All of My Faults Are Stress Related http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/ en Copyright 2009 Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:48:13 -0700 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.261 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Slumgullion movement due to atmospheric pressure? Dave's Landslide Blog for full details about this. I don't have access to the paper.

According to Dave Petley, there's a new paper in Nature Geoscience about the Slumgullion landslide. Slumgullion is in my greater neighborhood - it's in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, between Lake City (former home of Alferd Packer) and Creede (former home of Doc Holliday), and I think it's got the coolest name of any landslide (and possibly the coolest name of any geological feature). It's a strange landslide for its slow movement, and it's being monitored in excruciating detail by the US Geological Survey.

Warning: I haven't read the full paper - just the press release and Dave Petley's comments on it. So, with that caveat, here's why I think the paper is interesting, from the perspective of someone who teaches structural geology (faults, folds, etc.):

The paper concludes that changes in atmospheric pressure cause the small nightly movements of the slide. The explanation is that atmospheric pressure pushes down on both the soil and water. Increases in atmospheric pressure increase the friction that keeps the slide from moving; decreases in atmospheric pressure reduce friction, and allow the landslide to move. This implies an incredibly subtle balance of forces - atmospheric pressure isn't very large compared to the weight of water or soil or rock. And it also means that those things going on in the air are important to what happens below.

Dave pointed out that there was another paper in Nature this year that related changes in atmospheric pressure during typhoons to "slow earthquakes" in Taiwan. It's intriguing. (It does NOT support the concept of "earthquake weather" that Californians tend to bring up every October. Works for slow earthquakes on thrust faults during the extremely low air pressures of typhoons, because the orientation of the fault combined with the stress directions mean that pushing the rocks down decreases the chance of sliding. California's got the wrong fault orientations and stress directions for this to work.)

Intriguing, and perfect fodder for tomorrow's discussion of the stress conditions that reactivate faults. Thanks for the lecture help, Dave!

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This month, many of the bloggers here at Sb have been participating in Donors Choose, a campaign to raise money for schools. October is a crazy month for anyone who goes to the Geological Society of America meeting, so I teamed up with Highly Allochthonous and Eruptions in the hope that, between the three blogs, we'd be able to scare up some support for K-12 geoscience education.

October's over tomorrow, and the geobloggers' challenge has raised more money than any other challenge here at Science Blogs. $8,288. 40 donors. 1218 students reached. Last week, I had to go searching for new geoscience-related projects to support, because so many of the original projects had already been completely funded.

I'm amazed, and delighted. I mean, I hardly did anything. Anne Jefferson somehow managed to promote five projects during Earth Science Week and encouraged members of the Earth Science Women's Network to donate, even though Anne was an author on four GSA abstracts and a session organizer. Many other geobloggers and geotweeters spread the word about projects, as well. (I apologize for not keeping track of everyone!) And then, when we posted about projects, you were incredibly generous.

A large portion of that $8288 comes from HP's donation, divided amongst the various challenges based on how much was donated. Anyone who donated to the challenge will get to decide how that money is allocated. You'll get a "giving card" from DonorsChoose in November, and then you'll get to decide which projects to fund. When I find out how those work in detail, I'll post. (If it would make life easier, I'd be willing to sort through the various projects and list some that deal with rocks, water, weather, etc., so you don't have to dig through all the projects yourself.)

And I'm feeling a big guilty for not offering any really cool stuff to donors. I'll help Anne and Chris write posts for the Earth Science Week projects, but I feel like I ought to do something else. So... any suggestions (that don't involve doing something that would embarrass my mother)? (We've got snow already, so I can't promise to go hunting for cool rocks and minerals for your own teaching collection. But I could offer to send people samples of the rock-most-likely-to-be-mistaken-for-a-meteorite, at least by residents of Durango. But I can't promise too many of those.)

(Oh, and if you have been meaning to participate in the challenge, you've got one more day.)

Read the comments on this post...]]> http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/2009/10/the_amazing_generosity_of_geos.php http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/2009/10/the_amazing_generosity_of_geos.php carnivals Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:46:26 -0700 Getting kids into the Earth Sciences - last call for Donors Choose challenge tomorrow at the end of next week. Rumor has it that HP has a large pot of money (like $200,000) to split amongst the groups that raised at least 1% of the total... and they'll split the money at the end of the day tomorrow. If we raised that 1% of the total, HP would donate another $2000 towards the projects that we suggest. As of tonight, the Geobloggers challenge has raised $2215. The total amount raised, amongst all the bloggers and tweeters and others, is $282,116. So we're $600 short of giving a lot more money to engage kids in the Earth Sciences.

