NOVA's accurately-named student newspaper, Fortnightly, is now online. New issues every fortnight (two weeks)!

Labels: news, nova

First I've seen of last week's tsunami. Attempt to embed below, but here's a direct link.


Hat tip to my student Al for passing this on. Thanks Al!

Labels: earthquakes, news, tsunami

Passing on some excitement:

For the filming of a TV pilot, there will be a simulated explosion on Wednesday, March 25 between 9:30 a.m. (tomorrow morning) and noon near Key Bridge in the District.

The explosion will produce a 20 to 30' fireball that will last for approximately 2 minutes.

Please pass along this information to others appropriate. The Department of Homeland Security and D.C. Police and Fire departments have been notified, along with the Washington Airports Authority. The Virginia State Patrol and Arlington Police Department will be contacted. If you have additional questions, contact Kathy Hollinger or Burt Warner with the DC Film Office at 202-727-6608.

The explosion will take place on the Potomac River just north of the Key Bridge and Jack's Boathouse (K / Water Street, NW under the Whitehurst Freeway). In the scene to be filmed, there will be six (6) sculling boats on the Potomac River and one of them blows up. CBS Paramount television is filming a pilot titled "Washington Field." This is a new television series about the elite Washington field office of the FBI and a team of agents with exceptional and diverse skills who are called together for only the most critical cases.

Labels: action, dc, news

I'm sure I won't be the only one to be writing about this today, but here's a couple of links to news items about Liberty University's "Advanced Creation Studies" students touring the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

NBC (snarky!)
Washington Post (with photos)

Labels: evolution, museums, news, smithsonian, teaching

Last week, I mentioned the impending launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory... Well, last night at the launch, things didn't work out so well...

NASA Satellite Fails to Reach Orbit (New York Times)
NASA satellite crashes (Los Angeles Times)
Seven years' work on satellite crashes and burns in 12 minutes (Scotsman)
NASA satellite launch fails (Newsday)
and from NASA themselves, the grim Launch Mishap Ends OCO Mission

What a bummer. All that potential knowledge, snuffed out before we even got a chance to see it.

Labels: climate change, CO2, global warming, news, satellite imagery

I've been really digging my iPod. Yeah, yeah: "late adopter" and all that. But it's really cool!

The podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts) available for free are diverse and awesome, and I'm finding them much more interesting, rich, and deep than traditional radio. I've got music podcasts, science podcasts, story podcasts, and humor podcasts. In the interest of sharing the love, here's what I'm listening to:

All Songs Considered - From NPR, an every-few-days podcast showcasing new and interesting music from a wide variety of genres, often accompanied by insightful commentary from host Bob Boilen and his guests.

Morning Becomes Eclectic - From KCRW in Santa Monica, California, Jason Bentley (no relation) hosts an excellent radio show of... well... eclectic music. The only shows they podcast are the ones where guest artists are performing live in the studio, but that's fine by me -- there's some real gems here. (Although, I'll admit that I miss the former host Nick Harcourt.)

The Moth - An incredible storytelling podcast featuring one person per episode telling a true story, live onstage & without notes. These are incredible tales from our fellow humans: people who have experienced surreal, heartbreaking, or uproarious things, and know how to describe them to others. An absolutely inspired series. Five stars!

Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me! - The oddly informative NPR news quiz show. Invariably funny, sometimes hilarious. Hosted by Peter Segal, accompanied by luminaries like Carl Kasell, P.J. O'Rourke, and Tom Bodett.

USGS CoreCast - A weekly podcast from the United States Geological Survey, wherein stilted-sounding hosts interview scientists about their work, usually related to some story that's in the current news cycle. Mediocre listenability, but often interesting content.

Nature Podcast - From the acclaimed journal Nature comes this hip, well-produced podcast that features several hosts (male, female, British, American) interviewing scientists about their recent Nature publications and why they matter. Sometimes they give background information, too -- to bring listeners up to speed before the interview. It's detailed enough to be satisfying for a professional scientist, but not stiff or formal. Two thumbs up!

