khannula | April 25, 2009It's that time of year again. The plotter is out of paper and the students have new haircuts and clothes I've never seen. It must be time for senior thesis presentations. In about an hour and a half, the senior geology students will be giving 15-minute talks (the same length as at professional geology meetings) to a room full of friends, professors, parents, recent alums, and curious local geologists. They're probably nervous now, but when they come out, they will have accomplished something.
Their senior thesis work really started back in January of 2008, when they started scrambling for…
khannula | April 23, 2009I got back from a conference Tuesday night, and came home to the craziness of the semester's end. Part of me wants to blog about how cool undergraduate research is, after we had our big school-wide undergraduate research symposium, but I really should be grading the proposals for next year's senior thesis projects. (Which will be fantastic, too, though right now the students are a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the work they're planning to do.)
So here are some things that made me say "oh, WOW" when I skimmed through my rss reader & Twitter:
Guest photographer at Through the Sandglass…
khannula | April 17, 2009I've been awakened by an earthquake, but it was only M 4. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be in San Francisco 103 years ago this morning, when a M 8-ish earthquake struck at 5:12 am. Shaking ten times stronger than the Loma Prieta earthquake - I couldn't stand up in M 7 quake; would a M 8 knock a person out of bed?
And it was one thing to experience a M 7 earthquake in the daytime, as a geologist who knew just how nearby the Pacific Plate was, and how fast it moved, and what it could do. Did people in 1906 remember the Hayward quake of 1868, nearly 40 years before? Or would…
khannula | April 16, 2009I'm brainstorming for my summer class, and I'm thinking about creating an exercise or assignment in which students try to figure out whether a web site (or blog post, or whatever) is reliable. (I'm going to be teaching in a computer classroom, so I've got a choice of having students do a homework assignment or googling during class time. I don't need to decide that quite yet.)
I'm thinking of splitting the class into several groups and having them google some common pseudoscience/conspiracy theories, and have them look for any kind of hint that the information isn't reliable. I want to avoid…
khannula | April 16, 2009Last night, we were having another one of those incredible dust storms that have been blowing in this spring (and which may be decimating the spring snowpack).
This morning, I woke up to this:
I was happy to see it - it will melt by the end of the day, and will keep the soil from being so incredibly dry.
I'm not sure this guy is so happy, though:
khannula | April 15, 2009The cores of mountain belts formed by continental collisions often contain metamorphic rocks, formed when sediments were buried in the collision and transformed by heat and pressure.
But the heat and pressure don't happen simultaneously - rocks can be buried (and increase in pressure) much faster than they can heat up. When the rocks are not allowed to heat up significantly, this process can create blueschists, the high pressure/low temperature metamorphic rocks formed in subduction zones. In continental collisions, subduction stops, and the metamorphic rocks sit around at depth, heating up…
khannula | April 13, 2009My reviewers commenters on yesterday's post on chocolate chip cookie deformation had some great points. (Some of them also seem to have been very hungry. For those who want me to experiment more, and to get to analyze the results: looks like I've got something that I can promise once the Donors Choose challenge rolls around.)
Key criticism #1, from DDeden:
First the cookies puffed up, and then they collapsed. While they puffed up, their surface area increased [No, it decreased!], so the cookie crust was pulled apart. When the cookies collapsed, the surface area decreased again [No, it…
khannula | April 12, 2009I probably shouldn't have baked chocolate chip cookies yesterday, what with today being one of the two biggest chocolate-buzz holidays on the American calendar. But I did.
I've had a lot of trouble figuring out the best recipe adjustments for high elevation. My cookies have a tendency to puff up big, and then collapse into goo. The end results look like this:
All wrinkled around the edges, and flat in the middle. In fact, it looks like something I could map:
Those are fold symbols for the wrinkles around the edge, and normal fault symbols for the places where the crust broke open to reveal…
khannula | April 11, 2009Advising and registration for summer and fall semesters has just finished, so I've been spending a lot of time talking and thinking about general education requirements. In particular, I've been thinking about one question: why? What's the point of general education requirements? What are they good for? What should students get out of them?
In the US, most colleges (up to four-year schools) and universities (schools with graduate programs) require that all students take some classes spread across a range of disciplines. These general education programs vary from school to school - some are…
khannula | April 9, 2009The Small Human sometimes insists that I build Something with his legos. So today, in honor of National Poetry Month, I made this:
Can anyone name that poem? (It's about the only poem that I have memorized.)
(This post is brought to you by the encouragement of my English-major husband.)
khannula | April 7, 2009Along with the stories of tragedy in Italy, there are also stories that the earthquake was predicted, and that the predictions were ignored. Was the tragedy made even worse by authorities who wouldn't listen to a scientist who knew what he was talking about?
