volcanoes
greengabbro | February 24, 2009I turned on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's campaign speech pre-campaign campaign insinuation pre-campaign dogwhistle fundraiser rebuttal to Obama's speech while cooking my pancakes this evening.
I have two questions.
Do Republicans (or moderates who don't have a kneejerk anti-Republican reflex) also feel like he's talking to the nation as though we were all kindergarteners? I was flabbergasted, but I don't know how to properly account for my rather strong political biases here.
DID HE SERIOUSLY JUST SAY THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT BE MONITORING VOLCANOES??!?!!!????@#$@!
Ignoring for the…
greengabbro | January 7, 2009 Rob R. asks:
I've been following along with the recent happenings at Yellowstone (that is, as best as I can as a layman) but haven't seen that site [data from the Yellowstone GPS network] before. Could you explain (or link to) what I'm seeing there and what a "change in surface topography" might look like? Thanks in advance.
Sure thing! What you are looking at on that page is a network of GPS receivers cemented to various points in the Yellowstone caldera and surrounding area. The USGS has written a nice overview of GPS and other geodetic volcano monitoring techniques, and I won't…
greengabbro | January 2, 2009If you like apocalypse porn, you have probably been following the current earthquake swarm at Yellowstone. While there is no reason to believe that this is part of the lead-up to a giant caldera-forming eruption that will wipe out most of North America, or indeed to any eruption at all, there is also no reason to let that spoil your fun.
If you're watching the recent earthquakes page, take the reported earthquake depths with an especially big piece of salt. Earthquake depth is difficult to accurately determine, especially with real-time automated processing techniques. Think about it: You've…
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 | June 11, 2008
How Crater Lake was formed, in four parts
Originally uploaded by erika_amir
Via LJ geology.
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…