Central Washington University Natural Science seminars - Video of seminars on cool topics like mammoth digs, etc.

American Meteorological Society Climate Change video: Environmental Science seminars - These are a series of science seminars put on by the AMS on Capitol Hill for the benefit of policy makers, captured on video. I often try to attend, but if I miss one, I can get it via the iPod.

The Ricky Gervais podcast - From the talented British comedian comes this sporadic podcast which varies tremendously in content and satisfaction from one episode to the next. When this one is on while I'm driving to campus, the ones that leave me guffawing are the ones where Ricky and Stephen Merchant talk with Carl Pilkington. The three of them have a remarkable style of mutually-insulting comedy.

You can get all of these for free, searching on iTunes. Enjoy!

Labels: environmental, geology, humor, music, news, podcasts and vodcasts, science and society

Sierra magazine has a cool feature this month: photos of people and their appliances, showing how much coal it takes to run those appliances for one month. A very clever visual technique, illustrated by the talented photographer Lauren Burke. Click through to read the accompanying article about mountaintop removal, and how most of us support it daily at home by doing things like blogging. Hat tip to Mike Tidwell, who showed us some of these pictures yesterday during his talk at NOVA.

Also, the New Yorker this month has its ~annual piece from John McPhee. This one is about the author's experience with fact-checking. It's an interesting read if you're a fan of McPhee like I am. Eldridge Moores is mentioned -- although if you watched the video I posted a while back, you've already heard that Aegean /Adriatic plate mix-up story.

Labels: art, coal, geologists, geology, news

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NPR's Louisa Lim reports on tourists flocking to see Sichuan earthquake devastation in China.

Labels: china, earthquakes, news, radio

Some geology-oriented terms made the New York Times' annual rundown on buzzwords. It's noteworthy that two of the (non-geological) others on the list (futarchy and edupunk) were coined by Virginia professors.

Labels: news, teaching, virginia, words

A quick note for fellow Virginians: CNN reports on the new efforts by the Bush administration to drill for oil offshore from the Old Dominion.

Labels: environmental, news, oil, petroleum, politics, virginia

Check this out: planners of next month's inauguration are using a giant map to figure all the logistics out.

Labels: dc, maps, news, politics

This just in from the office of Virginia's governor, Tim Kaine:

"In higher education, our October actions reduced schools' 2009 base budgets by 5 to 7%. For 2010, I have increased the reductions to 15% for all schools, except the community colleges and Richard Bland, which will have the reduction level increased to 10%."

Especially in light of what I posted earlier today, this does not bode well.

Full text of the governor's remarks here.

Labels: economics, news, nova, politics, virginia

The current issue of Newsweek features an article that quotes NOVA President Bob Templin on how more students are signing up for classes at community colleges like NOVA, just at the same time the state is cutting our funding.

Labels: news, nova, politics, teaching

There's a new study out I read about today in New Scientist which took squid and put them in a tank of ocean water that was equilibrated to simulated atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide predicted for the year 2100. The oceans were also warmer in temperature, again simulating predicted future conditions. In these acidic oceans, the squid's metabolic levels dropped by 31%, and the time they spent contracting their muscles dropped by 45%. I didn't get to read the full study, which is behind a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paywall, but the abstract online hints that these mini-oceans were about 0.3 pH units lower than modern ocean values. The abstract doesn't say how much warmer the experimental tanks were, but notes that water's ability to hold oxygen decreases with warmer temperatures. The lack of oxygen may be the prime reason for the squid's diminished activity.
______________________
Journal reference: DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806886105

Labels: CO2, critters, mollusks, news, ocean acidfication, oceans

Leafing through the December issue of EARTH magazine today, I noticed an article which I was interviewed for back in September... another look at the phenomenon of geoblogging (p. 59-61).