Maybe $600 seems like too much money, even in little donations. So here's another suggestion. I've gone through the unfunded projects, and found several that would take less than $100 to fully fund them. It would be nice to push a few more projects across the finish line. So here are some suggestions:

What is there to learn about water? Kindergarteners. Water issues. Texas. High poverty school. Needs $59 to be fully funded.

Rock On!!! 4th graders in North Carolina need rock and mineral samples. The teacher says "Your help with ensure that my students are able to feel like real geologists and not just a student looking at pictures." They still need $78, and they can have their rocks.

Earth Science demonstrations for 6th grade students. Fault demonstration models in Arkansas. They live close to the New Madrid Seismic Zone. They should know about faults. And they're within $99 of being funded.

Three projects. One day. Can we do it? (Why do I feel like Bob the Builder all of a sudden?)

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Techniques and tools for effective recruitment, retention, and promotion of women and minorities in the geosciences. It's a mouthful, and included a lot of different perspectives, from information on the state of diversity in the geosciences today to suggestions for where we need to go to specific programs that have been developed to... well, to my talk, at the very end.

The session began with a personal perspective from Pamela Hallock-Muller, a marine scientist from the University of South Florida. You know, when I hear stories from women who entered the sciences in the 1970's, I am just floored by the things they went through. I mean, I remember people saying "girls can't do that" in the 1970's, but by the time I was in high school, Sally Ride had been on the space shuttle. But Pamela's had to keep fighting through her career, and... well, her story is pretty inspiring.

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Detachment Dynamics: heat, deformation, and fluids in extensional systems: Where continental crust stretches apart, steep normal faults join at depth into detachment systems: shear zones that separate hot, ductilely deforming rocks from shallower, brittly deforming rocks. These systems have been discussed since the 1980s, but the focus in this session was a little different than in past discussions I've witnessed. Detachments bring hot rocks closer to the surface, and put them adjacent to systems of fractures. If you've got hot rock and fractures close to one another, that should drive the movement of hot water, creating hydrothermal circulation. Above old detachment faults, those remnant hydrothermal systems could have deposited ores. (In fact, given the geology of Nevada and Arizona, I suspect that "could have" is too cautious of a statement.) In modern extensional systems, that means hot springs. (Also not particularly suprising, if you think about your favorite hot spring.) There are several groups looking at old metamorphic core complexes (such as the Snake Range, Nevada), using deuterium and oxygen isotopes to look at the sources of water (from below or above) that interacted with the deforming rocks, and the Colorado Geological Survey is thinking about geothermal systems active todayin the Arkansas River valley (Buena Vista area). (If Durango people want to know more about geothermal energy in Colorado, one of the co-authors of this talk will be speaking at the Four Corners Geological Society on this Friday, Oct. 23. Drop me a note if you're interested, and I will tell you the details.)

Spatial Skills in the Geosciences: Geologists are good at thinking spatially. At least, that's what we structural geologists tell anyone who will listen. (Just ask us to point to the nearest beer.) But rather that just brag about it, a group of geoscientists has started collaborating with cognitive scientists to try to understand exactly what's going on.

- Experience as a geologist actually doesn't correlate very well with performance on spatial visualization tests. (However, in a talk on Monday, I heard that geologists tended to perform a paper folding test very quickly, though I don't think they separated novice from expert geologists in that study.)

- One of the most intriguing ideas is software called CogSketch, which is designed to "see" student sketches in the way an instructor would. (Want to give students a quiz to see if they can recognize a fault, and have a computer give the students feedback and then grade the work?) The group that has designed the software is looking for people to help test it, so check their website and contact the authors.

- One of the most worrisome ideas came from studies of eye tracking (seeing where students looked when they read geology textbooks or looked at slides). Carefully examining pictures correlated with understanding the material, but many students only spent a few percent of their time looking at pictures. Didn't matter how the pictures were integrated with the test - some students only looked at the pictures when they got in the way of reading the words. (And other students, the ones who did the best on post-tests, glanced frequently at the pictures, regardless of how the pictures versus words were arranged.) So much for creative textbook design.

And on top of that, geologists are good at putting distracting things in their photos. Like people, for scale. When students look at a field photo, they look at the person. Or the dog. Or the graffiti on the rock. Forget the GIANT FAULT behind them... the people are more interesting. The authors suggested using a subtle scale instead of people. (But then will students wonder why we keep showing pictures of the change in our wallets, or our rock hammers' summer vacation?)

