While completing an Amazon impluse buy triggered by the "Climate Sale" post at The Way Things Break, I noticed a clever book cover:

Whoever designed that deserves a bonus. Pretty clever.

Labels: art, blogs, books, climate change, global warming, websites

Another artifact from my days as a boy scout...



I'm in the back row, third from the right. Sixteen years old.

The mountain in the background is the Tooth of Time.

Labels: mountains, new mexico, travel

For the second time, I'm distributing paper block models by Martin Schopfer at the Fault Analysis Group at University College Dublin. My experience has been that these little models are really useful for helping non-3D-minded students to visualize the subterranean form of geologic structures.

Labels: art, structure, teaching

You know what feels really good when you're feeling sick? A hot bath.

And so, when it came to pass that over the winter break, I flew down to Ecuador with a recovering case of pneumonia, my friend Lily and I opted to put our mountain-climbing plans on hold, and go sit in some hot water instead.



From Quito, we took a public bus ($2) an hour east to a series of thermal pools at Papallacta ("papa yacht uh"). This is a lovely resort, nestled in a lovely valley:



Inside the resort (>$2), the architecture was fused with the landscaping in some interesting pseudo-natural ways. For instance, this is in the lounge, where the rocky wall rises up, but then stops some distance below where the wooden ceiling begins. The interval is filled with glass, but the illusion is that the building is open to nature.



They've got nice grounds, too. An organic garden is featured, and they have some neat sculptures. This one is clearly inspired by Andy Goldsworthy.



But there was a mystery... The local river, which carved the valley, was cold:



...So where did the hot water come from? We had noticed some steaming pools on the bus ride over the Andes, at higher elevation. Taking a walk on our second day there, we saw this aqueduct coming down the mountain into the valley:



Aha! It must be that they are pulling the hot water out of the actual hot springs up above, then piping it down to Papallacta for people to enjoy.

Papallacta is just south of the Equator:



At the Equator, Papallacta's elevation of ~10,000 feet (~3300 m) is quite pleasant. A tad chilly when it's dark or overcast, but the snow was at a higher elevation still:



Hiking around in between soaks in the lovely hot water, we saw hummingbirds galore, including the bizarre sword-billed hummingbird, which has a beak longer than its body (Google it to see!) We also saw some cool critters, like this beetle:



...And also some cool plants. Lily's really into plants, but even I can appreciate their numerous and varied forms, especially in as biodiverse a place as Ecuador...



Flower-on-a-stem, within a leaf:



After soaking and resting and acclimatizing at Papallacta, I felt a lot better and we trooped back to Quito to meet up with our guide and start climbing mountains... More on that in posts to come.

Labels: art, arthropods, birdies, critters, ecuador, hot springs, plants, south america, travel

Today's a bit of an art theme, so I had to pass this on...

Labels: art, geology, sediment

As promised, here's some details for the event I mentioned the other day:

2:15- 4:45 Lisa Williams: Various displays of models, samples, artifacts, posters.
2:15 - 2:25 Bill Stanclift: Piano
2:25 -2:30 Reva Savkar : welcome and introduction of first speaker
2:30 - 2:45 Ralph Eckerlin: "Review of Darwin's life and accomplishments"
2:50- 3:10 Tom Macke: "Lincoln"
3:15 - 3:30 Karla Henthorn: "Common Misconceptions About Darwin"
3:35- 3:50 Jill Caporale: "The poetry in Darwin"
3:55 - 4:05 Nan Peck: "fun Lincoln-Darwin game"
4:10- 4:25 Bill Gorham: "Thomas Henry Huxley: Bulldog"
4:30 - 4:45 Callan Bentley: "Charles Darwin, Geologist"

200th Birth Anniversary of Lincoln and Darwin Celebration: The event will be held in the Ernst Community Cultural Center Forum on the Annandale campus of NOVA, Feb 12, 2009, starting at 2:15pm.

Labels: evolution, history, meetings, nova

EARTH magazine commissioned me to make a new t-shirt design for their "Where on Earth?" contest giveaway. Here's what I came up with...

(I've clipped the left and right edges with this jpg, to make it fit into blog-space.)

Labels: art, satellite imagery

My apologies if someone else has already called attention to these two:

Labels: blogs

They don't make 'em like this any more. Check out how much information is infused into this one diagram, by Voll (1960) in a paper on the structural geology of the Scottish highlands:


Multiple generations of deformation overprint one another in a diagram that is at once informative and beautiful. It's a work of art. My geology M.S. advisor, Dazhi Jiang, shared this image with me once as an example of an elegant structural illustration. I think that it's just so good, that I have to share it at a larger size (rotated, so it will fit in the blog's space):

Voll, G. , "New Work on Petrofabrics," Liverpool Manchester Geol. J. Vol. 2, 1960, pp. 503-567.

Labels: art, scotland, structure

"Solar Prius?" Gimme, gimme!

But it's a tease -- the roof's built-in solar panel only powers the A/C. (CNN)

Hey, that means the engine doesn't have to work as hard...
...but it's still a bit of a disappointment, eh?

Labels: energy, environmental, news, prius

My clever & creative colleague Reva Savkar (chemistry) is putting together a celebration of the 200th birthday of two important individuals in the history of the world: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, both born on February 12, 1809. The event will be held in the Ernst Community Cultural Center Forum on the Annandale campus, starting at 2:15pm.

The details are still being organized, but the event will feature short talks, music, and activities both from NOVA faculty and outside guests. Confirmed so far are: Bill Stanclift, Reva Savkar, Ralph Eckerlin, Tom Macke, Karla Henthorn, Jill Caporale, Nan Peck, and Bill Gorham.

I'll be presenting a 15-minute talk, starting at 4:30pm entitled "Charles Darwin, Geologist."

The event is free & open to the public. Join us!

Labels: evolution, geology, history, meetings, nova

Yesterday was our first big snowfall (well, "big" by DC standards) of the year. We got around 3 inches total, but then last night that got covered and compacted by a layer of freezing rain. Here's the scene yesterday morning around 8am from my apartment, looking west over Beach Drive, Rock Creek Park, and the National Zoo (movie is 30 seconds long):



The College was open, though, so in we all trooped. Here's the campus as viewed from Little River Turnpike:



And a few shots of the snow-laden campus...




The snow continued into the afternoon, with predictions of freezing rain for the evening. I had my Physical Geology class, but then the word came down from on high* that NOVA would be closing at 2pm. So, no lab, and no Environmental Geology. We all trooped home to our various classes.

* NOVA has put together an impressive new emergency alert system. It automatically sends e-mails, sends text messages to our cell phones, and (as I found out yesterday in the middle of my Physical Geology lecture) causes a window to open up on all campus computers saying "ALERT: The College will be closing today at 2pm due to snow." I was in the middle of a PowerPoint slide showing why weak bonding in mineral crystal lattices cause cleavage, and BAM suddenly there was a flashing alert up on the screen. Instantaneous notification for the entire class. Another one was open on my computer when I got back to my office. Pretty effective, I think.

Labels: dc, nova, snow

It was announced today that Dr. Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph Biden, is teaching as an adjunct professor of English for two classes this spring semester at NOVA's Alexandria Campus. Dr. Biden has a 28-year career as an educator, having held a 15-year appointment as a professor of English at the Stanton/Wilmington campus of Delaware Technical and Community College where she taught composition and developmental English. She holds a Master's degree in English from Villanova University and a Master's degree in reading from West Chester University. She earned a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware in 2007.