To my surprise, the NOVA Geoblog example is the lead for the story, which also interviews Lee, Ron, Kim, and Brian. It mentions some of the results from my survey of the geoblogosphere, including Andrew's analogy of the geoblogosphere's growth being kinda like the Cambrian Explosion, a clever notion which unfortunately the story attributes to me. Sorry Andrew: I did tell them that it was you who said it first!

The story isn't online (yet?) so I can't link to it (yet?), so in the meantime maybe you should re-up your subscription to EARTH.

Labels: blogs, news

My friend Jennifer Soles appeared on NPR's All Things Considered last night, discussing the current low acorn count that was mentioned over the weekend in the Washington Post.

Labels: news, plants

This was on NPR this morning. Made me laugh out loud.

Labels: humor, news, radio

A reminder to NOVA students, faculty, and interested area geophiles: I'll be giving a talk entitled "Two Months of Rock and Road: A North American geological road trip" today at noon as part of the Science Seminar series. It's in the CE Forum on the Annandale campus. Free and open to the public; light refreshments served.

McCain and Obama having fun: After all the rancor, this makes me happy.

If you're planning on going on the GSW Fall Field trip, let them know ASAP. They need a headcount.

The slate of speakers has been announced for next week's GSW meeting: Leonard Konikow, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston: "Ground-water depletion: National assessment and global implications;" Dionysis Foustoukos, Carnegie Institution of Washington Geophysical Laboratory "Energy sources in dark abyssal waters;" and Igor Puchtel, University of Maryland, College Park "Re-Os isotope systematics and HSE abundances of the 3.5 Ga Schapenburg komatiites, South Africa." 8pm next Wednesday at the Cosmos Club. Free and open to the public; refreshing beverages served starting at 7:30pm.

Virginia's a swing state... unbelievable and amazing.

Radioactive granite countertops cartoon caption contest reminder.

JPL has launched a new climate site:

...And congratulations to Walter Alvarez for being awarded the Vetlesen Prize.

That's all I've got. Have a good Friday!

Labels: field trips, gsw, meetings, news, politics, travel

Labels: canada, dc, geologic time, news

This week, New Scientist gives a rundown on how the two main U.S. presidential contenders compare on the issue of climate change. Check it out.

Labels: climate change, news, politics

Check out the before and after photographs of the Texas coast that Dave has posted on the Geology News blog.

Labels: hurricanes, news, texas

I swear, this is from Reuters, not the Onion:

Putin saves TV crew from Siberian tiger

Crazy! Putin guns down a wild tiger! WTF?

Labels: critters, news, russia

No way...

"US army has laser guns in its sights" New Scientist, 2 Sept. 2008.

Labels: news, tech

Looks like New Orleans got lucky with Gustav... A good thing in the short term, but ultimately maybe not the best situation. Each year, the sediment under New Orleans compacts a bit, and sea level rises a bit. On a hurricane-prone coast, that differential between an ocean with additional storm surge and a city full of people below is eventually going to get unsustainable. I wonder how tall we will build the levees in the future. If the city is forty feet below sea level, will we still keep rebuilding it every time a hurricane hits? Don't get me wrong; I love visiting New Orleans as much as the next guy... but ultimately it seems like a bit of a money pit. To some extent, Gustav's glancing blow may encourage people to continue to live in a geologically untenable situation. (Update: It seems Andy Revkin was having similar thoughts this morning.)

Oh well... I'll save the worrying for later. For the moment, I'll be happy that the damage appears to be as light as it was. Of course, with Katrina, it also looked pretty good on the day after, and then the city began filling up with water pouring in past breached levees. I'm going to keep my eye on New Orleans for a while yet.

In the meantime, though, there's a new hurricane en route to the States, and this one may come to my neck of the woods: Hanna. Something new to think about...

Labels: hurricanes, news

Good morning! It's dawn on Labor Day, and that means it's time for Hurricane Gustav to come ashore in the Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the storm's course has kept it cruising along at a pretty good rate of speed, and on a trajectory which keeps the bulk of the bad weather to the southwest of New Orleans. The other good news is it's "only" a Category 3 storm, thanks to it drifting over colder sections of the Gulf (unlike Katrina). This map shows this well.

