Roadtrip update:

Yesterday was a good one. I started off the day at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas. I was the first one in the door, and had the place essentially to myself. Massive mosasaur skeletons, supercool Uintacrinus slabs, plesiosaurs, and all kinds of other neat stuff. They had some less spectacular mineral displays, but the locally-derived fossils were world class. I was very impressed.

Then, driving. I made good time when the wind wasn't trying to stop me, and listening to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything on my iPod, I crossed into Colorado. Eastern Colorado looks a lot like Kansas, of course, but before too long had passed, I got my first view of the Rockies in the distance, "rising from the plains." I got to the Denver area around 2pm, which meant I had plenty of time before the 7pm "Geography Goes Digital" event at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS). So I headed southwest, towards Morrison, Colorado, and "Dinosaur Ridge." Dinosaur Ridge is a hairpin driving loop on/over the Dakota Hogback, showing Mesozoic sedimentary rocks shed off the Laramide Orogeny and into the Western Interior Seaway. There's an excellent display of dinosaur tracks, and lots of cool ripple marks, trace fossils, concretions, and stratigraphy. Looking out over the crisp dry air of the Denver Basin, I really felt like "Aha! I'm finally in the West!" It was a good feeling. After hiking and exploring there, I toodled into Morrison, Colorado, and went the Morrison Museum of Natural History. There, I had the terrific good luck to run into Matt Mossbrucker, who I mentioned reading about in Smithsonian magazine back in April. The museum's volunteers were on vacation, so I had the good fortune to have a personal tour from the director! Matt showed me a wealth of incredible fossils, including the type specimen of Stegosaurus, and footprints of baby Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus -- the latter tracks were the subject of the Smithsonian article. In case you (still) haven't read the article, it looks like these baby sauropods were capable of running on their hind legs like a basilisk lizard. Matt walked me through the logic, pointing at specific pieces of evidence on the massive slab of rock. Then we were out of time, because I had to get over to the DMNS for the "Geography Goes Digital" event.

At the DMNS, I was met by Kirk Johnson, the author of a book I mentioned here a month or so ago: Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway. My friend Michelle knows Kirk, and put us in touch. (Thanks, Michelle!) Kirk has been at the DMNS for more that fifteen years, starting as a curator of paleontology, and now as a vice-president. It was very cool of him to make time to see me. Immediately, Kirk introduced me to Bob Raynolds, the speaker for the "Geography Goes Digital" event. Bob and I talked a bit about geology and teaching, and then we scooted over to the Planetarium for the main event. I took a seat, leaned back and was amazed. It was like Google Earth on steroids; a feeling like looking down from the space station on Earth. Bob led us on an exploration of areas of the world that are showing the strain of coping with climate change. He has an astonishing amount of geographical knowledge (apparently, he has traveled to more than 50 countries to do geology) and it was a real treat to tour the planet with him and 150 of the DMNS's closest friends. Afterwards, Kirk took me and another friend-of-a-friend visitor on a tour of the museum. I saw the world's second-largest gold nugget, a massive crystal of rhodochrosite, and the incredible tour through time exhibit that Kirk put together when he first got to the museum. Starting with the Ediacaran, the exhibit went through time in a series of sub-exhibits. Each started with a diorama, and then showed the fossils that the diorama was based on. There were some INCREDIBLE fossils there -- absolute stunners. Kirk confided that's just how he wanted it -- not a thousand small fossils, but a few massive ones that just knock your socks off. It was very impressive. Around 10pm, I bade Kirk farewell, and left the museum. I drove up to Boulder, Colorado, and holed up in a hotel for the night.

I feel really lucky to have visited three amazing paleontological museums in one day, and to have had personal tours from the elite of Denver paleontology. Many thanks to Matt and Kirk for making time to show me around!

Now I'm off to check out Boulder, and maybe hike in the Flatirons above town. More later.

Labels: colorado, dinosaurs, fossils, kansas, minerals, travel

While toodling along the web on some other business this week, I stumbled across this publication by the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy.

I had no idea that there were any diamond finds in Virginia. But apparently there are, scattered across three different physiographic provinces!

