Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, and South Africa in his first post-doc, he now works at the University of Edinburgh.
Anne Jefferson has a love of all things water-related and blends hydrology, geomorphology, geology, and climate change in her work. She has a Ph.D. from Oregon State University and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.What are some of your favorite analogies for explaining geological concepts to other people?
Teaching through analogy - explaining new concepts to people by referring to things that they know or understand already - can be a powerful tool, and since geology is at its core very much a descriptive science, it's no surprise that useful analogies abound.
Here's another: in one attempt to describe one of the aims of my PhD research in New Zealand, I have likened the Earth's crust to a biscuit. Of course, there are many different types of biscuit: ginger nuts, for example, in addition to being very tasty, are quite hard to break, and when they do they will snap into a couple of large pieces. HobNobs, on the other hand, whilst being equally delicious, crumble easily into lots of smaller fragments. If you look at how continental crust deforms, sometimes it behaves like it's a ginger nut, with a small number of large-ish fragments separated by big faults, and sometimes it behaves like a HobNob, with lots of much smaller fragments all jostling against each other. Determining whether the crust in a particular region is more ginger nut-like or more HobNob-like is the key to properly describing the tectonics, and assessing things like the seismic hazard (for what it's worth, my research suggested that New Zealand is more like a ginger nut, although I'm still arguing with the Hob-Nob faction over that one).
So there's two for Callan; it'll be interesting to see what everyone else comes up with. Other responses so far: Tuff Cookie, Hypocentre, Callan himself, Lockwood.
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Physical Science
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Boiling water vs. boiling spaghetti sauce (mafic vs felsic melts)
Bubble wrap (rock that is porous but not permeable)
I did refer to a tsunami as a salami once, but that was because the class was right before lunch...
Posted by: NJ | October 9, 2008 2:07 PM
I remember a Pre-Cambrian geology expert once gave me a demonstration of how the earliest crust in the Archean could have formed by boiling whole milk on low heat. A thick wrinkly layer of cream formed at the top and one that had centers of collapse and boils as well (very early plate tectonics?).
I don't really know how truly it represents early Archean tectonics but it was a creative way to demonstrate a concept.
Posted by: Suvrat | October 10, 2008 12:44 AM
I've used horrible modeling sand for one demo
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=hycUyYiJaeg
and slinky's for another
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=iYb0mFoeaEs
I also like silly putty.
My dynamic friction talk uses 'slipping on the bathtub'.
Posted by: Harold Asmis | October 10, 2008 8:46 AM
Keeping to the food analogies my Professor for marine geology preferred to use turkish or salt-water taffy for the mantle.
Posted by: eric | October 12, 2008 5:05 PM
Some times just shrinking down the scale can be very help full. Such as with erosional features and comparing them to features at the beach while playing in the sand.
oh the the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. a classic!
Posted by: GeologyJoe | October 17, 2008 1:09 PM
When explaining my research to my friends and family I'm forced to describe just what exactly a hotspot track is. I've managed to successfully do this by lighting a candle and slowly passing a piece of blank paper a few centimeters above it. The paper represents a moving plate and the candle a "stationary" plume. The candle leaves a series of darker burn spots on the paper - a hotspot track! And you can change the direction of movement to get a kink too - just make sure you don't burn the house down!
Posted by: JackieG | October 21, 2008 1:56 PM