I've been following the tidal gauges displayed online at NOAA's "Tides and Currents" website, where the tidal gauging stations noted in the map above share their data with you, the web browsing citizen. Consider this graph, from Cedar Key, Florida:

The blue sine wave is the predicted tidal fluctuations based on the position of the moon and sun (tides are caused by gravitational tugs from those massive bodies). But superimposed upon that trend over the past fifteen hours is something making the sea a bit higher than it would otherwise be predicted to be: the red line shows us this observed water level. The green line shows the difference in water level between what's predicted and what's observed. What's causing the extra height to local sea level? This is storm surge, where the howling force of the hurricane's winds push the sea up in front of them. Because of the way hurricanes spiral in the northern hemisphere (counterclockwise, due to the Coriolis effect), these wind-induced storm surges are greatest in the area in front of the storm's path and to the right: the "passenger seat" position as it moves ashore. This is why storm surges were so great in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans was spared the worst of it (the eye of the storm passed east of the city then).

Today, the eye of the storm will pass west of the city, which really worried me when I first read the projections, because that put New Orleans in the path of the highest storm surge. The next six hours will be critical on this front. Here's the data from Pilots Station East, Louisiana, which is out on the Mississippi River's Bird's Foot Delta, in prime storm surge position for Gustav's path:

There isn't a lot of tidal variation in this location (low amplitude to the blue line), but you can see that the local water level is leaping upwards, 4 feet above normal at the time I'm writing this. How high will it eventually go? During Katrina, the highest storm surges were somewhere around 27 feet above normal (in Mississippi, not New Orleans). I think this graphic will continue to track the changes over the day, and it may be more updated than my text by the time you read this.

Good luck to everyone on the Gulf Coast. Stay dry.

Labels: hurricanes, news

Here's a satellite image of the Caribbean from early Friday morning:



Gustav's still moving northwest through the Caribbean, and set to enter the Gulf of Mexico by about midnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning. As you may have heard, everyone's getting ready for the worst-case scenario. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has already declared a state of emergency, and President Bush gave him a similar federal declaration. I'll be watching this one pretty closely over the next few days.

Another phenomenon that's manifesting itself over the coming days and weeks is the melting of the Arctic sea ice pack. As Al Gore noted in his speech the other night, the worst case scenario for melting of this sea ice has the Arctic ocean ice free sometime late in the term of the next president (but that's a worst case scenario). Certainly, the trend over time is towards less and less of the Arctic frozen. I follow the fluctuation of sea ice area on the website The Cryosphere Today (University of Illinois), which provides satellite data, graphs, maps, and animations of the areal extent of polar sea ice. Here, for example, is a graph showing the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice over the past year:



Last year, of course, it hit a record low, and there's still a few weeks to go before it starts freezing up again (mid-to-late September is the time of the minimum). Open Mind did an excellent post examining the trend here, although the pattern is also observable on this long-term graph from Cryosphere Today. Here's another one, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, that gives a half-century of context to the graph above:

In case DC-area folks didn't hear about it, there's also been some recent flooding in the southwest. (Geoblogospheroids will be well aware of it already, thanks to excellent coverage from Lee Allison at Arizona Geology.) I swam in that canyon this summer, just above the confluence with the Colorado River, and so this caught my attention more than an equivalent story would have about flooding someplace I hadn't been.

In addition to these larger-scale phenomena, there's a more local kind of weather I'm watching too: it's actually started raining in DC, for the first time since I got back on August 1! (A perplexed Achenblog on this odd situation). Time to bust out the umbrella.

Labels: hurricanes, ice, news, rain, snow

Just now getting around to reading last month's issue of National Geographic, but it's a good thing I got to it yesterday rather than tomorrow -- because today's the day I talk about comets, asteroids, and meteors in Physical Geology class, and one of the topics that people always love to talk about is what happens when those big dumb space chunks smack into Earth.



