NOVA Geoblog

Mount Kinabalu, Borneo

My friend Noah is a photographer on a Fulbright scholarship in Malaysian Borneo. He shared this photo with me yesterday... a spectacular image from the top of Mount Kinabalu (the fourth-tallest mountain in southeast Asia). With his permission, I'm sharing it with you, too:

For more of Noah's photography, check out his website: Hope in Light.

Labels: art, malaysia, mountains

Virginia's extraterrestrial impact crater

The largest meteorite (or maybe comet?... we don't really know which) impact crater in the United States is in Virginia, underneath the lower Chesapeake Bay. In the Eocene, a large bolide (unidentified space chunk) slammed into the Earth. Dating of microfossils found in the same sedimentary layers as impact ejecta have provided a date of ~35.5 Ma for the event. The impactor hit on the continental shelf offshore of Eocene Virginia, carving through the Atlantic-deposited sediments there and gouging into the crystalline bedrock beneath (igneous and metamorphic rocks like the modern Piedmont province, but buried beneath Coastal Plain layers).

The crater was discovered over a ten-year process that began with offshore sampling near Atlantic City, New Jersey in the mid-1980s. Those drill cores came up with a layer of ejecta (including shocked quartz and little beads of glass called tektites) among the late Eocene layers of sediments. Searching around, eventually the crater was seismically imaged by oil exploration in the Chesapeake Bay in the mid-1990s.

Centered on Cape Charles, Virginia, the crater is about 50 miles across, but appears wider as sedimentary layers adjacent to the hold have slumped inward along listric faults. The James, York, and Rappahannock Rivers all trend into this depression, and ultimately the crater is probably responsible for the Susquehanna River taking on its southerly course. When sea level rose and flooded the valley of the Susquehanna, the Chesapeake Bay was formed.

A similar impact structure offshore of New Jersey, the Toms Canyon Impact Crater, may have formed at the same time as the impactor broke into pieces before impacting.

The lead-off image to this post is by the team at the U-Haul trucking company, which performs a terrific public service by finding out interesting things about the different states (and Canadian provinces) and posting them on the sides of their trucks with eye-catching graphics. A great many of the topics they choose are about geology, from minerals to fossils to impact craters to cartography and canyons. A while ago, I wrote an article for Geotimes looking at their program.

More information on the crater:

Wikipedia's entry on the crater.
W&M Geology Department's page about the crater.
USGS team examining the crater.
National Geographic article (2001).

Labels: art, cenozoic, coastal plain, geology, meteors, new jersey, piedmont, rivers, virginia

Has the price of gas come down? (Toles cartoon)

Here's a good cartoon from Tom Toles (Washington Post) that I ran across today:

And if you like that, also see this one and this one.

Labels: art, climate change, humor, oil

Coprolite cartoon goes to the bathroom!

News: The coprolite cartoon I mentioned last week (published this month in EARTH magazine) is now going to be part of a permanent display on scat and coprolites at the Dinosaur State Park museum in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. My favorite part about this idea is where the new exhibit is going to be... it's in the bathroom! Ha! You gotta love that... talk about a teachable moment!

Labels: art, fossils, humor, museums

Climate/Electricity Cartoon

Just got around to reading the August issue of Geotimes today... I had forgotten I had a cartoon published in there! Anyhow, here it is... really really small, from the page on the Geotimes website where the accompanying story is hosted.

Enjoy.

Labels: art, climate change, environmental, global warming, humor

Evolution cartoon

I saw Stephen Jay Gould speak once, in 1995 or 1996, at William and Mary. He showed us a series of 'evolution' cartoons, all bearing some humorous variation on the the linear progression of ape-to-australopithecine-to-caveman-to-modern-man theme. Gould used these cartoons an an example of the traditional human way of thinking about evolution: as a linear process leading to us as its final culmination. (Gould argued against this "line" of thought -- suggesting instead that evolution is best thought of as dendritic and arborescent.)

Anyhow: since I saw that talk, I've been very aware of the variety of cartoons on this cliche of a theme. There are a lot of them. I saw another one (by Ward Sutton) this evening while reading this week's New Yorker magazine:

Labels: art, evolution, humor

Coprolite cartoon

My first cartoon appears in this month's Earth magazine (formerly Geotimes). Their website is live as of today, by the way. A few formatting bugs to be worked out, it looks like, but I think it looks like it's going to be good. I wish them the best of luck with the transition. Anyhow, here's the cartoon:

Coprolite research takes an unexpected turn.

Labels: art, fossils, humor

Woodcut block print of a tyrannosaur

I used to do a lot of woodcuts. Woodcuts are a kind of block printing, where you start with wood (usually basswood, or something else of medium hardness) and then carve away everything that you want to be white in the final print, leaving behind everything you want to appear black. Once the carving is done, ink your print and press it to a piece of paper, and you get a cool looking block print. The same thing can be done with linoleum, styrofoam, or potatoes.