Now, I'm not a seismologist, but I know a little about predicting earthquakes. I predicted one, you see: the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
There had been a small earthquake just before I arrived at Stanford, so earthquakes were on a lot of people's minds. The San Francisco Examiner had a hilarious cartoon about how to use your pet to…
khannula | April 6, 2009The estimated death toll from last night's M 6.3 earthquake in Italy is currently 150, with 10's of thousands of people left homeless. My thoughts are with the people there, especially those still searching for their loved ones.
As you can see from the USGS map and moment tensor (and from Highly Allochthonous, who posted a great explanation while I was on kid duty), the earthquake occurred on a normal fault associated with the collision of Africa and Europe...
At this point, if you've taken an intro geology class, you're probably shaking your head, wondering if I've made a mistake reading…
khannula | April 5, 2009There's a little tangent in the course design tutorial I'm working through, and I think it's worth considering outside the context of any particular course. How are my students different from me, in terms of how they learn best?
The tutorial uses the Index of Learning Styles to get participants thinking about how they like to learn, versus how their students like to learn. There's an online questionnaire that anyone (students, teachers, blog-readers) can use to assess their own learning styles, and a description of learning styles that explains the results. The results are plotted on sliding…
khannula | April 3, 2009I've been watching an aspen in my front yard this spring, and sending data to the National Phenology Network. (That's phenology, the study of recurring plant and animals phases, not phrenology.) We've had warm weather, cold weather, and windy weather, and blooming violets, crocuses, and dwarf irises, but the aspens haven't done much.
Until now. My aspen is blooming. Kind of.
There aren't any leaves yet, but this morning I noticed some things that reminded me of the fuzz on pussy willows back in Maine. So this afternoon, I took a closer look, and picked one. And... I think that must be the…
khannula | April 2, 2009My husband and I both had goals for our visit to the Grand Canyon at the beginning of this week. He wanted to give himself a workout that would leave him feeling sore all week. I wanted to check out the Trail of Time, an exhibit that some of my colleagues from New Mexico and Arizona had been developing. I didn't know whether it was complete, or where it started, but I'd been hearing Karl Karlstrom and Laurie Crossey talk about it for years.
The rangers working at the main visitor center had heard about it at a briefing, and had some pamphlets hidden behind their desk, but weren't quite sure…
khannula | April 1, 2009It's the Small Human's spring break, which means all kinds of work-juggling. The family took off for four days and went to the part of Arizona which is not apparently being auctioned off on e-Bay to balance the state's budget.
It's strange enough driving through eastern Arizona during daylight savings time - most of the state doesn't observe it, but the Navajo reservation does, and the edges of the reservation are a patchwork of state, BLM, reservation, and private land. I had enough trouble keeping track of the time, let alone the date.
I'll try to do some real blogging about it (because…
khannula | March 27, 2009This month's Scientiae is about overcoming challenges: our worst moments, and how we survived them. I've had trouble deciding which story to tell. Field camp? Running out of food while dropped off by helicopter? Not finding the rocks that were supposed to be in my dissertation field area? Bad dates (geologic, that is)?
I had some disastrous fieldwork in grad school, yeah, but I think my worst experience came from teaching. In fact, my teaching lost me a job. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
I was hired at the last minute for a one-year replacement position at a small liberal arts college in…
khannula | March 26, 2009I've got one wallet-sized version of the 1983 Geological Society of America time scale in my field pouch, and another page-sized version that used to be taped to the wall in front of my desk. I relied on it a lot, especially when starting work in a new field area. In the early 90's, when I was trying to break into the world of Appalachian tectonics research, I started by trying to figure out where the problems were in the models of how the metamorphic rocks of New England came to be. I spent a lot of time reading papers from different subdisciplines - the records of old mountain belts are…
khannula | March 25, 2009Geologists are quirky and interesting. We study this planet we live on (and others), we get to think about volcanoes or earthquakes or landslides or floods, we can tell you a gazillion ways that the earth could kill you (and then say that they'll all happen tomorrow... on the geologic time scale). We know how water flows through rock. We know how oil flows through rock, too, and what's likely to happen if we keep burning oil and coal and natural gas. And our employment prospects look good (though again, remember we think on the geologic time scale, and mega-recessions are too short for us to…
khannula | March 22, 2009This is a post for World Water Day. See more posts about transboundary water at Cr!key Creek.
For the past two years, my intro Earth Science students have been doing a project monitoring one of our local rivers. On the one hand, it's just another stream, small enough for students to safely wade into it with a current meter. On the other... it's our town's water source, and every drop of it is promised at least once, for irrigation, for municipal water supplies, for fish, for electricity, for a treaty between the US and Mexico.
The Florida River (Flor-EE-da, the Spanish word for "flowery") is…