Maria Brumm is a graduate student at UC Berkeley. She studies hydrogeolo tectohydr gehoo seismohydrololololol ground water in tectonically active settings.
Email: criminy.crickets [at] gmail [dot] com
Let's all consume media together! Here's what I'm reading and what I'm listening to.
May 5, 2008
Category: Fluff
Brian posted tag clouds for two of his recent papers. Having no shame, Lab Lemming followed suit. Since I have even less shame, I'm just going to jump on while the bandwagon is rolling.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 12:07 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 29, 2008
Category: Fluff
What do Emperor Hirohito, Princess Benedikte of Denmark, and Duke Ellington have in common?
Posted by Maria Brumm at 7:15 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brain in a Jar
Tonight I'm assembling an appendix to my thesis. Plot some data; bring it into Illustrator to clean up the formatting; write a caption and add it to the LaTeX document. Rinse; lather; repeat. I'm using an egg timer - I can handle 45 minutes of this boring stuff if I get to blog when it dings.
I'm writing a Master's thesis; I wasn't originally expecting that. While I am fully capable of enumerating its many flaws in a multi-paragraph bullet-pointed high-pitched single breath, I'm still proud of what I've produced. I wasn't expecting that either.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 3:52 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 25, 2008
Category: Environment
First off: The Earth Day Accretionary Wedge is up, full of environmental musings from the geoblogosphere - check it out! Since it is still Earth Week here at Berkeley, I'll follow up my carnival contribution with an observation from the trenches, where geology and environmentalism intersect in a series of excruciatingly dull technical documents.
Part of my job used to be telling the people of Sun County, California* how their ground water resources would be affected by proposed new developments. Your average housing development poses a couple of different potential risks to ground water supply. One is that paving a surface which was previously covered in permeable soil will reduce the amount of rainfall that ends up in the aquifer, sending it to the ocean instead in the form of stream and storm drain runoff. Another is that people will occasionally spill toxic chemicals on the ground (e.g., motor oil, pesticides) and if the soil is configured just wrong, those chemicals can potentially make it down to the water table and contaminate the aquifer. And of course, any development will require enough water for the people who live there, but evaluating the stability of the proposed water supply was someone else's job.
So what I did was overlay a map of the proposed development with a geologic map of the area, check for potential problem spots where the water table was near the surface, and calculate the amount of ground water recharge that would be diverted away from the aquifer if the proposed new project was built. Oh, and I churned out some excruciatingly dull technical prose. It was all part of the larger environmental impact review required for all new construction in California under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA - we pronounced it "seequah"). CEQA requires that developers avoid or mitigate any significant impact to the environment caused by their proposed project.
What's a "significant" impact? In many cases, local planning boards have drawn lines between "significant" impacts that require mitigation, and "insignificant" impacts that can be foisted worry-free on the people of California.
In other cases, "significant impact" means exceeding a threshold value that a subcontracting technical consultant, in the absence of concrete guidelines, pulls out of their a must use their professional judgment to determine.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 7:46 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2008
Category: Environment • Jerkwadism
Happy Earth Day, everyone. Or, if you're on campus here, Happy Earth Week, complete with live bands at noon every day and a really weird papier-mâché tree ball thing oh, apparently that was a pomegranate to commemorate the Armenian genocide. Earth Week means I've got three more days to write about the relationship of geology, as a science and a profession, to environmental politics... which is good, 'cause I'm distracted today by larger-scale theoretical considerations:
In the end, the root of the problem lies with culture. If we can change the culture, then we may win. If we cannot, then no amount of technology or legislation or green infrastructure is going to save us (though all of these things may buy us time in which to work on the ultimately much harder problem of culture).
I've spent more time in the past few years thinking about feminist theory than about environmentalism - not for any grand ideological reasons, just because I like feminist theory. But this is what feminism and environmentalism have in common: They are both movements to create large-scale cultural change. Most feminists, and I suspect most environmentalists, expect that change to be created by and reflected in a mixture of law, social custom, and individual behavior. Which is why I think Carol Hanisch, writing about the women's liberation movement in the late 60s, also gets at the heart of what troubles me about an emphasis on individual choices:
One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
It's not that environmentalism has nothing to do with personal virtue, but individual situations and personal choices must also be used as sources of insight into larger problems, and these larger problems require collective action.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 6:37 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2008
Category: Earthquakes
Every time there's an earthquake in the Midwest, my mother emails me, just in case I want to move back home to study it. So that's how I heard about yesterday morning's earthquake in Illinois - a bit less exciting than waking up to it, but that's fine with me.
This is not earthquake enough to reverse the geoscientific brain drain from the Midwest to the West Coast (there's also the weather to think about)... but for an ostensibly stable part of the continental interior, thousands of miles from the nearest plate boundary, Illinois and Indiana have seen an awful lot of seismic action over the past 12,000 years:
Estimated locations of prehistoric earthquakes in Illinois and Indiana, from Obermeier (1998). Stars are historical earthquakes (1804-1992) of magnitude 5 or greater, dots are magnitude 4.5-5, and the light gray plus signs are weer than 4.5. The prehistoric earthquakes on this map were found by digging around stream banks, looking for preserved sand boils and other evidence of liquefaction.
At the bottom of this map are the famous New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, which made the Mississippi run backward and rang church bells in Boston. Are they connected to yesterday morning's event?
The short answer is yes and the long answer is sort of, but it's not as simple as you are probably imagining.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 6:34 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2008
Category: Geoscientists
The man who discovered the "butterfly effect" died this morning at the age of 90.
Ed Lorenz was a meteorologist; I will spare you most of the details of his career, as they can be found in the MIT obituary. But back in the early 60s, when he was trying to figure out why weather prediction was so difficult, he discovered that even a simple set of equations can produce fundamentally unpredictable results (play with this effect here!). Scientists in virtually every field of study have been banging their heads against this fact in utter frustration for the past 45 years.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 3:29 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My beautifully kludgy little script that does much of the work of putting together linky-posts for me - pulling everything with a special "to SB" tag off my del.icio.us account and formatting it - has stopped working. I cry tears of sadness. I also have a backlog of links.
Like, f'rinstance, April's Scientiae carnival. And the announcement for next month's Scientiae carnival - I'm excited about the theme!
And a couple of things on the social status of women in relation to geology: A Broadsheet summary of this article (pdf) about how oil and mineral-resource economies are bad for women. The kernel of the argument is this: "when growth encourages women to join the formal labor market, it ultimately brings about greater gender equality; when growth is based on oil and mineral extraction, it discourages women from entering the labor force and tends to exaggerate gender inequalities." There's also an article in Advances in Geosciences about women's role in social adaption to climate change.
MOAR LINKS under teh foldz NOM NOM.
Posted by Maria Brumm at 7:06 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 11, 2008
Category: Rock Blogging
Coal doesn't burn completely. Here's what's left over.
(Do I apologize for the weak blogging? No! No apologies! I am still trying to work "elusive", "obsequious", and "vapid" into a discussion of bedrock hydrogeology. "Propinquitous", though, that's taken care of. Also, I am contemplating cheesy steganography.)
Posted by Maria Brumm at 7:06 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