Welcome, Dr. Biden!

Labels: news, nova, politics

Labels: antarctica, astronomy, australia, basalt, gsw, hadean, igneous, isotopes, meteors, minerals

There's a proposal to turn the Luck Stone diabase quarry south of Leesburg into a big reservoir for increasingly-populous Loudoun County, Virginia. It would then be followed by other tapped-out quarries in the area. Collectively storing 8 billion gallons, the reservoirs could serve the surrounding area for up to 120 days during a prolonged dry spell. The idea is to create the reservoirs by siphoning of about 40 million gallons a day from the Potomac River, starting in 2017.

These diabase intrusions are mafic igneous rocks that intruded into the crust during the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. As Pangea broke apart during the Triassic and Jurassic, a huge system of sags opened up in the crust. These low spots were the sites of (a) intense sedimentation, since water flows downhill, and (b) mafic igneous intrusions, since the thinned crust allowed decompression melting of the underlying mantle. (Partial melting of an ultramafic source usually yields a mafic distillate.)

The entire system of failed rift valleys extends along the same trend as the Appalachians, but further east, all the way up to the Bay of Fundy. Collectively, they are called the Newark Supergroup, after one of the larger rift basins in Newark, New Jersey. Dirty sandstones filling that basin were the source of all the 'brown stone' that made the brownstones of New York City. Locally, in our own Culpeper Basin, the main rock that is quarried is diabase, which has a coarser crystal size than basalt, but smaller crystals than a gabbro. It is distinguished by a lot of pyroxene.

Source for the reservoir proposal news: Today's Loudoun Extra, from the Washington Post

Labels: atlantic, culpeper basin, jurassic, minerals, mining, new jersey, new york, news, triassic, virginia, water resources

I'm very pleased to announce that my colleague Ralph Eckerlin, professor of biology at NOVA-Annandale, has been selected as a recipient of the 2009 Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. The award is the highest honor for faculty bestowed by the Commonwealth.

From the letter the President of Northern Virginia Community College, Bob Templin, just sent out to all the faculty and staff:

Dr. Eckerlin has served with distinction at NOVA since 1971. He has always given primary attention to effective teaching while also maintaining a strong record of research in his specialization of parasitology and making numerous other contributions to his profession. A previous recipient of college awards as the Student Government Association Most Outstanding Faculty and the Alumni Federation Outstanding Faculty Member, Dr. Eckerlin is praised by students and colleagues as an exceptionally dedicated and inspiring teacher. He takes particular pride in serving as advisor to students seeking admission to professional fields in biology and medicine, and in chairing or serving on committees to bring new faculty to the college who will continue the strong institutional tradition of excellence in the instructional program for biology and other sciences. He has sponsored student trips and conducted research in such locations as Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Mexico, Belize, and Costa Rica. Closer to home, he organizes regular trips to expose students to the wonderfully diverse biota of Virginia, whether in Highland County or the Dismal Swamp.

Beyond NOVA, Dr. Eckerlin has been very active in a number of professional societies, to include serving as president of the Tropical Medical Association of Washington, the Helminthological Society of Washington, and the Virginia Association for Biological Education. He also served as editor of the journal Comparative Parasitology as well as being a member of its editorial board since 1984. His numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals have dealt with a diversity of subjects, including mammals, reptiles, beetles, fleas, lice, nematodes, and protozoans.

Dr. Eckerlin is the seventh NOVA faculty member to receive this prestigious award. This is also the fourth year in a row that a NOVA faculty member has been a recipient. [...and the second year in a row just within the Math, Science, and Engineering division at Annandale -- last year, it was Walerian Majewski in physics!] He and eleven other faculty from Virginia colleges and universities will be recognized at special events in the General Assembly and elsewhere in Richmond on February 19.

Please join me in congratulating our colleague Ralph Eckerlin as one of NOVA's and Virginia's very best!

Bob

Congratulations, Ralph!

Labels: arthropods, mammals, nova

Jesse Carlucci of the Diagenesis blog has an excellent piece up today about the term "Darwinism" and its pitfalls on many levels. You should go check it out immediately.

Labels: blogs, evolution, words

President Obama is acting to (potentially) improve the fuel efficiency of cars manufactured in the United States. The official announcement will apparently come later today, but somehow the newspapers always find out first.

Meanwhile, Virginia's budget shortfall has led to the elimination of pollution inspectors, which means that instead of the usual inspection of 1400 sites in the Commonwealth this year, the reduced staff will likely get to 800 or so. In Maryland, by contrast, the article describes how the governor is actually increasing funding for the oversight of power plants. An interesting contrast from two Democratic governors (one of whom is now moonlighting as the head of the DNC).

PS - My Prius is less efficient in the cold. I've been hovering between 46.5 and 47.0 mpg for the past couple of weeks. Brrr.

Labels: energy, environmental, maryland, news, oil, prius, virginia

Last Friday was the first day of Structural Geology at George Mason University. Though I'm a full-timer at NOVA, GMU talked me into teaching Structure this semester, too. I've done this once before -- my first job out of graduate school, in fact. Then (in 2005), it was very stressful for me, and I'm not sure that I did a very good job. Now, though, I'm much more confident as an instructor, and I feel like I've got a better grasp of some of the essential ideas and techniques: both structural and pedagogical.

For the first day of class, I took a page from Kim of All My Faults Are Stress Related, who recently described a simple but effective "first day of structure" exercise in a post. Inspired by this idea of nurturing structural curiosity right from the start, I gathered up a collection of 36 samples of deformed rocks (plus a few non-deformed ones as "decoys") and laid them out on tables in our classroom:

Most of them were samples from my personal collection, which resides in my office at NOVA, but there were NOVA teaching lab samples too, and I added a few more interesting ones I found at Mason, like this ptygmatic fold in a granite dike:

The instructions to the students were twofold: First, visit each sample and describe it as fully as possible, noting in particular its "structural significance" (which I declined to define more explicitly). Then, once everyone had done that, get together as a whole class and organize these samples into groups based on common features. How many groups? Which features? They had to decide.

I took as my mantra a quote my friend Bridget (a writing instructor at NOVA) found:

"Teaching should be as experimental as writing." -Donald Murray

So I was conducting an educational experiment...

Starting the class in this way felt unfamiliar to me -- everyone "knows" that the first thing you're supposed to do is distribute the syllabus and spell out the gameplan for the semester. Or perhaps start with an introductory lecture. So it was kind of eerie and uncomfortable for me to sit still and quiet off on the side while a roomful of eager students (that I had only just met) went to work.

I sat back and made observations. One student was miming squeezing and stretching rocks with his hands -- "replaying" the stresses that he interpreted must have acted on the rocks to leave behind such structures. (Kim has another post up, just today, about the role of gesturing while teaching and learning geology.) I was pleased when (umprompted by me) they started using supplies like hand lenses, rulers, percentage charts, and hydrochloric acid to quantify the samples' characteristics.

Another student picked up a metaconglomerate with stretched pebbles whose boundaries were somewhat indistinct. His pen moved over the surface of the sample, visually tracing out the place where one stretched pebble stopped, and the next began.

