geosciences
greengabbro | May 21, 2008 Julian is hosting this month's Accretionary Wedge, and wants us all to discuss a geologic event that's significant to us personally. (Well, technically, he asked for the event that is most significant, but I love all my pet geologic events equally, so there, nyah.)
The nearly record-setting floods on the Mississippi River this spring have brought back memories of the summer when it just. kept. raining. During a rare break in the weather in July 1993, my mother took me, my sister, and friends up to the local Army Corps flood control structure, and the Coralville Lake behind it; of course, we…
esiegel | May 17, 2008Sometimes, you find weird stuff on the internet. But sometimes you find even weirder stuff in scientific journals. To what do I refer? A paper in the Journal of Mathematical Geology back in 2000 entitled Godzilla from a Zoological Perspective, by Per Christiansen.
This was written as a critique of the "new Godzilla" movie, arguing that it is not more biologically plausible than the "old Godzilla" of 1954.
However, calculations show that his limbs and limb muscles must have been severely undersized to move his huge bulk around at even a leisurely pace, and most other biological problems with…
greengabbro | April 2, 2008One of the things I love about geology is the jargon. After all, what could possibly be more fun than laying down "clayey" or "vug" on a triple word score and being able to say that yes, it is too a word?
Wait, don't answer that one. Instead, let me give you one of my favorite passages from Basin and Range:
Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones. They had roof pendants in their discordant batholiths, mosaic conglomerates in desert pavement. There was ultrabasic, deep-ocean, mottled green-and-black - or serpentine. There…
greengabbro | March 24, 2008This month's edition of the Accretionary Wedge is up at Magma Cum Laude, covering:
How Hollywood manages to screw up, in movie and/or TV form, the science that it took me multiple years, pints of blood and continuing therapy sessions to learn, and why I can't be held legally responsible for my reaction when the students in my intro classes spout it back at me on exams.
And once again, I am not in it. But still, you should go read! See especially the quote Zoltan pulled from a review of There Will Be Blood:
The fact is, Plainview is barely human to begin with, so watching him grow coarser…
greengabbro | March 11, 2008It's one of those mornings where everything looks shiny and interesting - everything but the stuff I'm supposed to be working on. And wouldn't you know it, the Earth and Planetary Science Letters RSS feed just dumped a couple of issues on me. Surely I can at least blurb the interesting titles? It will be a prize for finishing my timed bouts of real work.
Sorry about the Elsevier paywalls. It couldn't be helped.
They poured honey into a sandbox - for Science! L. Mathieu and B. van Wyk de Vries, Dykes, cups, saucers and sills: Analogue experiments on magma intrusion into brittle rocks
The "…
greengabbro | February 21, 2008Chad Orzel offers the following dorky poll:
If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money? ... For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for example, how would I spend three billion dollars on physics?
If I had three billion dollars to throw at a single area of physics, I would obviously throw it at geophysics - but that kind of smart-alecky answer isn't going to cut it in the hypothetical world. No, the unspoken terms of the question demand that I spend $3,000,000,000 on a single project in geology. Moreover,…
greengabbro | February 19, 2008 I was trawling the USGS photo archive for upcoming Friday Rock Blog candidates when I came across this scanning electron micrograph of wheat. It's from a gargantuan volume published in 1981, full of initial reports about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
Why is there a picture of wheat in a book about a volcano?
It turns out people were curious about how quickly material from the ash would be incorporated into the soil nutrient supply, and particularly into crops. So a month after the eruption, USGS scientists sampled wheat and soil from fields that had been ashed on.
The answer? Wheat from…