khannula | June 9, 2009I spent last Friday grading for my five-week summer class. It took about nine hours*, which wasn't that bad, considering that the main graded work consisted of papers.
I like making students write. It lets me see their thought processes, and helps me differentiate between the students who can repeat what they've heard and the students who think for themselves - something that I especially want to see from an upper-level gen ed class like this one. So I assign papers. But I usually end up regretting that later, and wish I could convince myself that multiple-choice exams were adequate for a…
khannula | June 8, 2009Much of the celebration of World Oceans Day focuses on the ocean's importance as an ecosystem, especially in relation to climate change. But the bottom of the ocean is still relatively unknown - I've been told by marine geologists that we know the topography of Venus better than that of our own planet, because we know so little of the ocean floor. The little that we learned before the late 1960's transformed the understanding of geology on land, as well - if it weren't for exploration of the oceans, we wouldn't know about plate tectonics.
So in honor of World Oceans Day, I give you links to…
khannula | June 7, 2009I bet I'm not the only geologist who always wants to list "time machine" in the budget request for every grant proposal I write. Yes, we've got a lot of tools to sort out what's happened in the past, but wouldn't it be a lot easier if we could just go back and see for ourselves? So I love this month's theme for the reactivated Accretionary Wedge carnival.
I want to go back about 1.7 billion years, to see what on Earth was happening when my favorite local rock was being deposited.
This is the Vallecito Conglomerate. It's been metamorphosed, but its sedimentary features are still preserved. It'…
khannula | June 2, 2009There's a question-and-answer in The Scientist online [free registration required] entitled "Is Tenure Worth Saving?" The interviewee, Dan Clawson (a tenured sociologist at the University of Massachusetts) goes through some of the history that's all-too-familiar to people who want jobs in academia: to cut money*, universities have been quietly shifting their work, more and more, to non-tenure-track positions.
But what about reasons besides money? Does the institution of tenure lead to the accumulation of deadwood**?
TS [The Scientist]: Other than the monetary benefits to the university, what…
khannula | May 30, 2009I 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 of Geology that look interesting:
Extensional tectonics: Extension rates, crustal melting, and core complex dynamics. Metamorphic core complexes are made up of metamorphic and igneous rocks that have been brought nearer to the surface by continental extension. They're characterized by mylonites that separate the hotter,…
khannula | May 28, 2009When 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 - more stable than most in this economy (assuming the department doesn't get torn apart during budget cuts). Mid-career faculty have the freedom to do the research that interests them, to teach large intro classes without worrying about getting bad…
khannula | May 28, 2009My 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 bitter, and most of us accept that climate science has made huge advances in the past 20 years. In fact, I said something like that in a recent survey from... maybe AAAS?)
I blog because I think rocks are interesting. But perhaps blogging about the…
khannula | May 25, 2009You 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 protective of their terminology.
Geological Society of America time scale
I'm neither a stratigrapher nor a historian of stratigraphy. (In fact, I tend to treat sedimentary layering as a marker that helps me keep track of the gorgeous changes in shape that rocks undergo.) I also…
khannula | May 24, 2009The 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, in mid-June. His theme: Let's Do a Time Warp!
So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is this: "Where and when would you most like to visit to witness and analyze an event in Earth's history?" Suppose you have a space-time machine to (safely and…
khannula | May 20, 2009I 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, except for the big ones, which are about the size of pin-head (at least in my rocks).
They're easy to break with a chisel. They require a lot of squinting and experience to identify their minerals.
And they're gorgeous under a microscope.
I just saw a really neat set of photos of phyllites on…
khannula | May 18, 2009Andrew 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 of advisees with small children. We talk about how to juggle coursework and kids a lot (especially when kids are sick, or schools have vacations), but I haven't had that many long talks with them about jobs (yet). There are geology jobs near my town - engineering geology…
khannula | May 17, 2009In 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) looked at the report, and criticizes its assessment of landslide hazards. I haven't looked at the report myself (and it's long, unfortunately, so there's no way I'll be able to digest it in time for class this week), but I will try to keep the criticisms in mind when I do.
I had no idea that there was a…
khannula | May 17, 2009Earlier 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 you want insights into the experiences of marine geologists in the field... well, you can read for yourself. (Teaser: one post is titled "We Thought We'd Seen It All".) Science in action. So cool. Or hot, in this case.
(Thanks to the Lab…
khannula | May 14, 2009Water. 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 really happen - that countries trade virtual water when they import food. But is that really the case? Seed has a nice article today about just that. It brings together seven experts on water and international relations to address the question of water and conflict. The consensus, if you can ever get one from…
khannula | May 13, 2009Ok, you're probably thinking. Now she's really lost it. California's got earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, coastal erosion, oil, gold, sinking ground, a funky inland delta with levees in danger of failing, major water issues... and that's not even getting into the really cool stuff, like serpentinites and blueschists and pillow basalts and forearc basin sediments and granodiorites.
Yeah. California's got plenty of geology, and plenty of problems related to its geology. And college-bound high school kids don't study it, because very few high school earth science classes count for admission…
khannula | May 11, 2009One year ago today, a M 7.9 earthquake struck the Chinese province of Sichuan. It was horrific. I don't have anything profound or helpful to say about it myself, but I want to pass on links to other remembrances:
Berkeley SeismoBlog explains the tectonics of the earthquake, and the possibility (raised in the Chinese journal Geology and Seismology that the water in the Zipingpu Reservoir may have triggered the earthquake. (The plate movements caused it, but the water may have made it easier for the fault to slip.)
The NPR reporters who were in Chengdu last May for another story, only to find…
khannula | May 8, 2009So you're a fairly new professor, done with classes for the summer, ready to dive into research. And then you get your course evaluations back. What do you do?
If the course evaluations were excellent, yay! You can walk around feeling good about yourself for a while, and then go back to the research. (Even at a teaching-intensive school, you've got to publish something to get tenure.)
If the course evaluations weren't so good, well...
First, put them aside and do something that makes you feel good. Talk to someone who likes you. Go for a run. Garden. Read your favorite novel. Go to a movie.…
khannula | May 6, 2009I'm neck-deep in a five-week summer class, and spending my evenings reading for class prep and thinking about how to run discussions. So I'm on a blogging semi-hiatus, at least until I've got an hour or two free of other commitments. In the meantime, I'll occasionally post some of my old favorites. This one was my first blog post ever, and was included in the 2007 Open Lab.
NPR has had this series, off and on, in which listeners record interesting sounds and then explain them on the air. I didn't have a recording device with me last weekend, but I literally stumbled across some of the most…
khannula | May 3, 2009I'm deep in class-by-class planning for the summer session class that I start teaching tomorrow. I've decided not to blog about the class once it starts, in part because I'm going to be encouraging the use of Internet sources, and I expect my students to run across the geoblogosphere and Science Blogs, and I don't want my own thoughts about course topics to get in the way of their thinking.
However, I'm lurking along, checking to see what volcanoes are erupting and what landslides are happening. And I'm keeping my eye on the H1N1 influenza strain formerly known as swine flu, because I've got…
khannula | April 30, 2009I should have finished designing the new version of my disasters class. I've been thinking about it forever. But then I was trying to get a paper written, and then I went to a conference, and then there were senior thesis presentations and end-of-semester grading and a six-year-old's birthday, and, well...
Yes, I am frantically trying to get a syllabus ready for class on Monday.
I've got three more days (though they include a discussion with my soon-to-graduate thesis student, graduation, and a birthday party, so it can't be non-stop syllabus work). That means that, although I should be…