Based on Googling my personal website, a design firm in Seattle recently contacted me to do a new series of woodcuts. Their client, a housing development in Washington state, wanted a squirrel mascot. So over the course of the past week, in addition to preparing for the fall semester, I busted out the chisels and ink roller. Here's the squirrel that I prepared for them:

But carving the squirrel reawakened this particular creative urge in me. I like doing woodcuts! And I like thinking up my own material to carve. So in my spare time, I started this fellow, finishing him up yesterday afternoon as the sun dipped low in the western sky:

He's sort of a juvenile, freaked-out, overweight, embryonic, stressy tyrannosaur. With an overbite. I like him because, artistically, he combines my interest in cartoons with my interest in block printing. (And of course, my interest in geology!)

Labels: art, critters, dinosaurs

Enceladus

Every now and again, I like to post an image that just speaks volumes. Check this one out, of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Wow! What a beauty. This photograph was taken on Monday by the Cassini spacecraft. Enceladus may host liquid water below the surface, since it has geyser-like features near its south pole. There are only three places beyond the asteroid belt where eruptions have been seen: Enceladus, the jovian moon Io, and Neptune's moon Triton. Enceladus is only a few hundred miles wide; These fractures are about 1000 feet deep.

Labels: art, planetary geology

Geotimes becomes EARTH

Starting with next month's issue, the magazine Geotimes will change its name to EARTH magazine.

Why? Listen to Pat Leahy give AGI's reasons in a video on Geotimes' website.

I gotta say -- this is a smart move. How many people, browsing the racks at Barnes & Noble, are going to pick up a rag called "Geotimes"? It's a pretty dorky name. On the other hand, how many people are going to pick up a magazine called "EARTH"?

Whoa... Major customer expansion, I'll bet. I'm curious to see how much it takes off.

The magazine is re-inventing itself in several ways, not just switching out the masthead. I noticed in the June issue, they started featuring a crossword puzzle, and next month's issue will be the first to feature my monthly cartoon. It's also going to be longer.

Change isn't just a political word this year...

Labels: art, news

Illustration page updated

I spent a fair bit of today updating the "Scientific Illustrations" page on my NOVA website. I'll be adding a few more images there in the next week or so, including another commissioned set, but I figured I'd mention it here now, since I've practically gone cross-eyed working on it all day.

Labels: art, nova, websites

What should a monthly geology cartoon look like?

This morning, I popped a signed contract in the mail to Geotimes: they've asked me to draw a monthly cartoon for that geology-themed magazine. It will probably start in the August or September 2008 issue. Technical details still remaining to be settled include: what this cartoon will look like, and what it will discuss, and even what it will be called.

Geotimes managing editor Meg Sever and I have discussed a couple of possibilities: probably it will be vary in size and form: sometimes it will be a three panel strip, sometimes it will be a single panel (like The Far Side). The goal is less to be humorous (though that's always a bonus) and more to explain. In fact, Meg initially got the idea from an odd project I did for my senior "thesis" at William & Mary: The Cartoon Guide to Geology (1996). That was peppered liberally with bad jokes, but the primary goal wasn't to be funny -- it was to explain geology through a cartoon medium.

I bring this up now to seek the good advice of the geoblogosphere. Especially those of you who are Geotimes subscribers: what topics do you want me to cartoon about each month?

Also: what's a catchy title for a monthly geology cartoon? Any advice you have would be welcome!

Labels: art, geology, news

The pulsing carbon dioxide engine that is the U.S.

Take the next five minutes of your life, and watch this video about a cool new imaging experiment done by Kevin Gurney's research group at Purdue. They've taken pre-existing data about CO2 emissions and plotted it in a dynamic map. The most striking feature is the pulsating nature of the United States' CO2 emissions: we put out a lot during the day, and not so much at night. The maps really show this -- demonstrating yet again the power of images (over description) to convey information.

It's long been my contention that one of the biggest problems with the global warming issue is that CO2 is invisible. I'll bet that if people actually saw giant clouds the color of liquid Barney wafting off the coast every day, then they would be more inclined to think of carbon dioxide as something tangible.

Labels: art, climate change, CO2, global warming, maps

Collier photo website

Check out the aerial landscape photography of Michael Collier, as showcased on this website.

Collier's photographs are currently on exhibit at NSF in Arlington, VA.

