greengabbro | July 22, 2008Craig McClain over at Deep Sea News has been spewing some vile libel about our magmatic companions:
Two spectacularly awful events occurred in the ocean. Ocean anoxic event 1 (120mya) and 2 (93 mya). Rather unshockingly, the complete lack of oxygen in the oceans led to major extinctions. But what caused the OAE? New evidence strengthens the link between OAE2 and volcanism (but not Vulcans whose large brains are also known to cause major oxygen depletion).
[...]
[V]olcanoes are evil and an enemy of our salty friends.
Evil? Just because Earth life is too weak to handle the occasional flood…
greengabbro | July 21, 2008The chip in my head (the nice doctors at Seed installed one when I signed up for this blog) is all a-twitter. That means it's almost time to make my way, slack-jawed and drooling with my arms groping vaguely about the space in front of me, all the way across the continent to Seed's aboveground urban lair.
Dear readers, I know that Seed didn't implant chips in your brains (probably), but you're still invited to join the shambling hordes. And I, for one, welcome the opportunity to meet each and every one of you in the spicy flesh.
Saturday, August 9, at an as-yet unspecified time in the mid-…
greengabbro | July 18, 2008Gentle Reader, help me out here: Did I accidentally write Tuesday's post in crazy moon-language? The response to that coordinated swarm of movie reviews - from people who are affiliated with Sizzle, as well as people like Chris Mooney, who just plain liked it - appears to be that those of us who hated the movie are just powerpoint-obsessed scientists who don't understand. It makes me wonder if anyone actually read my review. The Sizzle team sent out an email:
The bottom line is that we see two groups of viewers. One group who are interested in the facts and accuracy, and they want to know…
greengabbro | July 17, 2008
Eye candy of the week: Zoltan Sylvester (of Hindered Settling fame) has some fantastic photos from the Geopalooza! exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
Mike Brown on coming up with a name for Make-make (the plutoid formerly known as 2005 FY9 aka Easterbunny):
Its orbit is not particularly strange, but it is big. Probably about 2/3 the size of Pluto. And it is bright. It is the brightest object in the Kuiper belt other than Pluto itself. Unlike, say 2003 EL61, which has so many interesting characteristics that it was hard choosing from so many different appropriate name (more…
greengabbro | July 14, 2008Before I give you my review of Randy Olson's new mockumentary about the global warming debate, I'd like to apologize for being such a terrible liberal documentary-goer. I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, or Olson's previous movie, Flock of Dodos, or any of Michael Moore's work since "TV Nation". I keep meaning to, and then I forget, or I decide that I'd rather use those two hours of my life for an escapist Pixar fantasy or save the $9 for beer. I am totally going to fail at providing a compare'n'contrast with the relevant touchstones of the genre that will assist you in deciding whether or…
greengabbro | July 14, 2008 There's an article in last Friday's issue of Nature describing some changes in the rocks near the San Andreas Fault that occurred in the hours before two small earthquakes. Here's the BBC's writeup; for those of you who can sneak behind the Nature paywall, the original article is here.
A similar study was published sixteen years ago, not in Nature but in Science. The first author on the 1992 Science paper, Paul Silver, was also the second author on this week's Nature paper. While the recent study measured stress changes along a fault using precise instrumentation installed in a pair of very…
greengabbro | July 11, 2008 Well, technically this is Friday tsunami blogging, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the 1958 Southeast Alaska earthquake and ensuing Lituya Bay megatsunami, a half-kilometer high wave which killed only a handful of people.
The earthquake happened on the Fairweather fault, a strike-slip fault which forms the main boundary between the Pacific and North American plates on the Alaska panhandle. Strike-slip earthquakes don't typically cause tsunamis directly - in a strike-slip event, the ground moves mostly horizontally, not vertically, so it…
greengabbro | July 5, 2008
This month's Scientiae is out! Hear women's voices... in science!
A conversation with Mr. Mister:
Should I blog about this? It's got some gender in it.
Yeah, it's got a lot of gender. It's kind of awful.
Attention, Southern California! On November 13 you will have the exciting honor of hosting the world's largest-ever earthquake drill, and there is a blog devoted to the preparations. Readers not in Southern California can play along by working on your own emergency kits.
Could a volcanic eruption under the Arctic Ocean be responsible for melting ice caps? No. Andrew Revkin has a massive…
greengabbro | June 30, 2008One hundred years ago today, a meteor exploded above Siberia, flattening trees over an area of a couple thousand square kilometers (one-tenth of Wales). This video shows the mostly recovered forest, and a view of the lake that might or might not be an impact crater:
The narration overstates the "mystery" about the cause of the explosion. We might not have any of the traditional tell-tale signs of an impact, like a crater or even a bit of leftover meteorite, but we've observed smaller atmospheric meteor explosions. People are still floating alternative hypotheses, but there's little reason to…
greengabbro | June 28, 2008 Okay, I'm still trying to figure out why my del.icio.us link-posting script is broken, but it's time to get back to quasi-regular link-posting anyway.
