Scientists convicted of manslaughter for failing to be psychic

Words cannot begin to express how upset, angry, and filled with contempt I am by this:
Italian scientists resign over L'Aquila quake verdicts

Two scientists resigned their posts with the government's disaster preparedness agency Tuesday after a court in L'Aquila sentenced six scientists and a government official to six years in prison. The court ruled Monday that the scientists failed to accurately communicate the risk of the 2009 quake, which killed more than 300 people.

We wish we could predict earthquakes. We really, really do. So many lives could be saved. But there is as of yet no way to make those kind of predictions. A series of small earthquakes? Depending upon how you define it, those occur all the time. Hell, we can only sort of predict the imminent eruption of a volcano, and the mechanics of that, the pressures that dictate an eruption, are relatively simpler and there are far more "tells" - seismic activity, increased outgassing, etc.

Nature agrees: 

There will be time enough to ponder the wider implications of the verdict, but for now all efforts should be channelled into protest, both at the severity of the sentence and at scientists being criminalized for the way their opinions were communicated. Science has little political clout in Italy and the trial proceeded in an absence of informed public debate that would have been unthinkable in most European countries or in the United States

Hey Italy, while you're jailing people for failing to predict disasters, how about extraditing the horrendous human beings who played fast and loose with the financial markets and caused the global economy to shit itself? That had far more potential for being predicted and arguably has caused even more human suffering. What about jailing people who have refused to listen to repeated warnings about global climate change?

Or I suppose this pattern could continue and the next time a doctor fails to predict a heart attack, or a traffic cop fails to predict an accident, they'll end up in jail.

This is ridiculous. Contemptible.

What I did with my day.

Today I turned this:

Into this:

Using these tools:

...four times. Six to go. And then they'll be ready for XRF analysis, which will tell me what mean annual precipitation was in that location nearly 54 million years ago. 

This is the exciting part of science they never show you in the movies. 

Have I mentioned that I hate public speaking?

Because I do. I really, really do.

For this internship, I've had to give four presentations, in front of rooms filled with people I don't know that well, many of whom seem to delight in asking really hard questions. I guess it's one of those sink or swim things. Even better, for three out of the four presentations, I had to go first out of my group since it was my responsibility to set up the background for the larger presentation.

So much anxiety.

I think the secret is acting. As in, acting like I'm not someone who is utterly terrified. It seems to be working for me. To the point that statements like, "You know, I wish I could answer that question but I can't remember at the moment because I'm scared out of my mind," get treated as laugh lines rather than a pathetic truth. Or maybe everyone just sympathizes.

Also, ostracods. Why can't I remember your name when I'm actually trying to give a presentation, yet it comes popping back into my head the instant I sit down? This has happened all three times I've given this presentation. Enough is enough.

I'm grateful that at least I'm no longer paralyzed with vomit-inducing terror when it's time to give a talk. I can fake being a normal human being who can communicate without looking like she's about to get strapped into the electric chair.

I think Skepticamp's helped me with this a lot, actually. It's one of the few places I've ever willingly given a talk, and several times at that. Even if I am, as usual, absolutely terrified while I do it. Though I seem to mask my fear well enough with enthusiasm, from what I've heard. My desire to nerd out about something geology-related is apparently enough to get me over the pant-shitting prospect of a room full of people I don't know who might ask me a question for which I have no answer.

Skepticamp is also where I cemented my bad presentation habit of just throwing slides on the screen and bullshitting at them. Everyone else in my team wrote exhaustive notes to themselves on their slides. I... don't. Ever. I just make my slides, go through them a few times so I can remember the approximate order (even I know it's a bad, bad thing to be surprised by your own slides), and then figure if I know the subject well enough, I'll be able to talk through it just fine when the time comes. So far it's worked out okay for me.

Except the damn ostracods.

Anyway, I've survived the intern forum, which means I'm home free! I have another two weeks at work, but no more presentations, thank goodness. I shouldn't have to stare Powerpoint in its stinky, evil little eye again until it's time for me to put together a presentation for my Masters thesis and AGU. (Ah, AGU. I will begin dreading you now so I can pace myself.)

At least there are no ostracods in the Bighorn Basin.

DAMN YOU OSTRACODS!!!!

Welcome to Silent Hill, PA

It's May 3, 2012. Ten hours to go until the US premiere of Avengers and I'm in central Pennsylvania with a group of friends specifically to see that movie. How to pass the time?

Well, the native of Pennsylvania (my dear friend Rynn) mentions that we're maybe an hour away from Centralia.