Labels: art, satellite imagery

Worth a thousand words

This is the image on the cover of the April 2008 issue of Geology:

Wow, eh? Here's what they have to say about it: "The image shows a perfectly preserved Devonian phacopid trilobite, which was collected at Hamar Laghdad in Morocco (cephalon is 10.2 mm diameter). The shell is silicified with a high iron content, while the lenses retained their original calcitic composition, hence the color difference. This can probably be explained by the different crystal size and the porosity of the shell. Photo by: Christian Klug and Hartmut Schulze."

Labels: art, fossils, minerals

Banksy on the cover of Science?

I was somewhat astonished to see this image on the cover of this week's issue of Science:

At first glance, you might think this was the cover of the New Yorker or something -- a bold, clever piece of art, with a distinct (and satisfying) lack of screaming headlines. It draws you in, this art -- you wonder who made it, why they made it, what's art and what's photograph, and most importantly, why is this image on the cover of Science?

It turns out that there is an article in this issue about how societies deal with antisocial behavior. According to some, the work of the artist known as "Banksy" counts as antisocial behavior. Here's the caption Science provides for the cover: "An example of' 'art' by self-styled guerrilla artist Banksy, as seen in East London in November 2007. Human behavior that would be characterized as antisocial punishment can also be called art; prosocial institutions, most notably the campaign Keep Britain Tidy, refer to Banksy's work as vandalism."

I don't know much about psychology, and I'm not going to attempt to review the article, but seeing this particular artist on the cover of Science gives me an excuse to introduce others to his (admittedly controversial) work.

I've been a fan of Banksy's work for a couple of years now -- he does a couple of things worth noting: First, his bread and butter is outdoor "graffiti" of elaborate black and white designs, usually done with stencils, sometimes highlighted with deliberate focused use of color, and often exploring the "police state" aspects of the modern world, as in this example:

He also does a few interior art installations, like one in Los Angeles which included painting a live elephant to blend in with wallpaper (a literal "elephant in the room"):

Lastly, he's known for putting his own artwork up in great museums, as if it belongs there. Some museums have even accepted his additions, in the name of art. This YouTube video shows Banksy at work, installing his own edgy artwork when the curators aren't looking:

While I appreciate Banksy's art for his envelope-pushing content and panache, I can see how it would piss some people off. I think one of the cool things about science is that we can go and look into the big patterns of how society deals with even something as esoteric as "guerrilla art." I think it's great that science is even applicable to stuff like this. However, for my purposes, it's enough to sit back and grok on Banksy's art, and the point of today's post is only to share that art with others.

Banksy's website.

Labels: art, humor, science and society

That's not really a job.

Labels: art, geology, humor

"The Last Iceberg"

Today was the artist's reception at the National Academies of Science for Camille Seaman's exhibit of photographs entitled "The Last Iceberg." I took a break from writing a paper for my MSSE class and went down to check it out.

One of my geology honors students, Spencer, showed up too, and we checked out Seaman's glowing icebergs set against dark backgrounds. There were some really stunning images, but the exhibit was rather small -- only fifteen or so separate pictures.

If you're not in the DC area, you can check out a slideshow of images from the exhibit at Seaman's website. Enjoy!

Also, while I was there, I went upstairs to see the excellent "Monkey Portraits" exhibit by Jill Greenberg. As with "The Last Iceberg," only a selection of images was shown -- a total of ten or so. But man, what an amazing ten images! I'll put just one up here, entitled "Undecided":

Labels: art, climate change, dc, global warming, primates

Weirdness with a geologic name

On an odd day, a post about an odd place:

Reading David Byrne's blog last week, I was alerted to the existence of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. When I went to this museum's website, I found a phantasmagoria of odd objects and pseudoscientific farce. It's not supposed to be real; it's supposed to be art. But... why "Jurassic?" Like a lot of McSweeney's works, it seems a little too clever for me to "get." Though not a geologist, Byrne seemed similarly perplexed: "the mixture of the real ... and the imaginary... is a bit of a head twister at first."

Labels: art, museums, websites

Lola dreams of fossilization

Yesterday I found my cat Lola pondering a fish fossil from the Eocene Green River Formation. Because she's more of an Appalchian cat, I explained to her that this fish was preserved in flat-lying lacustrine deposits in southwestern Wyoming. The formation is notable for bearing impressions/carbon-films of many species, essentially an entire fossil lake ecosystem. She seemed interested, so I referred her to a travel article I wrote on the topic once for Geotimes. She padded off to read it.

Later, Lola conveyed to me that during a cat nap, she dreamt of her own fossilization in the Green River Formation style:

I replied, as I'm sure you would, that I'm not into the idea of pet cryo-preservation or taxidermy, and that I hoped she'd remain unfossilized for the foreseable future. That made her purr. I also reminded her that most cats don't like water, and hence are unlikely to fossilize in their usual habitat.

Ahh, Photoshop: even better than Facebook for wasting away the hours...