Later, a student set aside a chunk of slate with plumose structure on its surface. With raised eyebrows, he said, "I can't say much about that!" A few minutes later, the sound of stippling resounded in the room as one student sketched a grainy sample.

Periods of quiet work were interrupted periodically with joking commentary. The students in this class (mostly guys) appear to have really bonded with one another during previous geology classes. They are all seniors, with the exception of one geography graduate student. It's good to see that they are comfortable with one another.

During the groupwork portion of the exercise, when the students were organizing the samples into clusters based on shared characteristics, I continued my silent observations. "Let's organize them by stress direction," one student said. "But not fault direction?" asked another. "How about directionality, regardless of what it's direction of," came the reply.

They ended up choosing these titles for their groups: "Slickensides," "Bends and folds," "Smashed together," "Tension," and "Undeformed." It was cool to watch this process play out. I had put out one sample of tension gashes in a limestone (extensional fractures infilled with calcite). The sample was one of the few that I had labelled. That went into the "Tension" group, of course. But what about that other sample with the quartz veins? Was that the same kind of thing? It's a different mineral...

The most classic exchange went like this:

Student 1: "I'm confused."
Student 2: "It [the organizational system] made sense at first."
Student 1: "...Like a lot of organizational systems in geology!"
(laughter)

Finally, once consensus has been achieved, we all walked around to the various piles of rock and I talked in a general sense about the structural importance of each one. The students appeared to be pretty engaged with this discussion: after all, they had invested some serious time in trying to figure these samples out; now they wanted to know what they really meant. My discourse on the samples stretched to about an hour. All told, the whole lab, grouping, and ensuing discussion lasted about three and a half hours. I felt really good about the exercise as a way of generating structural thinking during our first few moments (and hours) of class. I preferred this way of starting class to the traditional approach.

Satisfied that we were off to a good start, I passed out the syllabus.

Labels: igneous, metamorphism, sediment, structure, teaching

One of my favorite hiking and geologizing destinations, the Billy Goat Trail (in C&O Canal National Historical Park) was the site of a gruesome discovery Saturday: a dead body! More here from MSNBC. Hat tip to Michelle A. for the prompt notification.

UPDATE: Same info, but from the Post.

Labels: field trips, maryland, news, piedmont

This map of the country of Mongolia was featured on the wall of Mongo's Mongolian Barbeque restaurant* in Quito, Ecuador. It is rendered in cowhide, with colored bits of leather doing all the decoration and adornment. It's really a pretty impressive work of art: cartographically accurate (with some omissions due to space constraints close to Ulaanbaatar), but also beautiful. It did not have a key or legend with it, but blue blobs represent lakes (like these). Yellow areas appear to represent high-elevation areas. Off-white appears to represent steppe, though the distribution shown on this map is not exactly how I would have drawn it. Brown circles are "major" cities, while blue circles represent villages. Of particular note to me was that my Peace Corps site, the itty-bitty village of Ereentsav, is located on the map, probably because it's a border-crossing town with Siberia. It's one of the two little blue dots in the northeast (upper right) of the map. Google Maps can show you the town's location on the Siberian border, though they spell its name differently ("Ereencav"):



Incredibly, the satellite photos for this region of the world are good enough that you can zoom in and see the house I lived in when I served there. See the green building in the middle? I lived in the little shed (half as wide as the green building, a little longer) just to its right (east). My outhouse is even visible -- the little square nubbin in the southern corner of the fenced-in area:



___________________________________________________________________

* "Mongolian Barbeque" is a branch of Inner Mongolian cuisine. Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region in China, with decent food. "Outer" Mongolia is the country of Mongolia, its own nation, distinct from China. I served there in the Peace Corps in 1998-1999, and I can tell you from experience that they do not serve especially good food. Maybe that's being too harsh... Let's just say that in Mongolia, you don't eat Mongolian Barbeque.

Labels: art, ecuador, maps, mongolia

A bill working its way through the Senate right now, S-22, has some provisions you may be interested in. It's called the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009. Mainly, it sets aside a heckuva lot of wilderness areas. But the thing that brought it to my attention is that it sets aside some money to develop a "national geologic trail" focused on Glacial Lake Missoula, with an interpretive center to be located in Missoula, Montana. The Senate website describes it like this:

The Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail Designation Act (S. 268 and H.R.
450), would create a trail to document the catastrophic flooding that stretched
across parts of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington during the last Ice Age.
The designation of an Ice Age Floods Trail follows the recommendations of a 2001
study headed by the National Park Service which found the area suitable for
addition into the National Park System.

This part of the bill carries a possible pricetag of $12 million, with $2 specifically for the visitor center. Though there's no way the trail would be done by this summer, Glacial Lake Missoula's geologic signatures will be some of the highlights planned for this summer's Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rockies class.

Read more about it in this article in the Missoulian.

Hat tip to Babak R. for letting me know about this.

Labels: glacial landforms, glaciation, lakes, montana, national parks, politics

Due to a scheduling mishap, this semester I'll be teaching my Environmental Geology lab in the new Science Learning Center in the Schuler Building on NOVA's Annandale campus.

This past Thursday night was our first session in there. Exploring the new facility, I opened up an old-looking refrigerator back in one corner. "What's in here?" I wondered....



Whoa! A bunch of dead birds! These are, no doubt roadkill (or window-kill) samples that are awaiting preparation as 'study skins.' Under professor Walt Bulmer, NOVA has developed a robust collection of study skins to aid in ornithological studies. (I'll have to shoot some photos of those sometime.)

Though I hadn't expected to see a pile of dead birds in the fridge, I soon recovered from the shock. Before converting to geology, I used to study ornithology, and have spent time prepping study skins in the lab at William & Mary (and once, in my dad's basement, with a Sturnus vulgaris that turned out kind of stinky). Returning to my students working on their lab, passing the anatomical models and the physics references, I thought how refreshing it was to be working in a lab utilized by all the sciences.

I guess in retrospect, I should have suspected the fridge's contents when I saw this cartoon taped to the front of the fridge door:

Labels: birdies, humor, nova, teaching

The International Year of Planet Earth may have declared a list of "the Earth's ten most spectacular places." At least that's what they're saying at the Discovery Channel's new Discovery Earth site, where they have a rundown of all ten (with photos). (No mention of it at the IYPE site, though: It may be that the Discovery Channel is just highlighting ten of the many, many U.N. World Heritage sites... their language is unclear as to who decided on these particular ten.)

Regardless, the photos will whet your appetite. With my visits in bold, they are:

• The Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland (posts on NOVA Geoblog)
• Wadi Al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales), Egypt (Eric's been posting on this recently)
• Lake Baikal, Siberia (deep, big)
• Komodo National Park, Indonesia (big monitor lizards; my friend Kenny has been)
• Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA (posts on NOVA Geoblog)
• Ilulissat Icefjord, Denmark (glacial beauty)
• Wulingyuan, China (quartzite pillars and indigenous fauna)
• Surtsey, Iceland (46 years old this year)
• Central Amazon, Brazil
• Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Labels: antrim coast, asia, australia, china, fossils, giants causeway, glaciation, grand canyon, ice, reefs, south america, travel, water resources

First in a series of blackboard sketches? We'll see...

