Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Earth Science! She lives in Seattle, WA, where she works in environmental consulting.
It's one of those mornings where everything looks shiny and interesting - everything but the stuff I'm supposed to be working on. And wouldn't you know it, the Earth and Planetary Science Letters RSS feed just dumped a couple of issues on me. Surely I can at least blurb the interesting titles? It will be a prize for finishing my timed bouts of real work.
Sorry about the Elsevier paywalls. It couldn't be helped.
- They poured honey into a sandbox - for Science! L. Mathieu and B. van Wyk de Vries, Dykes, cups, saucers and sills: Analogue experiments on magma intrusion into brittle rocks
- The "inner inner core" paper is making headlines, apparently on the basis of this murky press release. But if you start revising your middle-school earth science textbooks based on just a single tomographic anisotropy model of the inner core, well... you'll probably make a lot of money by putting out new revised editions every few months. Xinlei Sun and Xiaodong Song, The inner inner core of the Earth: Texturing of iron crystals from three-dimensional seismic anisotropy
- It's easy to see how subduction zones can drag rocks deep into the earth, but why do some of those rocks pop back up again so quickly? New models suggest that sometimes, when a subduction zone tries to swallow a piece of buoyant material, it makes the whole system stagger backwards and burp. Jean-Pierre Brun and Claudio Faccenna, Exhumation of high-pressure rocks driven by slab rollback.
- How long did it take to go from a hellish magma ocean to respectable continents? Not very long at all. T. Mark Harrisona, Axel K. Schmitta, Malcolm T. McCullochb and Oscar M. Loveraa, Early (≥4.5 Ga) Formation of Terrestrial Crust: Lu-Hf , δ18O, and Ti Thermometry Results for Hadean Zircons.
Environment
Physical Science
Comments
Here is where perhaps I display my ignorance. The first link (any article that involves a sandbox? I totally want to read) doesn't appear to link directly to an article, and I do not immediately discern a way to find one. Does it require a log in?
Posted by: Cyrano Jones | March 11, 2008 2:19 PM
Hmm. The link takes me to a page where I can then download a PDF, but I'm using a fancypants Berkeley IP address today so I'm not sure what it looks like to everybody else. Anyway, it does require a log in - and either money, or an institutional subscription. When it's properly published, instead of just "in press", you should be able to read the abstract there for free.
There is a very extensive scientific literature about sandboxes (though they are often called "shake tables" so that the engineers can feel more dignified, and also because there are good reasons to shake your sandbox), so if you really want to read all of them, you're in for a long project...
Posted by: Maria | March 11, 2008 2:51 PM
About the burpy subduction thing, I don't see the abstract, but I'll bet it's quite similar to this upcoming presentation at the EGU meeting by Brun and Faccenna, part of some interesting-looking stuff at this session.
Posted by: Andrew | March 11, 2008 2:59 PM
Oh, darn, I don't have access to EPSL. I want to hear about high-pressure burbs. Sounds like my dissertation rocks.
Posted by: Kim | March 11, 2008 4:27 PM