knob, West Virginia 4,861'
Timms Hill, Wisconsin 1,951'
Gannett Peak, Wyoming 13,804'

A good map and comprehensive list of these high points can be found at geology.com. Which ones have you visited?

Labels: mountains, travel

A graduate of my summer Snowball Earth course just forwarded me a link to a news item about a recent discovery which finds biomarkers exclusive to the sponges during Marinoan-glaciation-aged sediments on the Arabian Peninsula. The strata are "at least 635 million years old."

This is significant because the usual line about Snowball Earth is that multicellular animals show up after the glaciations end, not during. So what's going on here? Looks like we didn't understand the thing as well as we thought. For many people, the co-incidence (in the most literal sense) in timing between the end of the glaciations and the first multicellular animal fossils was one of the most intriguing things about the Snowball hypothesis -- we all want to know where we came from, after all -- and this may take some of the wind out of those sails. As humans, we like a good story, and this may be one reason the idea of a Snowball Earth is such a popular notion: it's a dramatic story about where we came from, and one that stretches our conception of the limits of change on our planet. But now that story exhibits a flaw upon closer scrutiny, and it makes it less satisfying. The consolation prize is that event though the story isn't as neat, it's closer to the truth. That's the way science works -- especially earth science, which isn't often as tidy as a fairy tale.

Hat tip to Christina T. for passing this on!

UPDATES: (1) Chuck read the paper and wrote it up at his blog. (2) WIRED magazine is also reporting on this, calling the discovery the world's "oldest animal fossils." I'm not sure I agree with that phrasing -- but that probably stems from my lack of familiarity with the reliability of biochemical signatures over traditional body or trace fossils.

Labels: chemistry, fossils, geology, porifera, proterozoic, snowball earth

I went to Ecuador to climb mountains.

After a lovely two days of recovery in the thermal springs of Papallacta, Lily and I began our mountain-climbing tour. We summited three peaks in the central Ecuadorian Andes: Pasochoa, Ruminahui, and Iliniza Norte. Today I'd like to share our experiences climbing the first (and shortest) of those, the peak called Pasochoa. Here it is from the rough road we drove in on:



From a Google Maps perspective, here's the physiography of the surrounding area. Pasochoa is the highest peak of the central volcano in this view:



Once we started hiking, we got above the trees and into the paramo ecosystem, a high-elevation grassland biome that exists between treeline and the bare rocks above where only lichens survive. Another view of the peak, which is about 13,700 feet in elevation:



Once we got up a little bit, we could look down to the Valle de los Chillos, a massive valley between Andean peaks, south of Quito:



One of the most spectacular things that happened on this hike is we saw an Andean condor, which flew by between us and this view, quite spectacularly. We weren't able to get the camera out in time to capture it, but with its black and white plumage, it was unmistakeable. Here's a amateurish Photoshop to show what it kind of looked like:



I pointed out the volcanic breccia to Lily and our guide, Diego:



More of the same could be seen in eroded-out minarets on the flanks of the mountain:




Pasochoa is one tall bit along the rim of a much larger caldera, and when we got up to the edge of that caldera, we got a real sense of its sudden drop-off. Clouds/fog curled up and over the lip, obscuring the view, but we could peer down into them and see that the land dropped steeply away for many hundreds of feet.



Lily gives a sense of scale to the edge of the caldera:



After lunch on top, more clouds moved in, and we decided to decamp back to the vehicle. Here's Diego and I descending the trail towards lower elevations.



Being a guy who had just recently recovered from something akin to pneumonia, I felt pretty good about making the summit of a 13,700' peak. Next up: let's see if we can't find something a little bit taller...

Labels: birdies, ecuador, mountains, south america, travel, volcano

Because he's coming to campus tomorrow (Thursday), last weekend I watched Mike Tidwell's movie We are all Smith Islanders. It's a 35-minute long documentary about how climate change is effecting the states of Maryland and Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Though it is a political document (and not a scientific documentary), I think it's a worthwhile enterprise because it connects the global to the local. We hear a lot about climate change, but when someone actually walks through Ocean City, Maryland, pointing out what three feet of sea level rise would look like, it fosters a connection based on shared landmarks.

Thanks to archive.org, you can actually watch the movie in low resolution on the Internet. Google video also keeps a copy available.

Or, if you'd prefer it in higher resolution (on DVD), you can find it at the NOVA library.

Labels: action, climate change, dc, global warming, maryland, movies, nova, politics, virginia

I'm on the mailing list for ANDRILL, an organization that I got interested in because they pair educators up with Antarctic researchers for scientific expeditions. They forwarded this video to me yesterday from the recent Polar-palooza campaign. It's a bunch of high school kids singing/rapping about climate change. Some of the turns of phrase are pretty clever, and the overall production values are high. I dig it, and figured you might want to check it out too:

Labels: antarctica, climate change, global warming, music

Last month, when hiking Iliniza Norte, a 16,997' volcano in Ecuador, we got up near the summit and began scrambling over the rocks there. Conditions were cold and snowy, and I was pleased to see some beautiful ice formations in protected nooks in the rock. These crystals of ice had a gorgeous branching pattern...