Labels: art, igneous, teaching

When critters interact with their environment, sometimes they leave behind traces of that interaction. If we're lucky, these traces fossilize and can be preserved through time to tell us interesting things about the past. This past summer, when I rafted down the Grand Canyon with my father and two brothers, I saw some cool trace fossils. In chronostratigraphic order (earliest first), here they are:

The Bright Angel Shale can be found atop the Tapeats Sandstone, and below the Muav Limestone along the river in much of the canyon. The Bright Angel is middle Cambrian in age. For my money, it's one of the most spectacular sedimentary layers there, because it's so varied. The colors of the individual strata range from purple to green to brown to tan, and they are in many places chock full of horizontally-oriented feeding traces. Here's some of those wormy shapes along the trail to a waterfall we hiked to... (sorry, don't remember the name or exact location... I think it was day 4 or so of the overall trip... Hmmm, I guess I should have blogged this in early July when I photographed it...)





Nearby, we saw a spectacular trilobite crawling trace (Cruziana?):



Earlier in the trip (day 1, at lunchtime), and higher in the stratigraphic stack (the Permian Coconino Sandstone, which is a sand dune deposit), we saw these reptile (synapsid?) footprints:



This is a trackway left by an ancient reptile as it was walking up and down the dunes, preserved on the slip-face (which defines the feature we recognize from a side-view as "cross bedding"), and now, 260 million years later, I'm viewing those same tracks from underneath, as the older slip-faces of the dune have peeled off, and only the overlying (younger) ones are preserved in this particular alcove. Pretty spectacular stuff. And it offers some nice lunchtime shade, too... Can't complain about that. Here's another shot, with a sense of scale in it:



You can see the individual toes! Wild!

Labels: arizona, cambrian, fossils, grand canyon, permian, primary structures, travel

My mom recently had her attic renovated, which meant that I had to go up there and remove all the stuff I'd stashed up there when it was just free storage. Rummaging through that memorobilia this week, I found my old boy scout merit badge sash.

It's pictured here, both front and back.

The merit badges are the little circular patches on the front side. As you can see, I earned 28 of those puppies before I got my Eagle Scout award and retired from scouting. They are: swimming, cooking, leatherwork, canoing, mammal study, citizenship in the community, lifesaving, rowing, reptile study, basketry, nature study, environmental awareness (now apparently called environmental science), pioneering, citizenship in the nation, fire safety, first aid, wilderness survival, camping, art, pottery, citizenship in the world, personal management, communications, orienteering, woodworking, soil and water conservation, personal management, and forestry. (Notice that geology is missing...)

On the back of the sash, you can see patches from the Goshen Scout Camps in Virginia, the Philmont axe, the Arrow of Light (the only cub scout award that can be worn on the boy scout uniform), a patch showing that I swam a mile, an Order of the Arrow lodge patch, another commemorative patch from Philmont Scout Ranch, and my Boy Scouts of America Lifeguard patch.

Scouting was really good to me. It gave me a lot of confidence in my skills as an outdoorsman, and gave me a lot of great experiences in nature and in society. I doubt I'd be who I am today without thos formative experiences. Though I don't agree with everything that the BSA stands for today, I think that on the balance they do a great service for our communities and our boys.

Any other scouts out there? Any of you earn the geology merit badge?

Labels: action, art, gear

American Meteorological Society's Environmental Science Seminar Series

Coming to Grips with Sustainable Practices: Where Do We Go from Here?

What are the forces that shaped consumer culture in the U.S.? How does per capita consumption in the U.S. compare with that of other countries, especially in the realm of energy usage? What impact has consumerism had on resources and living standards in the U.S. and elsewhere? What are the implications of maintaining our present level of consumption? What are the implications of other countries aspiring to levels of per capita consumption on a par with ours? How might our society begin to identify and embrace more sustainable habits and practices, and what might such practices be? What policy steps might the new Administration and Congress consider codifying in the interest of promoting a more sustainable lifestyle and economy?

Public Invited

Monday, January 26, 2009
New Time: 12:00 noon - 2:00 pm
Russell Senate Office Building, Room 253 Washington, DC

Buffet Reception Following

Moderator:
Dr. Anthony Socci, Senior Science and Communication Fellow, American Meteorological Society

Speakers:
Dr. Juliet B. Schor, Professor of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

Betsy Taylor, Consultant, Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions, Strategic & Philanthropic Consulting on Climate Solutions & Sustainable Development, Takoma Park, MD

Program Summary

Sustainability, Consumption and the Path Forward At the center of the US ecological dilemma lies consumption. We have been a consumer nation for more than a century, having made a directed choice in the 1930s toward that path. Today, in the midst of the simultaneous crises of the economy and the environment, we are again faced with choices about how to move forward. Although it has gotten far less attention, business-as-usual spending is as problematic as BAU energy use. The US ecological footprint, which is twice the level of comparably rich European countries, exceeds the equitable global sustainability level by a factor of 5. Rising per capita consumption underlies the ecological overshoot of the world economy, which now exceeds biological capacity by 40%. In the United States, inflated-adjusted personal consumption expenditures increased 88% from1973 to 2003, which resulted in a 37% rise in our ecological footprint. This is important because it has accompanied decades of attempts to save energy and de-materialize production, all of which have proved inadequate. Fortunately, there is increasing awareness of these issues, and a grassroots movement to transform consumer patterns and habits is underway. However, it has had virtually no legislative presence to date.

In Dr. Schor's presentation, the issue of consumption will be placed into its historical and comparative context. New data will be presented on the magnitude of the 'cheap import' boom in material (and therefore ecological terms) over the last 15 years. Underlying economic factors such as labor market policies and the distribution of income affect the path of consumption and ecological impact. A medium term consumption path will be sketched out, which yields high levels of human well-being, is becoming broadly popular, and is ecologically sustainable.

Ms. Taylor will discuss an array of policy instruments that could promote a more sustainable standard of living and more sustainable consumerism. In the lead-up to address climate change through cap & trade or carbon fees, it would serve our collective interests to simultaneously address the root causes of ecological degradation and collapse. Ms. Taylor will also call for a rekindled debate on policies and programs that might steer our economy and culture in a more sustainable and durable direction.

Labels: climate change, energy, environmental, meetings

A friendly reminder about tonight's meeting of the Geological Society of Washington:

Labels: gsw, meetings

The day before Inauguration, I decided to celebrate George Bush's last day in charge of my country by taking a walk in the woods. Okay... that wasn't really my motivation. I was just procrastinating writing up my Structural Geology labs for the coming semester. Anyhow, for one reason or another, I took a stroll in the woods.

I brought my rootin' tootin' new camera with me, and took a few photos. I've got four things to show you: (1) some differential weathering, (2) some kink banding, (3) some cool effects in frozen soil, and (4) a critter.

(1) To start, check out this close-up photo of a stone bridge where the Klingle Valley merges with the Rock Creek Valley:


Several of the (local) stones used in the bridge are weathering at a faster rate than the mortar (cement) that holds them together. As a result of this differential erosion, the less-stable rocks are recessed into the face of the bridge:



Here's another one, where you can see that not all minerals are equally stable at Earth surface conditions. The large central quartz augen stands out in high relief as the micaceous & feldspathic schist around it weathers away.



