All of My Faults Are Stress Related
Archives for May, 2009
Articles I want to read: May Geology edition
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 30, 2009 I made a promise to myself that every month, I would at least look through the abstracts on my RSS feeds and note interesting articles that I wanted to find time to read. So now it’s May 30, and I’d better do it before the June issues come out. So… articles in the May issue…
Scientiae: deadwood, or not?
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 29, 2009 When I saw there was going to be a discussion of issues facing mid-career faculty at last year’s Geological Society of America meeting, my first thought was: “Call the waaaaaaahmbulance!” I mean, pre-tenure faculty have issues. Job-hunting post-docs have issues. ABD grad students have issues. Mid-career faculty, on the other hand, have stable jobs –…
Hey! Who are you calling unfashionable?
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 28, 2009 My climatological Scibling Stoat used “geologist” as an insult, I think: hard rock geologists have done rather poorly in science, because they have become unfashionable Hey! I resemble that remark! (Point taken, at least career-wise. In the past 20 years, many departments have replaced retiring rock geeks with climate geeks. But some of us aren’t…
Return of the Quaternary
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 25, 2009 You would think that, with 4.6 billion years of geologic history to play with, geologists wouldn’t get all hung up about a mere 2.6 million years. But when those 2.6 million years include the glacial episode popularly known as the Ice Ages (and the evolution of some weird naked ape), well… scientists can get pretty…
The Accretionary Wedge is back!
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 24, 2009 The Accretionary Wedge, the monthly carnival of geology, is still alive! Or, well, it’s still active, at least. Its originator, Brian, got too busy to keep it up, so he handed off responsibilities to Lockwood (of Outside the Interzone), Chris (of goodSchist and the Podclast), and me. Lockwood will be hosting the next Accretionary Wedge,…
I *heart* phyllites
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 20, 2009 I have a confession to make. My favorite rocks are flaky. Really flaky. Phyllites are the metamorphic rock that gets left out of intro geology labs. They’re kind of like slates, in that they break into slabs. But they’re shiny like schists. The crystals are too small to see with the naked eye – well,…
Question: geology jobs with toddler?
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 18, 2009 Andrew Alden at about.com received a question from a reader. She’s in her second year studying geology in Australia, she likes hard rock stuff, she thinks mining and petroleum sound interesting, and she’s worried about juggling it all with a small child. I teach a fair number of non-traditional students, and I’ve got a number…
Linkfest: natural disasters, human responsibility, and a great visualization of Arctic sea ice
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 17, 2009 In the news this week: Andy Revkin at the NY Times has a news story and a blog post about the UN’s new report assessing disaster risk. One of the experts quoted in his story sent him a comment with a lot of concern about the promotional video. Dave Petley (who writes Dave’s Landslide Blog)…
Blogging a research cruise to active undersea volcanoes
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 17, 2009 Earlier this month, a group of biologists, oceanographers, volcanologists, geophysicists, and other scientists from many institutions took a trip to the area between Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga to look at actively erupting submarine volcanoes, including a backarc spreading ridge (never directly observed before!) and a new arc volcano. And they had a blog. So if…
Water wars & regulation
Posted by Kim Hannula on May 14, 2009 Water. Too much and you drown, not enough and you die of thirst. Getting it just right is important. But how? One of the fears associated with global warming is that it could lead to droughts that could lead to wars. There was an essay in Nature in March that argued that those wars don’t…