- On the other hand, mineralogy classes can dance to learn symmetry. (Simple exercises with hands can also be useful, in my experience, for those who find contra dancing to be an uncomfortably novel experience.) There are videos, with music.

(Warning: I didn't go to an entire session either in the morning or in the afternoon. I have a bad habit of leaving a room at the mid-session break, getting into a conversation in the hall, and not going back in. This was a typical pattern for the meeting.)

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I spent a lot of yesterday morning looking through the program, making plans for the rest of the week. (And no, I haven't followed through on all of them. That would have been impossible unless I could clone myself, unfortunately.) But although I am terrible about making plans and following through on them, the process made me think about the different things that people want to get out of meetings.

These days, I come to meetings for several reasons:

1) To get better at teaching content. I've been teaching at undergraduate institutions for 16 years now. Yes, we do research, and our administrators claim that the goal of doing the research is to keep up with the field. But I teach six undergraduate courses a year, and they aren't all in my research specialty. In fact, in any class, I probably only spend a few days talking about things that I've worked on myself. The rest of the time, I'm teaching students about ideas generated by other people. I've learned about those ideas in classes myself, but it's been 20 years since I started grad school. Ideas change. Over the past few years, I've started to wonder whether the framework that I use to explain ideas (especially about things like active faults, which I've never worked on myself) are... well, maybe not wrong, exactly, but misleading, or unproductive in terms of generating the ideas that will be important in the next 20 years. Meetings like this are my chance to learn where my discipline is going. (Yes, I could read more papers in journals. This is more fun.)

2) To get better at teaching, period. There's a lot of great research on how students learn in the geosciences these days. How do those nebulous "spatial thinking skills" really work, and how do people learn them? These day, it's the pedagogy that gets me thinking creatively.

3) To give me ideas for my own research. Or at least, to keep from falling so far behind that my papers will get laughed out of an editor's office. After 16 years, sometimes it feels like I have to sprint to stay at the back of the pack. So I come to meetings, and get ideas, and then need to finish my own projects... when I have time. (Ha.)

4) To see people. Durango's great, but not many people come through. I've accumulated at lot of friends and acquaintances and mentors and mentees over the years, and this is where I see them. (And after about two hours of talks, this becomes my priority for a little while.) I should refer to this as "networking" - after all, these are people who might become collaborators, or who might become connections for my current students. But mostly it feels like socializing.

5) To meet people with whom I'm currently working. Ok, some of my "meeting people" time involves projects that I'm planning to start. Those face-to-face meetings are important. This really is networking.

6) To support my student(s). Presenting at a conference is a big step, especially for an undergraduate.

7) To present my own stuff. This seems like it should rank higher, but honestly? It was a much bigger deal earlier in my career, when I was trying to get established as a researcher and trying to get feedback on my ideas. These days, if I give a presentation, it's because I've got something that I want to share, but I don't expect to get much professionally from it.

Of course, my goals were different at other stages of my career. When I was a grad student, presenting my research was the most important thing in my world. When I was a new faculty member, I needed to meet the people who were important in my field, and impress them with my work. I've come to conferences with the goal of talking to people from funding agencies, or to apply for jobs, or to interview job candidates. Some of those approaches were the right ones at the time (and at some times, I was too shy and didn't network nearly enough).

And now... I should go hear a couple more talks about detachments. After the blog post goes up. (Note that live-blogging the meeting is not one of my goals. If I hear something that I want to think more about, and I have time between all my other goals... then I'll do it. Apologies to anyone who wants a good science journalist and is reading me instead!)

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I don't live in California, but I might crawl under my desk tomorrow morning just to be part of the action. Because there's a big anniversary coming up on Saturday, and I'll be busy in Portland, Oregon, without the time to post.

At 5 pm on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, I was just settling down to do my Chinese homework. (Yes, I had been procrastinating.) I had been living in California for three weeks, in a frat-house-turned-hippy-co-op, just getting started in grad school. I knew how close the fault was, and that the building where I lived had been built just a few years after 1906. But geologic time is long, and human time is short, and even a geology grad student can find it difficult to imagine tectonic and human time converging.

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Tuesday is No Child Left Inside day. If you're as busy as I am, and can't actually take kids outside while you're putting the finishing touches on your GSA presentations, I've got a solution for you. Donate to the geobloggers' . As a bonus, Anne at Highly Allochthonous has picked out five projects that she would like to see fully funded, and Anne and Chris promise to take requests for post topics as a thank-you gift to donors. (The zombie-protection rock hammers project has been funded, thanks to all of you - I guess I can take a post request for that one!)