Yet another: recessed about an inch into the bridge:



That's not all I saw. I also re-discovered the location of some kink bands along the Rock Creek Park bike path:



These kink bands are similar to the ones that Spring 2008 Honors student Victoria measured and analyzed in Broad Branch (also in Rock Creek Park), but these ones are in a different location, further south in the park.



What's worth noting about these kink bands is that they overprint the regional foliation of these schistose rocks. In order to do that, the force that generated the foliation must have been coming from one direction (call it east-west), causing the mineral grains to line up at right-angles to that stress. That allignment is what we call foliation. Later, a new generation of deformation came in from a different direction (call it north-south, approximately parallel to the foliation), kinking the pre-existing foliation. For more on kink bands in DC, see my "DC rocks" page.



(4) One of the disadvantages to hiking in Rock Creek Park in the winter is that it's pretty monochromatic. One of the advantages is that with all the leaves off the trees, it's a lot easier to see new stuff. It's great woodpecker-watching weather, for instance. I saw five woodpeckers of two species that day. Also, it makes it a lot easier to see where the trails are. I saw a new trail that I had never walked before, and so I decided to check it out. I'm glad I did. One thing that I saw that is pretty cool is this effect in frozen soil:



When water freezes, it expands in volume by about 9%, and that shows up here as the upper layer of wet soil froze, it expanded in all directions, pulling away uniformly from two large cobbles of quartzite. It almost makes it look like the quartzite cobbles shrunk in their "sockets," but really it's the "sockets" that got larger.

(4) Lastly, I was doubly glad to have taken the new trail because it was a "road less travelled" kind of deal. I was the only one there. As I trod along, suddenly I heard a scampering noise. It was a critter! It ran up a little gully and then paused as still as a stump, looking at me:



Can't see it? Try this zoomed-in shot:



It's a red fox! Vulpes vulpes, one of two wild canids we have in Rock Creek Park. Pretty good sighting -- only the fourth time I've seen one here (and I spend a lot of time in this park). And every one of those times was in the winter. Again, it's having those clean leaf-less views that allows hikers to see stuff like this.

Labels: critters, dc, ice, mammals, national parks, structure, weathering

Those aren't insects swarming all over the ground: those are people!

From the GeoEye satellite, via Google Earth, via the Google Earth blog.

Labels: dc, politics, satellite imagery

Labels: dc, politics

Ed Adam's "cold lab" (which I toured this past summer as part of my "Examining Life in Extreme Environments" class at Montana State University) gets mention in an article in today's New York Times. They also profile some of Adams' experiments setting off avalanches at Bridger Bowl, in the Bridger Range north of Bozeman. Worth a read. Some cool photos, too.

Labels: ice, mass wasting, montana, msse, snow

Here's the view from my apartment yesterday (the day before Inauguration):



Happy Inauguration, everyone!

Labels: dc, politics

I've had a trusty pair of Nalgene water bottles for many years. One of the things I do is collect stickers when I travel, and then slap them on the outside of these water bottles. Here, for example, is one side of the two bottles:


Here's the other side:


The full record of stickers is:

Recreation and Parks program at NOVA
Wilderness Medical Associates (the group that trained me in WFA last May)
Northern Arizona University Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation
Yellowstone National Park
Sport Rock, a climbing gym in Alexandria, Virginia
Mammoth Cave National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park
Gimme! Coffee, Ithaca, New York
Apple computer
Red Cross' "Give Blood" campaign (I cut up this sticker & distributed its bits across the bottles)
Alaska flag (from the ferry through the Inside Passage)
Pickle Barrel sandwich shop, Bozeman, Montana
Vieques, Puerto Rico
"Certified Organic" from a bunch of bananas
The Red Hand of Ulster (from my time in Northern Ireland)
Puri Saron, a resort in Lombok, Indonesia (I didn't actually go to this one; my friend Kenny did.)
British flag
State Farm Insurance (reflective!)
Mauna Kea observatories (Hawai'i)
KZMU public radio in Moab, Utah
Thyangboche Monastery, Nepal (I didn't go to this one, either. Thanks Kenny!)
"MtP" in an oval: Mt. Pleasant, a DC neighborhood I used to live in, just north of my current digs

There's a lot of personal history there, a sort of visual record of the places I've been. Trouble is, apparently the water bottles themselves were poisoning me. At least that's what they started saying last year; specifically that water bottles containing a substance called Bisphenol A (commonly referred to as "BPA") were not to be trusted. Though I haven't read the studies, they are reported to have found a significant correlation between high levels of BPA and heart disease, diabetes, and high levels of some liver enzymes. Plus, people keep nagging me about giving up my old water bottles, and I'm getting tired of inventing excuses for continuing to drink out of them. So yesterday, I officially retired my old sticker-covered bottles, and bought two new (BPA-free) Nalgenes instead:


You'll notice that I switched color schemes and mouth types (the new bottles have a narrow mouth). And you'll also notice that I've put my first sticker in place on the new bottles: from the Tambopaxi Lodge in Cotopaxi National Park in Ecuador, where I stayed for two nights the week before last. (If you're ever in Cotopaxi, you must stay there: It's really excellent.)

Background fabric for all images is a new tablecloth I bought at a craft market in Quito (for $2).

The old bottles will be hung above the mantle of the library hearth at the Bentley Estate, in commemoration of their usefulness and long history.

Labels: art, ecuador, gear, travel

Another book I read over the winter break was Canyon Solitude, by Patricia C. McCairen. It's a travel book about one woman's solo journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It's one of those books that derives its structure from a journey, but it includes plenty of asides, mainly about the author's longer-term personal journey through life. It's rich in a kind of feminine soul-searching which may appeal to female readers, but as a male, I kind of didn't "get" that part. That being said, I'm a fan of travel books, and it was a pleasant enough read. I think it resonated more with me than it would with the average bear because I spent a week on the same journey this summer. Overall, I'd give it 3 stars out of 5 possible.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon.

Labels: arizona, books, grand canyon

Recently, Andrew Alden compiled a list of state minerals and state rocks. A quirky piece in today's Washington Post explores what Maryland is urging its citizens to do with their state fish: eat them. The story also, somewhat randomly, includes a limerick composed by Virginia's former governor and current senator, Mark Warner:

We have a state dog and a fish and a bird.
And of the fossil I'm sure you have heard.
So why not a bat?
What's wrong with that?
The state beverage is no more absurd.

For some reason, I hear this limerick in my head in Carl Kasell's voice...

Labels: birdies, critters, fish, fossils, mammals, maryland, politics, virginia

In a few days, the world will get what it's been waiting for. In a few short days, an eagerly-anticipated event will take place that will hopefully make the world a better place and bring satisfaction and closure to those who have waited for what seems like forever. I can hardly wait...

... I speak (of course) of the season premiere of LOST.

The Times profiles the dude who's in charge of keeping track of everything.
The Post examines the show's exploration of space-time in the context of earlier shows.
Entertainment Weekly has a quiz about some of the minutia in Season 4. (I got 29/34 right.)

Namaste!

Labels: humor, tv

Strange Maps has an interesting piece up today about where West Virginia came from (as a state): turns out it was all about the Civil War. The accompanying map shows the original proposed name for West Virginia, "Kanawha," as well as a proposed demarcation between Virginia and Maryland that trended along the western margin of the Blue Ridge physiographic province. If this boundary had come to pass, Virginia would have gotten the Valley & Ridge province, but Maryland would have retained the Blue Ridge, Piedmont and Coastal Plain.