On Thursday's excursion, Chris and I tried to find the "Front Royal Peridotite," one of seven locations mentioned in the DMME publication. It's a single dike which crosses State Road 626 southeast of Waterlick, Virginia. But to no avail! There were no outcrops visible on either side of the road, and there was a dense little cluster of houses bearing manicured lawns. Bummer. That would have been cool.

I'll try and visit a couple other localities mentioned in the report over the next year or so, and hopefully I'll find some of these igneous source rocks, though I don't hold out much hope of actual diamonds.

Labels: blue ridge, diamonds, minerals, piedmont, valley and ridge, virginia

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

On Thursday, I posted some reflections on one of the talks at the most recent meeting of the Geological Society of Washington. At the same meeting, there was another talk that got my attention, and I wanted to briefly share its findings with the geoblogosphere. The talk was entitled "Mineralogy of the Atmosphere: Assessing environmental and health impacts of airborne particulate matter." It was given by Reto Giere, of the University of Freiburg, Germany. (He's currently in DC as a Visiting Investigator at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

Reto's research has lately focused on particulate matter in the air. He collects it and then evaluates it using transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and other techniques. The first point he made in Wednesday's talk is that "soot" is a matter of definition. Natural and anthropogenic sources can both be found in the sub-1-micrometer range. If you look at small particulates, Switzerland's environmentally-lauded train system actually generates three times as much "soot" as their traffic output.

So what's in that "soot?" Turns out that a lot of it is anglesite, PbSO4 and some of it is gunningite, ZnSO4'H2O. (There are also droplets of elemental selenium, Se.) The majority of these metal sulfates (and others) are coming from flue gases from power plants. And the thing is, because they're so small, all these goodies end up in our lungs. Reto has run modeling experiments to see what weight-percent of the average person's dose of inhaled metals gets extracted by the lung fluid. In one week, 80% of the zinc was absorbed by the lungs, 55% of the nickel, and 35% of copper. Yum! (I would have been interested to see the actual masses of these absorbed metals compared to the quantities present in a typical vitamin pill, but that wasn't covered.)

There's good news that stems from Reto's work too: the particular "cocktail" of minerals in a sample may be diagnostic of a specific source, which would be useful for forensic identification of polluters. Overall, I found it an interesting talk, on something I'd never really thought about before.

Labels: environmental, gsw, minerals

So this weekend, as part of my ravenous Netflix consumption, I watched Libby, Montana, a documentary which explores the effects of vermiculite mining in the namesake town. The vermiculite in question is augmented with a less desirable mineral: the amphibole known as tremolite. Tremolite grows in a long, fibrous habit, which has been given the name... asbestos. So the deal with Libby is that essentially everyone in town either worked in the vermiculite mine, or was married to someone who worked in the vermiculite mine. A bunch of them inhaled tremolite fibers, both workers and family members. A bunch of them developed lung diseases like asbestosis or mesothelioma. A lot of them died. The movie ends with a moving tribute to the dead. It's some bad stuff. W.R. Grace, the company operating the vermiculite mine, is demonstrably culpable for their employees' deaths.

Tremolite is one of the nastier varieties of asbestos, but not all minerals that happen to grow in that shape are carcinogenic. Some, like chrysotile, (the variety mined at the type locality) have not been found to be as dangerous (by authorities like the USGS). But because many varieties of asbestiform minerals do cause disease, many people (particularly in the litigious U.S.) have opted to ban all minerals of the asbestiform habit. This has resulted in umpteen gazillion public buildings being stripped of their asbestiform minerals, whether or not those particular minerals have been shown to be disease-causing. It's like banning all round candy just because you think that red M&Ms are carcinogenic (which isn't even true). So this brings us to my home institution of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). This week, if you were to come visit me in my office in the CF building, here's what you would see (photo).

We're doing asbestos abatement. Amazingly (from a legal standpoint), I'm still allowed to keep working in my office, ten feet away from a what appears to be a major asbestos removal project. The local source is the floor tiles, which look pretty much like linoleum, but are apparently held together with the strong "asbestos" fibers. Which asbestos mineral exactly? Don't know. Probably never will. Last year, they did the same thing in a separate building, the one where my classes are held.

As a P.S., I'll mention that halfway through the day yesterday, I noticed someone put duct tape over the words "Asbestos" and "Cancer and Lung Disease Hazard." No longer that particular danger, apparently...

Labels: minerals, movies, nova