The article's a good read, and illustrated with magnificent images, like this classic 1972 image of a fireball over Jackson Lake, Wyoming. That's the Tetons in the background. Check it out.

Labels: meteors, news, wyoming

Gustav's going for the Gulf. This could be bad and will surely be a newsworthy topic over the next week. Other people have explored it better than I could, so I'll just link to them:

• Kim at All of My Faults Are Stress Related: "Gustav and Uncertainty"
• Michael at Strike Slip: "Why Tropical Storm Gustav Could be a Big Problem"
• Associated Press at NY Times: "Officials may evacuate New Orleans as Gustav nears"

Labels: hurricanes, news

The Onion's "American Voices" covered a recent issue (see here in the New York Times, for instance) that some people are paying attention to: radiation emitted by granite countertops.

Because granite contains some uranium (different levels in different granites), some folks are getting upset that their fancy, expensive granite countertops could actually be emitting radiation into their kitchens. But, as the article points out, it's not really all that much in the grand scheme of things.

One final note: the image used to illustrate the story (shown here) is apparently the exact same variety of garnetiferous granite gneiss that my father recently chose for his countertops, when renovating his kitchen! I'll have to bring the Geiger counter over there next time I visit...

Labels: humor, news

The Freakonomics blog draws our attention today to a new study suggesting that beer consumption and low publication records are correlated. Hmmm.

Labels: blogs, news, science and society

In his "Achenblog" today, the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach discusses whether the former Soviet republic of Georgia is in Europe or Asia. A bit of geography to start your day.

Being a geologist rather than a geographer, I'm of the opinion that it's in Eurasia, but no one's asking me...

Labels: blogs, news

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

Whoa! Check out this minuscule snake! Really small vertebrates catch my attention -- think of all those itty-bitty ribs and vertebrae in something this small. How big is its heart? How many red blood cells can fit through its arteries at a time? How incredible is it that vertebrates can be as small as this guy, or as large as an Apatosaurus or a fin whale?
It's from Barbados. Check out more details here.

Labels: critters, news

There's been some interesting articles in my media subscriptions lately. Thought I'd use today's post to share.

In the June National Geographic, a study of the geology of Stonehenge reveals the source of the monoliths ("polyliths?") there. They came from the Preseli Mountains of Wales. That's a long journey for such big rocks. Also in the same issue is an eye-popping pictorial piece on sea slugs. You must check it out, because it features dozens of David Doubilet images like this one:

WIRED's cover story this month is about environmental "heresies": ideas that supposedly environmentalists aren't supposed to like, but need to happen. The basic premise is that "only cutting carbon matters," and so they come up with some interesting recommendations like: (1) use A/C more, and heating less, (2) "screw the spotted owl" (don't worry about the loss of biodiversity), and (3) buy a used Geo Metro rather than a new Prius. I found this last of particular interest, as it recounts a web rumor that it took less carbon to make a Hummer than a Prius, and therefore Hummers were more environmentally friendly. (The Prius' battery has a lot of high-carbon-cost nickel in it.) WIRED breaks it all down into BTUs, and runs the numbers. According to their analysis, it takes the Prius 100,000 miles to catch up (i.e. be more carbon-efficient) than an old Toyota. Bummer... Big bummer. (At least the Hummer bit has been debunked.)

As usual, Smithsonian had a bunch of interesting pieces in it. Almost everything in there catches my imagination. It's a very well done magazine.

The New Yorker had a couple of articles, too: In their recent "innovators issue," Alex Ross profiled John Luther Adams, the man responsible for the mesmerizing "the place where you go to listen" in the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. If you haven't ever been there and find yourself in Fairbanks, I would recommend this museum highly, and this one room / art installation in particular: it plays certain notes and tones and changes the lighting depending on what the aurora, seismic activity, and other Earth processes are doing. And Margaret Talbot profiled Irene Pepperberg, who raised the parrot Alex and taught him to talk. This article explores the insights into intelligence gained from this serendipitous longterm experiment.