Christie at the Cape has a great post on archetypal female geologists - a counterpart to those irritating jokes about geology stereotypes that suggest you can only be a real geologist if you have a beard:
Why are the portraits so important, and why am I obsessed with Grey Braid fashion? Because it asserts so strongly the geologistness of these women, and the womanliness of these geologists. It represents a collective turning-of-the-back to…
greengabbro | June 27, 2008I've finally read Dr. Tom Chalko's wackaloon manuscript. It was fantastic.
Chalko artfully combines common misconceptions about his subject matter with accessible yet impressively mathy-lookin' slipshod data analysis, and produces an argument that appeals to the innate human desire to make sense of the natural world. His skill at subtly invoking people's fear of a changing world and appropriating the power of existing cultural narratives - in this case, the discourse on climate change - places him among the crackpot screed-writing elite. That makes it worth discussing a few of his more…
greengabbro | June 24, 2008 I've been reading The Design of Everyday Things, which I recommend as a useful and interesting way of thinking about all sorts of minor frustrations in daily life. It's also applicable to teaching - I've definitely noticed many student problems that have more to do with misunderstanding the nature and purpose of the assignment, than with misunderstanding the concepts involved. I was blown away when I realized that not everyone automatically interprets an expression like "Nc(M)" to mean a quantity Nc that is a function of a variable M, but apparently a dedicated mathphobe in the California…
greengabbro | June 19, 2008This is the most irresponsible "science" "reporting" I have seen in yonks:
New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr. Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago.
The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of "global warming" is comprehensively and urgently addressed.
Cursory examination reveals that Dr. Tom Chalko is a complete wackaloon! Even if you do not know the first thing about seismology,…
greengabbro | June 19, 2008Greetings, and welcome to this week's Carnival of Space! Before getting to the astro-goodness, Will has a question: How many of you get your astronomy news directly from the press release?
Planets and Plutoids
Everyone likes Mars, which means everyone's attention is on Phoenix and its oven. At the Planetary Society blog, Emily Lakdawilla interviews Phoenix mission manager Barry Goldstein. Turns out, recent data-handling problems actually mean we'll get more data back from Phoenix:
[But] because we were in this anomalous state, we requested, and received, a bunch of contingency passes from MRO…
greengabbro | June 18, 2008A reader named Amanda recently wrote me, asking for some advice:
I graduated from NYU in 2007 and have been working in LA as an assistant, but I'm thinking about going back to college and getting a second degree. My first one is a BFA in screenwriting, so naturally I want to compliment that with a BS in geology in order to be a high school science teacher. Here's the thing: as obsessed as I am with geology, I'm terrified of actually studying it. I'm great with concepts, and applying things I've studied to real life.
Problem is, I'm terrrible at any level of math higher than algebra. Because…
greengabbro | June 17, 2008From the perspective of this paper's publication, my cross-country move was badly timed. Since my email access has been so sporadic over the past couple weeks, I missed chances to help edit the press release and do a couple of interviews.
The press seems to have done just fine without me (except that no reporters have found my blog - or at least, no reporters have found it interesting). The Boston Globe has a nice photo set. What's weird, though, is watching the quotes from various officials at the company whose borehole we claim is responsible for the disaster.
In an article in the Financial…
greengabbro | June 12, 2008 I don't actually know what underlies the Middle Devonian brachiopods of my childhood, but I might get to find out soon. Iowa City is experiencing its second "500 year" flood in 15 years, and Coralville Lake has overtopped its dam... again. And the river hasn't crested yet. Fortunately, my family is on high ground, and playing host to some friends who've been evacuated from the flood zone.
Buildings in Iowa City must have floors that are at least 1 foot (or 1.4 of your Earth football diameters) above a designated "100 year" flood elevation. These elevations are determined by FEMA; climate…
greengabbro | June 12, 2008Earthquake engineer Kit Miyamoto has posted a journal of his trip to Sichuan. If you don't mind a little bit of construction jargon it's a good discussion of the details of what kinds of buildings collapse, and what kinds are safe, as well as the logistical difficulties of the immediate post-earthquake recovery. The lesson to be learned from the Sichuan earthquake is the same as the lesson of basically every major earthquake in the past several decades: If you build bad buildings, they will fall down and kill people.
After some earthquakes, we have been able to dramatically improve our…
greengabbro | June 11, 2008
How Crater Lake was formed, in four parts
Originally uploaded by erika_amir
Via LJ geology.
greengabbro | May 31, 2008 It's been two years* since the ground opened near Sidoarjo, Indonesia, spewing mud over the homes, farms, and businesses of tens of thousands of people. The disaster quickly acquired the rather endearing name of "Lusi", which is short for "lumpur" (Indonesian for mud) and "Sidoarjo". The two-year anniversary media bonanza has focused on the continuing plight of the refugees and the publication of a new paper analyzing GPS data around the mud volcano to determine that there is, indeed, going to be a big hole in the ground where the mud used to be. Chris Rowan has already blogged about that…