Labels: blogs, blue ridge, coastal plain, history, maps, maryland, piedmont, valley and ridge, virginia, west virginia

According to a study by the Washington Post, our area's electricity consumption dropped by a small but perceptible amount in the first nine months of 2008, as compared to 2007. The article linked to above describes the sources of data as being a mix of home audits in Arlington County, Virginia (40 out of 89,000 total), government figures for the number of miles driven on local roads, and utility billing information. Overall, the Post estimates a 2% reduction for the study period in 2008 as compared to the previous year. Now, the question is, Why? By their reckoning, it's likely to be a mix of increased consciousness of "green" energy practices, increased use of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and perhaps most importantly: mild weather.

One thing I can say about that lattermost factor: this year, 2009, is so far not really of the "mild weather" variety. It's dang cold here!

Labels: dc, energy, environmental, maryland, news, virginia

Labels: art, blogs, humor, nova

Here's a copy of my presentation last week at the NOVA "Power Up Your Pedagogy" conference, hosted here at the Annandale campus (sponsored by our Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning). Apparently there were some technical snafus for one (both?) of the scheduled playings of the talk, so I wanted to put it online for anyone who missed it. It's 13:40 in length, available as an .avi file. You'll have to download it to your computer, because I can't figure out how to embed it here.

Other talks from the conference are listed (some with video) on the PUP page on the CETL website.

Labels: blogs, conferences, geology, nova, teaching, tech

Chemists at Scripps have created an indefinitely-self-replicating molecular system, based on the "RNA World" hypothesis for the origins of life. Read all about it at the Royal Society of Chemistry website.

Labels: chemistry, evolution, news, origins of life

The perpetually-interesting site Oddee hosted a series of satellite images of the Earth today, including this one from April of last year. Somehow I missed it then...

The image, originally from NASA's Earth Observatory (one of the finest websites I know of for those interested in Earth science), shows a collection of volcanoes in the western Arabian Peninsula. A large version of the image (unlabeled) is here.

The most spectacular thing about this image is the color contrast between the volcanoes on the left versus the volcanoes on the right. This spectacular contrast is indicative of the rock types involved in each volcano. On the left, felsic lava was erupting, which cooled into the extrusive rock rhyolite. On the right, mafic lava was erupting, which cooled into the extrusive rock basalt. Mafic igneous rocks like basalt have a higher proportion of the elements iron, magnesium, and calcium as compared to elements like silicon, potassium, and sodium. Felsic igneous rocks are, in a sense, distillates of mafic source rocks: they are made of minerals that are more easily melted.

Also worth noting is the way the basalt overlaps the rhyolite between Jabal Bayda' and Jabal Abyad tells us that the rhyolite came first, and the basalt came second, an example of relative dating. And these insights can be gleaned from space... or more accurately, from our computer screens, depicting an image from space. That's pretty incredible, when you think about it.

FYI, here's what NASA's William Stefanov wrote as the caption for this exceptional image:

The western half of the Arabian Peninsula contains not only large expanses of sand and gravel, but extensive lava fields known as haraat (harrat for a named field). One such field is the 14,000-square-kilometer Harrat Khaybar, located approximately 137 kilometers to the northeast of the city of Al Madinah (Medina). The volcanic field was formed by eruptions along a 100-kilometer, north-south vent system over the past 5 million years. The most recent recorded eruption took place between 600-700 AD.

Harrat Khaybar contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this astronaut photograph. Jabal ("mountain" in Arabic) al Qidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows. Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite. While the 322-meter high Jabal al Qidr exhibits the textbook cone shape of a stratovolcano, Jabal Abyad is a lava dome; a rounded mass of thicker, more solidified lava flows. To the west (image top center) is the impressive Jabal Bayda'. This symmetric structure is a tuff cone, formed by eruption of lava in the presence of water. The combination produces wet, sticky pyroclastic deposits that can build a steep cone structure, particularly if the deposits consolidate quickly.

White deposits visible in the crater of Jabal Bayda' and two other locations to the south are sand and silt that accumulate in shallow, protected depressions. The tuff cones in the Harrat Khaybar suggest that the local climate was much wetter during some periods of volcanic activity. Today, however, the regional climate is hyperarid - little to no yearly precipitation - leading to an almost total lack of vegetation.

Labels: basalt, blogs, igneous, middle east, satellite imagery, volcano, websites

From Greenfyres, via Tamino: "Sherlock Holmes and case of the climate bandwagon." Well worth a read, if you like satire and the writings of Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Labels: blogs, books, climate change, global warming, humor

Following the success of last year's Climate Change Symposium, this year NOVA will host Mike Tidwell, the dynamic director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, for a talk on global warming and what college campuses can do about it. Mr. Tidwell has a reputation as a terrific speaker, so I'm really looking forward to his talk.

He will be speaking at 11am on Thursday, February 5, in the Ernst Community Cultural Center Theater (CE building) on the Annandale campus of Northern Virginia Community College. The event is free and open to the public. I encourage you to attend if you're in town. A booksigning will follow in the Theater lobby.

Labels: climate change, global warming, maryland, meetings, nova

After yesterday's review of Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau, author Wayne Ranney left a comment here that alerted me to his blog, which the geoblogosphere may be interested in:

Labels: blogs, books

Chris Nedin alerted me (via his excellent Ediacaran blog) about this video (which was in turn posted at Larry Moran's The Sandwalk blog). I found it worth watching, though the language change partway through (from the third-person to the second-person) gives it an accusatory feel. In spite of that, this is probably worth viewing for introductory science students to distinguish what they hear labelled as "science" in general society from what a scientist considers "science." It's 10 minutes long, but in many places cleverly illustrated:

Labels: blogs, evolution, pseudoscience, science and society

Over the winter break, I read the new book Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau, by Ron Blakey & Wayne Ranney. This is an excellent read, and a terrific introduction to the geologic history of one the world's most dramatic landscapes. Blakey's maps have been featured on this blog before, and he has been kind enough to allow me to modify some for use on my field course websites (like here and here and here). The book goes through geologic time and makes extensive use of beautiful paleogeographic maps to reveal the story of mountain-building, transgression, regression, sand-dunes, faulting, volcanism, and erosion that characterizes the Colorado Plateau. It's not just paleogeographic maps, by the way: there are also plenty of shots of fossils, Colorado Plateau landscapes, and comparable modern depositional environments to enliven the story. It's a graphic story, well told with excellent graphics. I recommend you get yourself a copy if you've ever been to the Colorado Plateau, or if you ever plan on going there.

Find the book: On Amazon ... At the NOVA library

Labels: arizona, art, books, colorado, maps, new mexico, utah

School of Rock 2009: Cores, CORKS and Hydrology on the Juan de Fuca Ridge

Dates: 23 June - 5 July 2009

Location: Aboard the JOIDES Resolution from San Diego, CA to Victoria, British Columbia

Application Deadline: Wednesday, 4 February 2009; Limited Space Available

The 2009 School of Rock teacher research expedition is scheduled to begin Tuesday, 23 June, 2009 aboard the recently relaunched 143m JOIDES Resolution. School of Rock 2009 participants will be among the first to work and sail aboard the newly renovated ship.
During School of Rock research experiences, K-12, informal, and undergraduate educators will have daily opportunities to conduct hands-on analyses of sediment and hard-rock cores with scientists and technicians who specialize in IODP research. This year's workshop will focus on how cores and CORKS shed light on the hydrology, geology, and tectonics of the Juan de Fuca plate.