Thursday is Women in the Geosciences day. So, um, help your favorite woman geoscientist by doing something to let her get ready for GSA. (I love the idea, but I am completely failing in my mentoring duties on that day. Meant to have a potluck for students, but I'm going to be flying to Portland the next afternoon...)

Thursday is also Blog Action Day. It's not an official part of Earth Science Week, but the themes this year are the same: climate change. So you can be part of two things with one post, which is especially good for busy conference-preparing people.

So... happy Earth Science Week!

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13. Rock hammers

Not to be confused with tremendous mallets, these things are faster to wield and don't leave you exhausted after two or three swings. Used for busting rocks, they can easily be repurposed to bust zombies.
Advantages: Combines all the best qualities of the 1911A1 and the pump-action shotgun.
Disadvantages: None. Anyone who suggests otherwise eats babies.
The e-mail reminded me about one of the projects from the Geobloggers DonorsChoose challenge. An 8th grade science/math teacher in Oregon wants to take her students on field trips. She went on a trip last summer with geologists to the Columbia River gorge, and she wants to take her students there. She's got a field trip budget from the principal, and now she needs rock hammers. (She's also got goggles for eye protection, in case you're worried about middle school kids getting rock chips in their eyes.) The project is more than half funded already, in part by people who came from the Geobloggers challenge. They've only got $166 left to go.

So... going to Oregon for the Geological Society of America meeting in a few weeks? Or live in the Pacific Northwest and want to reduce the risk of zombie attacks? Or just like the idea of sending middle school kids (many of whom speak English as a 2nd language) from a disadvantaged high school on a geology field trip? This class needs your help.

...And... it's been funded! Thanks, donors! Read the comments on this post...]]> http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/2009/10/you_could_help_save_oregon_kid.php http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/2009/10/you_could_help_save_oregon_kid.php field work Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:30:49 -0700 Geobloggers take on DonorsChoose all over the geoblogosphere) are just one example. Water's another. And climate. And volcanoes. And landslides. And... well, you get the picture. So outreach is important.

But the best outreach might be the stuff that goes on every day in schools. My kid's lucky - he lives in a college town, with all sorts of students and professors providing opportunities to learn cool stuff. But a lot of kids don't have those advantages.

DonorsChoose.org lets us help the teachers who need funding to give their kids opportunities. This month, ScienceBlogs is participating in the Social Media Challenge - many of the bloggers here have set up pages at DonorsChoose to bring attention to some worthwhile projects. The geobloggers don't want the earth sciences left out, so we're participating. Anne Jefferson (Highly Allochthonous), Erik Klemetti (Eruptions), and I have a list of projects dealing with rocks, sand, water, weather, soil, and anything that gets kids outside.

Here's one example of a project. An 8th-grade class in a poor rural community in Washington wants to purchase soil sampling equipment. Their teacher has arranged for a visit by a guest speaker, and wants the students to prepare by doing their own experiments. It sounds like a great idea to make outreach even more worthwhile. But the class needs the funding by October 11 - only 11 days from now. If the readers of geobloggers pitch in (just a little per person), maybe we can let this cool idea happen.

There's a link to DonorsChoose on my sidebar. Click the link, choose a project, and help schools teach about the Earth.

Thank you!

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I watched all this unfold with some concern. I'm not much of a conference blogger - I just don't write down my thoughts fast enough (and I have a bad habit of talking to people in the halls instead of scurrying off to type on my computer). But I've tried - I've written a few posts about conference sessions, and I've felt like I should have written more. (Certainly there's more than one post worth of interesting stuff that I've heard at conferences in the past couple years.)

But geology isn't biomedicine. Our work isn't covered as much in the press, and there isn't a discipline-wide fear of being scooped, and conference talks are often about fairly mature studies (including work that's in press). Still, when I read the press guideline's for this year's Geological Society of America annual meeting, I was concerned about how they applied to me. Would it be ok to write about interesting sessions, or to discuss material not included in press releases? So I sent an e-mail to the people coordinating the press passes, and asked about blogging policies.

Here's the response that I received (below the fold):

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Short version: traditionally, geologists have used different abbreviations for ages (time before present) and duration (amount of time elapsing between two different events). Ages are abbreviated from Latin: Ga (giga-annum) is a billion years, Ma (mega-annum) is a million years, ka (kilo-annum) is a thousand years. Duration, on the other hand, has been abbreviated from "years." (I've seen it abbreviated in a couple of different ways, actually, and I don't have my USGS style guide to see what the recommendations there are.) There's a move to use the same abbreviations for both: Ga, Ma, ka, etc., but there's disagreement. (The main argument for using Ma to represent durations is that geologists are used to thinking about numbers meaning ages: 70 Ma refers to a time in the Cretaceous.)