To show this branching pattern close up, here's Lily's gloved hand holding two such crystals (fused together). They look like squirrel tails!



The backdrop of oxidized porphyritic andesite (hosting lichens) isn't bad either.

Labels: ecuador, ice, minerals, travel

As noted everywhere, next Thursday is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. We've got fun plans at NOVA (and you're invited), but you might also opt for this symposium at the National Museum of Natural History downtown:

Thursday, February 12, 2009
Darwin Anniversary Symposium
Baird Auditorium, 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm

February 12, 2009 marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th year since the publication of his influential work, On the Origin of Species. To recognize Darwin's scientific accomplishments, including his observations on plant and animal life, the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, offers a day of discussions with distinguished panelists that will focus on a variety of topics from historical perspectives of Darwin to evolution and medicine.

Labels: evolution, meetings, smithsonian

No need to hear me say it... Get it straight from the source:

Library of Congress Hosts Lecture By Sandra Herbert, Feb. 18

The Science, Technology and Business Division of the Library of Congress will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth with a lecture by Sandra Herbert, one of the world’s leading authorities on Darwin. She will discuss her book Charles Darwin, Geologist, which explores how geology changed Darwin and how Darwin changed science.

Herbert will lecture at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 18, in the Pickford Theater on the third floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. A book-signing will follow the lecture, and the science reference staff will display Darwin items from the Library's collections. The event is free and open to the public; tickets or reservations are not needed.

In "Charles Darwin, Geologist," Herbert provides a fresh perspective on the life and accomplishments of Darwin, who was born on Feb. 12, 1809 (the same day as Abraham Lincoln) and whose thoughts and theories about the natural world hold true today - 150 years after the publication of his "On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection" (London, J. Murray, 1859).

While Darwin is best known for his voyage on the HMS Beagle, his study of finches on the Galapagos, and his theory of evolution, he had wider interests in the field of science, including geology. According to Herbert, "In the 19th century, geology attracted persons of imagination, like Darwin, because of its promise of knowledge of the distant past." Herbert shows how Darwin's study of geology and his developing ideas about geological systems profoundly shaped his creative insight and scientific methods as he worked toward an understanding of evolution and natural selection.

Charles Darwin, Geologist, written largely at the Library of Congress, won the Geological Society of America's Mary C. Rabbitt Award, the American Historical Association's George L. Mosse Prize and the History of Science Society's Levinson Prize for Historical Work in the Life Sciences as well as the Albion Book Prize given by the North American Conference on British Studies.

Herbert recently retired as director of the program "the Human Context of Science and Technology" and professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is also editor of the Red Notebook of Charles Darwin (1979) and Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries (1987).

As a Distinguished Visiting Scholar for 2006-2007 at Christ's College in Cambridge, Herbert assisted the university with its plans to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. Herbert first saw the Charles Darwin Archives at Christ College when she was a graduate student at Brandeis University. The archives contain Darwin's notebooks, papers and correspondence, and when she discovered the material she remembers thinking "It was like finding out Shakespeare had left unpublished plays behind."

The Library of Congress maintains one of the largest and most diverse collections of scientific and technical information in the world. The Science, Technology and Business Division provides reference and bibliographic services and develops the general collections of the Library in all areas of science, technology, business and economics, with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture, which are the subject specialties of the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library. For more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech.

Labels: evolution, history, meetings

The blog is in Spanish, and I can't quite make out where these photos were taken, but if you like concretions, you'll want to check these out.

Labels: blogs, concretions

Here's a pretty cool outcrop I found as we were leaving Cotopaxi National Park in Ecuador (in early January). I've got two small photos taken laterally on different parts of the outcrop (exposed by a stream), and then I follow those with two close-up crops, showing the details. I've posted the full-size versions of the first two photos on Flickr, so you can click through if you want more details. The zoomed-in shots are displayed here at the same size you'll find on Flickr.





What's going on here? It looks like we've got a series of thinner, relatively fine-grained layers below, topped off with a massive, poorly-sorted layer. The lower layers are all ash- and lapilli-sized grains, each stratum pretty well sorted. The upper layer consists of all kinds of different-sized chunks, including some boulders, "floating" in a really fine-grained matrix. Check it out:





I interpret this as a series of volcanic ash-(& lapilli-)falls that were then buried beneath a lahar, a volcanic mudflow. The lahar's slurry-like consistency was capable of transporting really large clasts, and when it slowed down, it set up like nature's concrete.

I think this is pretty spectacular stuff.

Labels: ecuador, igneous, mass wasting, south america, stratigraphy, travel, volcano