Apply Now - Don't Delay!

For additional information, please contact:
Sharon Cooper, Assistant Education Director, Deep Earth Academy Tel: (202) 787-1632 scooper@oceanleadership.org

Leslie Peart, Education Director, Deep Earth Academy Tel: (202) 787-1603 lpeart@oceanleadership.org

Labels: jobs, teaching, washington

Here's some silly sketches I made the other day...

Graded Bedding:


Cross Bedding:


Stromatolite:

Ripple Marks: (This one may be a bit obscure)


Normal Fault:


Reverse Fault:

Labels: art, geology, humor, primary structures

Tamino of Open Mind has an excellent post up describing how 2008 temperature data compare to the long-term trend. Check it out! It's an excellent example of clear writing accompanied by illustrative graphs.

Labels: climate change, global warming, graphics, news

This is pretty good... from the Coyote Crossing blog:

Labels: art, climate change, coal, environmental, global warming, politics

The January meeting of the Potomac Geophysical Society will be held January 15th at the Fort Myer Officers' Club in Arlington, VA in the Campaign Room.

This month's talk will be: How Deep Was That Earthquake?, by Jack Murphy, SAIC, McLean, VA.

Abstract:
Less than 100 years ago, seismologists were still actively debating whether deep earthquakes existed, and it wasn't until the 1920s that Turner in England and Wadati in Japan confirmed that some earthquakes do indeed occur at great depths below the surface of the Earth. We now know that, while the majority of earthquakes are shallow and confined to the Earth's crust, there are numerous earthquakes every year that occur at depths of hundreds of kilometers below the Earth's surface. Moreover, these deep earthquakes have played an important role in the development of our understanding of plate tectonics in that they mostly are confined to restricted zones along convergent plate boundaries, where their locations as functions of depth map out the trajectories of the descending slabs. However, despite the many improvements in computing power and analysis capability that have been introduced into earthquake location studies in recent years, it is still a challenge in many cases to accurately estimate the depth of an earthquake using commonly available seismological arrival time data. In this talk, the history of earthquake depth determination will be briefly reviewed and some recent research that has led to new approaches designed to address limitations of existing standard analysis procedures will be discussed.

Biographical Information:
Mr. Murphy is the Deputy Division Manager of the Monitoring Research Division of SAIC where he is responsible for managing research contracts with a variety of government agencies. He has had more than 40 years experience as a research seismologist and is an internationally recognized expert in the modeling and analysis of seismic signals produced by explosion and earthquake sources.

Labels: meetings, pgs

In Terra Veritas, Clastic Detritus, NOLOGIC, Looking for Detachment, The Ethical Palaeontologist, Geoberg.de, Highly Allochthonous, ReBecca's Blog and Hypo-theses have all recently shown us their world travels. Having just added a new country to my list, I'll throw my map up here too:

visited 18 countries.
Create your own visited map of The World

And here's my US map (all 50!):

visited 50 states.
Create your own visited map of The United States

Labels: blogs, travel

Wednesday, January 21, 2009
1428th Meeting of the Geological Society of Washington

Robert Gagosian, Consortium for Ocean Leadership: A new paradigm for geosciences research funding.

Elizabeth Eide, Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, The National Academy of Sciences:
Geology, energy, and environmental policy at the coastal margins of the northern North Atlantic.

James Day, University of Maryland, College Park: Evidence for evolved crust formation in the early solar system.

Refreshments start at 7:30 p.m. The formal program starts at 8:00 p.m.
Meetings are held at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium 2170 Florida Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.

Labels: gsw, meetings

Note - this event is cancelled due to the lousy weather today.

PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON

Movers & Shakers in 20th Century Paleontology: Role of the Smithsonian Community
Tom Dutro, U.S. Geological Survey (retired) and Research Associate, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

7:00 p.m., in the Cooper Room, National Museum of Natural History
10th St. & Constitution Ave. Meet in the Constitution Avenue lobby at 5:00 p.m. if you wish to join us for dinner, at the Elephant and Castle, NW corner of 12th & Penna. Ave., NW

Non-Smithsonian visitors will be escorted to the Cooper Room at 6:30 and 6:55 p.m.

Remaining Dates for 2008-2009 Season: Feb. 18, March 18, April 15, May 13

Labels: meetings, psw

Just a quick note to say: I'm back!

I left Quito this morning at 10am, and just got back to my apartment in DC around 8pm. Feels good to be back home. I had a fun trip, and I'll tell you all about it, but probably not 'til the semester gets underway. First classes are at noon tomorrow!

Labels: dc, ecuador, south america, travel

This is from the tour operators in charge of me this week...
-CB

Day 01. Quito - Pasochoa
Pick up in your hotel. we depart from Quito at 09h00 in the direction to Volcano Pasochoa, where your trekking begins. As you walk up hill towards it summit (4200m) you will enjoy the views of the neighbours peaks such as Antisana, Rumiñahui and Cotopaxi. You will head south on a easy going trail along the crater edge of this extinct volcano, Condors and other birds of pray are often seen before you descend in a green valley. We arrive in a Aclimatization Center Tambopaxi is located at 3200 m. a refugee in the middle of Cotopaxi and Ruminahui volcanoes.

Day 02.- Limpiopungo, at the base of the Cotopaxi Volcano
Today you will explore the Paramo of the Cotopaxi National Park. Here you will visit the Pre-Inca ruins of El Salitre while enjoying magnificent views of Cotopaxi Glaciers. Afterwards you will continue to Limpiopungo valley and lake. Return. Dinner and overnight.

Day 03.- Climb. Ruminahui & Limpiopungo Lake
Today is the longest day of your trekking tour. You will walk along a trail, up and down following the flanks of Ruminahui peak observing birds of prey and in the horizon the mighty Chimborazo, and Illinizas. Return to Limpiopungo where we dirve to the Cuello de Luna. Dinner and overnight.

Day 04.- Illiniza Ecological Reserve
Drive to the north following the route Illinizas reserve until arrive to la Llovisma, another acclimatization center. Overnight.

Day 05.- Climb Illiniza North - return to Quito
Today you can either drive to the parking place of the Illinizas and walk uphill to the settlement of Illinizas and summit the north peak which is rather easy and recommended as training for those who will attempt Cotopaxi. Somewhere in highlands, your vehicle will be waiting to transfer you back to Quito.
_____________________________________________________________

Here's the view of Illiniza Sur from Illiniza Norte:

Oh, yeah....

Labels: ecuador, mountains, south america, travel

Kilauea Iki is the name given to a lava lake that formed in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park in 1959. It erupted from Pu'u Pua'i, the mound you see in the middle distance of this photograph:

The lava pooled in a pre-existing crater below to a maximum depth of about 400 feet, and has been solidifying ever since. Researchers have drilled though the cooling crust of Kilauea Iki to determine how fast the lava cools. By 1981, a good 200 feet of solid rock had formed at the top of the lava lake.