My take: I don't have a strong opinion. It takes practice to make the distinction, and my students tend to ask why we need two units, and I don't really have a problem telling ages from lengths of time. (I can usually handle subtraction, though it's more difficult when I'm dehydrated at the end of a long day in the field. Pretty much everything is more difficult when I'm dehydrated.) But I'm willing to be convinced.

So what do you think? (If you've got a really strong opinion, GSA is taking comments. But I'm happy to listen if you want to lay out your favorite argument here, too.)

(Note to physicists: 10^whatever seconds just is not going to work, or we'll have to start working in logarithmic time.)

Read the comments on this post...]]> http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/2009/09/how_should_geologists_abbrevia.php http://scienceblogs.com/stressrelated/2009/09/how_should_geologists_abbrevia.php geologic time Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:31:54 -0700 Getting a job at an undergrad institution (repost): the application This is a repost from my old blog, from a year and a half ago. But it's time for academic positions to be advertised - if they haven't been frozen due to budget cuts. So, some old advice on getting a job, while my own job is keeping me especially busy.

So. You want a job, do you? At an undergraduate college? Ok, then. Let me tell you what I know.

(This is based on being on six different search committees at two different schools - one private small liberal arts college (SLAC), and one public liberal arts college. However, I haven't been part of a search in the past seven years - my department has been successful at moving people from job candidate to tenured professor, so that's no longer my biggest service obligation. So: the job market changes with time, and I may be out of touch.)

A job application is like any other piece of writing: to be effective, it needs to be pitched at the right audience. Except that goes triple (at least) for job applications. In the case of a search committee for a liberal arts college, that audience usually includes the entire department, the dean, other administrators, students (for parts of the application - not reference letters), and possibly a faculty member from another department.

So what does this audience want from the job search, anyway?

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Disclaimer: I've taught at two undergrad-only colleges: one private liberal arts college on the East Coast, and one public liberal arts college in the Rockies. (I was also a student at a private liberal arts college. That made me want to teach at one, but it didn't teach me much about surviving.) Everything I'm going to say is based on my experience. One person, limited in time and institutions. All schools have their quirks, and SLACs may have more than most. And institutions change through time - the expectations when I was hired had changed within seven years, in both places. But I'm teaching at an undergrad school right now, and that gives me a different perspective from professors at research universities (who may have been students at SLACs, or who may have run away screaming after a temporary teaching position, or who may know of SLACs mostly via grad students who came from them).

Oh, and for non-USAians - I don't think this kind of institution exists outside the US. And these schools are different from community colleges, and from small universities with M.S. programs. I've never taught at either of those, so I don't know what the work is like.

So, with those caveats, I'm going to do two posts. The first is going to deal with expectations: what exactly is involved in teaching at a SLAC? The second is going to deal with getting a job. (I initially had planned to write a post about getting tenure, but that's so quirky that I didn't.)

So. Expectations.

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- Early this afternoon, I posted a frantic plea for good Google Earth locations to use to demonstrate tilted rock layers in my first Structural Geology lab. I should have just checked SERC first. They now have a collection of images and latitude/longitude coordinates that are both beautiful and beautifully deformed. I started my lab by showing the class the Raplee Anticline. Google Earth is amazing for learning to visualize features on geologic maps. (I'm going to have to go into this more deeply in the future - I went from way cool visualization directly into solving spatial problems with trig, and it was rough.)

- Callan Bentley at NOVA Geoblog has been discussing the differences between structural and sedimentary basins (here and here). (Callan's field photos are often good for a dose of structural geology, too. His blog makes me wish I'd spent the summer in the field.)

- The M 7.0 earthquake that caused injuries and deaths in Jakarta, Indonesia today looks pretty weird, tectonically. It occurred at 50 km depth in a subduction zone, but the focal mechanism implies that it occurred during northwest-southeast shortening. The plate movement is about perpendicular to the slip direction - the Australian plate slips to the northeast under Java there. I don't think the plate convergence is as oblique under Java as it is beneath Sumatra (where there are some interesting structures that result from plates that collide at an angle to the plate boundary). Anyway, I have no idea what happened.

- And I need to read a paper from the August issue of Geology about an active low-angle normal fault in Italy. I saw a press release about this paper tweeted today, and the abstract is interesting enough that it deserves a full blog post.

But I've promised a student that I'll read articles about the Navajo Mountain laccolith and talk to her about them on Friday, and I've got 31 labs from my sophomores to grade already.

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