On the commodities front, the New York Times reports today that thieving biofuellers are stealing vegetable oil in Oregon, and that guano stocks are being closely guarded in Peru. Telling quote from the latter: "Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it," (Pablo Arriola).

Labels: alaska, birdies, environmental, mollusks, news, prius, wales

Thanks to Andrew Alden for addressing the issue of the tidal influence on recent Cyclone Nargis' flooding of southern Burma. NASA recently published this before/after image online:

Thought I would pass it on.

Labels: asia, floods, hurricanes, news

On Monday, my Physical Geology students and I experienced a magnitude-2.0 earthquake during our final exam. The hypocenter was 1 km south and 6km down.

I pulled out the geologic map of the Annandale quadrangle (1986) by Avery Drake and A. J. Froelich to check for faults in that area. Here's a scan of the map:

You can see our campus in the northwest, and I've highlighted the epicenter of the quake with the red and green concentric circle. Interstate 495, the Capitol Beltway runs north-south through the center of this area. To the south and east of NOVA's campus, you can see that there's a mappable thrust fault (the Red Fox Thrust) which dips to the northwest, presumably under the epicenter and under the campus. However, the map provides no information on the angle of dip of this thrust. Is it steep enough to get to 6km depth a mere ~3km north of its surface trace? (The map's cross section shows it dipping at about 52 degrees, but that's pretty speculative.) Or if the dip is shallow, is there a deeper (perhaps parallel) thrust underneath it? (There is none shown within the map area, though there is one to the north of campus that dips to the north -- making it unlikely to be the culprit.) Alternatively, was Monday's quake caused by a new fault? Perhaps a normal fault which cross-cuts these Paleozoic thrusts?

No new answers -- only more questions...

Labels: earthquakes, news, nova

Holy cow! Chaiten is continuing to erupt, and witnesses are posting some incredible photographs of the event.

I highly recommend you check out these two sites, which I am only aware of thanks to James Annan who posted the links at his Empty Blog.

Seriously: check them out. It's like Independence Day down there.

Labels: news, south america, volcano

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

So, this is weird: a new insight into the planet Mercury is that it has a big long tail which extends away from the planet, strung outwards by the solar wind (a stream of charged particles shooting away from the Sun in every direction). Comet tails are also due to the solar wind's erosive effect, vaporizing particles & dragging them "down-stream" (i.e., away from the Sun). The tail is long: At 1.6-million miles in length, the streamer of sodium atoms is more than 100 times the planet's radius. Read more here.

Labels: news, planetary geology

Yesterday, Florida's state board of education felt obliged to stick the word "theory" into their description of the teaching of evolution. See this Reuters article for all the moronic details. Of course, evolution is a theory (i.e. well corroborated by many years of scientific testing & explanatory of a wealth of biological phenomena), so I don't have a problem with this definition per se, beyond exasperation with the motivations for its inclusion. I expect we'll see another lawsuit (a la Dover, PA) regarding this move, but in the meantime, it's an opportunity for science teachers to elucidate the difference between "theory" as it's used in science versus "theory" as it's used in casual conversation. So, the battlefield for teaching proper science shifts from Kansas to Pennsylvania to Florida. What would the Flying Spaghetti Monster say?

Labels: evolution, news, politics

In case you haven't yet heard the news, the school shooting that took place yesterday afternoon at Northern Illinois University's Dekalb campus was in a geology class. I don't know what class, but it was in a "large lecture hall" (CNN) and the instructor was apparently a graduate student (Washington Post). The shooter was apparently an ex-sociology graduate student (Post). I can't imagine how awful that must be. There have been plenty of previous school shootings (unfortunately), but hearing that it was in a geology class really clarified in my imagination the horror of such an event unfolding.

NIU's website with updates.
More from The Washington Post.
More from CNN.

Labels: geology, news