Here's a view into Kilauea Iki from a different angle, with me rotated about 90 degrees along the crater rim relative to the first photograph:



As you look down there, you'll see that Kilauea Iki does not display a nice smooth surface. Instead, it's fractured, and those fractures have a familiar shape: polygonal and relatively regularly-spaced. They look kinda like the tops of ginormous columns...


When you get down inside, it's pretty flat. You really get the feeling you're walking on a giant layer of soup scum:


...But it's not completely flat. There are cracks and crevices, buckles and upwarps:


Dynamics playing out in this mega-scum layer atop a roiling lava lake are thought to be human-scale analogues of the motion and dynamics of tectonic plates. Here, for instance, two "plates" of cooled lava have drifted towards one another. This meso-scale "convergent boundary" has raised up a mountain range fit for Lilliputians:


Elsewhere, "plates" of lava scum have drifted apart, opening up a "rift" between them. Here, I lie down to bridge the rift:


These cracks are utilized by plants because they offer a shaded nook where moisture isn't immediately evaporated by the sun:


Lastly, I thought I'd point out some neat mass wasting and structural geology I saw there. Here's a shot looking roughly westward across Kilauea Iki, towards the cinder cone of Pu'u Pua'i:

I know it's kind of washed out, but in this photo, you can see a big solidified lava flow that came over the lip of the crater, and then solidified, and then partially collapsed downward.

This sequence resulted in the big talus pile you can see at center-right, but there are remnants of the original sheet (or "tongue") of basalt there.





















Zooming in and cranking up the contrast, let's label a few things:
Up at the top, we can see some fault scarps that have developed as the massive tongue of basalt pulled downward.

A major scarp marks the edge of the cliff, and then below it you see a big slab of basalt with an edge that's just barely in the sunshine, and a bunch of more fragmented pieces below that (marked "breakdown"). Another big slab is seen alongside the breakdown.

What really caught my eye, though, was the en echelon array of pull-apart fractures seen in between the arrows. Here, the stress of the main tongue of basalt sliding downhill sheared this slab of rock, causing it to develop fractures at a ~40 degree angle to the shearing direction. These pull-aparts therefore represent a big surface-condition analogue for tension gashes that can form in subterranean rocks experiencing shear stress.

Labels: analogies, basalt, hawaii, landslide, mass wasting, plate tectonics, structure, travel

Ann Hornaday authored an interesting piece in this morning's Washington Post about Ota Benga, the Congolese Pygmy who was displayed for a time in a cage in the Bronx Zoo. It turns out that Ms. Hornaday's great-great-great-uncle, William Temple Hornday, was the one who put Ota Benga there.

Labels: africa, anthropology, new york, science and society

What's the tallest mountain on Earth? Most would say Everest, since it's the highest point above sea level. I mentioned this issue as part of my lead-in to my Mauna Kea post, since some folks might claim Mauna Kea as the tallest, since it rises the most above its base on the oceanic crust of the Pacific Plate. But there's a third contender: Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador.

The planet Earth is not a perfect sphere; it bulges a bit at the equator (about 13 miles) compared to the poles. The result is that if you look at two mountains of exactly the same elevation, one located at the pole and one at the equator, the equatorial one will be 13 miles further away from the center of the Earth than the polar one. That makes the peak of the tallest equatorial mountain (Chimborazo is at ~1.5 degrees south) the point on Earth that is furthest away from the center of the planet. It is 1.3 miles (2.1 km) further away from the center of the Earth than the summit of Everest is. NPR covered this surprising statistic in an entertaining piece in 2007. However, as the commenter on this post-NPR post notes, it's not just the silicate earth that bulges at the equator, it's the atmosphere, too. So it's not like the air is thinner at Chimborazo than Everest. You may be closer to the Moon atop Chimborazo, but you're not closer to "space" due to all that extra thick atmosphere above your head.

Here's a Google Maps "terrain view" map of Chimborazo (high relief peak east of El Arenal):


I had hoped to "auto-post" this while I'm traveling in Ecuador, for about the same time I would be looking at Chimborazo with my own eyes. However, I got sick over the holidays, and the persistent illness forced me to change my travel plans. I'll still be going to Ecuador -- but only for one week instead of the planned two. And I still hope to catch a glimpse of Mount Chimborazo. Hopefully when I get back to DC, I'll be able to share some photos of this superlative mountain. For now, the map will have to do.

Labels: ecuador, maps, mountains, south america, travel, volcano

Ecofont is a free font that has lots of little holes in the letters, using less ink and therefore extending the life of your printer cartridge. You can download it at the link above; they claim it works best at 9- or 10-point size.

Blackle is Google, but with a black screen instead of white. Because it takes energy to produce the luminescence we see as the white screen when we go to Google, Blackle's creators reckoned you could save some energy if you just changed the color of the background. A simple, elegant notion. So far, they claim 1,010,466.263 Watt-hours have been saved by computer users who use their website over the traditional Google screen.

Labels: environmental, tech

An article posted last hour on washingtonpost.com by Joel Achenbach examines an upcoming paper in Science that explores the idea of an impact triggering the Younger Dryas glacial advance as well as ending the Clovis culture and triggering the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna. The evidence is nanodiamonds in sedimentary deposits from 12,900 years ago. Read the article, and wonder how Joel Achenbach finds out about this stuff a day before it's published. How does he get his hands on this article with enough time to compose a newspaper piece about it, but the rest of us have to wait until tomorrow to read the original paper?

Labels: anthropology, climate change, critters, diamonds, ice, news, sediment

It's the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a reminder that things continue to fall apart. Like... rocks. ...and steel. Today, I'd like to share a "compare & contrast" of two kinds of fractures I saw on my Thanksgiving trip to Hawai'i. One is caused by a decrease in volume; the other is caused by an increase in volume.


Type 1: Columnar jointing (shrinkage fractures)









Columnar jointing results from the decrease in volume as hot lava crystallizes into cool rock. The overall shrinkage in the rock's volume is accomodated by fractures that (all else being equal) are oriented at 120-degree angles on the surface of the flow, and then propagate downward into the flow, perpendicular to the cooling front (isotherm of the critical fracturing temperature, which here is subparallel to the surface of the lava flow). Similar fractures form in drying mud, where the volume loss is due not to cooling but to the evaporation of water. Generally, these mud contraction fractures (a) don't go as deep, and (b) experience more volume loss, resulting in wider fractures. These are in the Mauna Lani resort area, on the western shore of the big island of Hawai'i.
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Type 2: Rust blisters (expansion fractures)








Here, we see fractures forming not due to a loss of volume, but the opposite: an increase in volume! Here the metal (steel, presumably?) in the pole is oxidizing, and in completing that reaction, rust is forming. The layer of paint probably got nicked, water (probably saltwater?) got under it, and then the paint kept the water down there, facilitating the rusting reaction. As the rust formed, it swelled relative to the volume of the original metal. It expanded in the direction that offered the least resisting stress (out away from the surface of the pole). As the rust bumps grow, they impart a new stress on the metal/rust, and this causes fractures to form subparallel to the pole's surface. These are near Ka Lae ("South Point"), near the start of the hike to Green Sands Beach.

Labels: basalt, hawaii, structure, travel, weathering