Labels: art, fossils, humor, lola

Biofuels cartoon

After last week's CO2 smackdown on corn ethanol and other biofuels as a "cure" for global warming, Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles scratched out this killer cartoon:

Thanks to John Weidner for calling this gem to my attention!

Labels: art, dc, ethanol, global warming, humor, politics

Geologic evolution of the Grand Canyon

You may have seen Ron Blakely's excellent paleogeographic maps of the North American continent. Browsing around his site the other day, I found this nice sequential cartoon of the geologic steps it took to build up the rocks at the Grand Canyon.

My dad and my two brothers and I are going rafting down the Canyon this summer, and I'm looking forward to exploring the geology firsthand from the river level. My four previous trips to the Canyon have all started at the rim, then hiked down (sometimes to Plateau Point, sometimes to the river), and then back up in the same day. Staying at river level for over a week ought to be awesome.

Labels: art, geology, grand canyon

The works of Jan Svankmajer

Film du jour: The Collected Works of Jan Svankmajer (available from your friendly neighborhood red envelope-dealing internet DVD subscription service). Svankmajer is a Czech artist who specializes in surreal, experimental film. Some is filmed in stop-motion animation, some is regular animation, and some is live-action. Of the movies on the DVD, some are just plain weird, some are unsettling, and some are whimsical and fun. None of them is more than 10 minutes in overall length: bite-sized bits of entertainment (just like blogs offer "snack-sized" chunks of reading). The first short film is A Game With Stones, and while it isn't explicitly about geology, it does feature a series of beautiful cobbles of varying lithologies, dancing, eroding, and melding with one another. It's eye-catching, though you'll find yourself asking, why do the rocks come out of a faucet? On a clock? As one YouTube user commented: "It looks cool, but I don't get it." Exactly.

Labels: art, movies

The works of Edward Burtynsky

I watched a cool documentary the other night about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The film is called Manufactured Landscapes. (It's available from Netflix.)

It follows Burtynsky mostly through China (with asides to Bangladesh and North America) as he photographs of places where humankind has indelibly altered nature to produce landscapes that are at once disturbing and utterly beautiful. By trailing Burtynsky, the documentarians film the landscape through his eyes, as well as showing his still photos. Burtynsky maintains a website with some of his best images available in an online gallery. It's a remarkable ensemble. I recommend that you check out this visionary photographer.

Labels: art, environmental, movies

Round graphics in today's Post

I was struck by the visual similarity of these two round graphics from the Science section of today's Washington Post. The first shows the circuitous path taken by the Mercury Messenger spacecraft, which is scheduled to fly by the innermost planet in about 2 hours from the time I'm writing this:

The second image shows the changing ice situation in Antarctica on a cool combination of ice-flow velocity map and ice loss/gain bar graph, wrapped around the edge:

Labels: art, global warming, planetary geology

Historical paleontology art at the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian's department of paleobiology has a webpage devoted to displaying some art that was used in some old scientific papers on fossils. There's a beautiful variety of images there, like this frontal view of a Triceratops skull that was used to prepare a lithograph, which then appeared in a paper by legendary paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh (archnemesis of Edward Drinker Cope). Check out the full variety of art here.

Labels: art, fossils, smithsonian, websites

Cloud holder

One final shot from Northern Ireland: me holding up a cloud. Sunset, December 30, 2007: Port Rush, County Antrim.

Labels: antrim coast, art, clouds, northern ireland

Monday, October 13, 2008

Mount Kinabalu, Borneo

Friday, September 26, 2008

Virginia's extraterrestrial impact crater

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Has the price of gas come down? (Toles cartoon)

Monday, September 8, 2008

Coprolite cartoon goes to the bathroom!

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Climate/Electricity Cartoon

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Evolution cartoon

Monday, September 1, 2008

Coprolite cartoon

Monday, August 25, 2008

Woodcut block print of a tyrannosaur

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Enceladus

Friday, August 15, 2008

Geotimes becomes EARTH

Monday, August 11, 2008

Illustration page updated

Saturday, April 19, 2008

What should a monthly geology cartoon look like?

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

The pulsing carbon dioxide engine that is the U.S.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Collier photo website

Monday, March 24, 2008

Worth a thousand words

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Banksy on the cover of Science?

Thursday, March 6, 2008

That's not really a job.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

"The Last Iceberg"

Friday, February 29, 2008

Weirdness with a geologic name

Monday, February 25, 2008

Lola dreams of fossilization

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Biofuels cartoon

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Geologic evolution of the Grand Canyon

Thursday, January 31, 2008

The works of Jan Svankmajer

Monday, January 21, 2008

The works of Edward Burtynsky

Monday, January 14, 2008

Round graphics in today's Post

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Historical paleontology art at the Smithsonian

Monday, January 7, 2008

Cloud holder

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