If you're not a fan of horror videogames or somewhat obscure but recent east coast history, Centralia probably doesn't ring any bells. It's the town that was devastated by an underground coal fire. It's a haunting place where white smoke stinking of sulfur billows from the ground itself and the roads collapse as the fire continues to eat its way through the coal veins. Trees in the area are bleached and blasted by the fumes.

Centralia was the inspiration for the fictional town of Silent Hill, which spawned a successful franchise of survival horror videogames as well as a somewhat less impressive movie. In the original game (Silent Hill) and the movie, it was clear that the billowing white fog engulfing the town was actually smoke and ash from the underground fires. In later games, the fog was left to be more traditional water vapor and the mining town history fell by the wayside.

Needless to say, as a fan of the games, I leap at the chance to see Centralia.

If you're expecting someplace as haunting and creepy as the video game setting, I can't guarantee that Centralia will deliver. On the day we go, the fires aren't burning with particular ferocity - the air is almost entirely clear. It's sunny and more than a little muggy, the surrounding hills bursting with plant life in a way I'm still not used to as a resident of Colorado. But the trip is perhaps more interesting because it's nothing like what I expect.

There are two halves to a look at Centralia. There's the town itself - or what's left of it - and a closed-off portion of road that used to be part of Route 61.

The actual Route 61 now circumvents this section, swinging wide between two hills to avoid the slowly extending fire damage that undermines the landscape. But if you follow the road north out of Ashland, you'll come to a cemetery at the top of a hill before you hit the next town. Park nearby and the old section of Route 61 isn't hard to find.

It's utterly deserted, but you can still hear the sounds of traffic from the nearby reroute. The road itself is covered with graffiti. Apparently when you're a teenager in rural central Pennsylvania, this is what you do for a good time on a Friday night. Most of the graffiti is penis-based, or names and dates from visitors. There are a disturbing number of swastikas that have been drawn on the asphalt. And here and there are nerd shout-outs to the other reason people come here, the one that doesn't involve drinking and drawing cartoonish genitalia - Welcome to Silent Hill, PA and There was a hole here. Now it's gone. The road surface buckles, wavers, and cracks, broken-up graffiti showing that the surface destruction is recent and continuing as the subterranean fires march ever onward.

I think in the future, I'm going to have a hard time seeing how clean the roads look in post-apocalyptic future visions. Because if there is even one remaining teenager in the world, and one remaining can of spray paint, it seems almost inevitable that things will end up covered in dicks.

Getting into the remains of the town itself requires backtracking and going around the side of the hill. Rynn's GPS unit still shows the ghost of streets that no longer exist. At the base of the hill, a few houses still stand, and are obviously occupied. The rest are empty lots surrounded by low stone walls, showing where houses once existed.

Further up the hill, the destruction of Centralia is total, and largely man-made. If the streets were ever paved, they aren't any more. It's dirt and gray gravel now, slices of thinly-laminated black shale showing through where runoff has carried away the surface soil. The black shale crawls with tiny, bright pink mites that look like they should belong to a 1980s Atari game.

There were obviously once houses up and down this hill, but nothing remains, just flattened lots that have plainly been bulldozed.

Broken up bricks and concrete are still visible, the remains of walls and foundations that haven't been completely removed. The ground is littered with broken glass and shotgun shells; I guess since unpaved tracks don't provide the same graffiti opportunities, this part of the disaster is used as a shooting range. Strange little bits of civilization still peep out of the surrounding trees, like this wooden utility pole.

This is where it finally begins to feel eerie, seeing these ghostly remains of what was once a town. There are a lot of reasons for the government to have seen to the destruction of the unoccupied houses. With toxic fumes rising from the ground, allowing abandoned buildings to stand and invite squatters is a potentially lethal proposition. They'd be fire hazards. And it's a way to discourage gawkers like myself from picking over the bones of Centralia.

But all the same, it's disquieting to see there was once life and it has been so plainly removed.

And even on this clear, beautiful day, there is a reminder of the fires that still rage through the coal seams. Smoke isn't billowing, but the air smells faintly and pervasively of sulfur. There are holes in the ground from which wispy smoke drifts. Like a ghost, it doesn't photograph, but it's there to see with your own eyes.

Seeing smoke come out of the ground is something that disturbs a deep, primal portion of your brain. The smoke stinks like matches, and you know that's bad and you really should just get the hell away. Even worse, when the breeze shifts and the smoke washes over you, it's notably hotter than the muggy air. You feel it like breath on your face.

And you let yourself imagine that this might just be a little hint of hell. Because an endlessly burning, unquenchable fire that burns slowly underground, eatings its way through the bones of old trees certainly fits the bill. In that moment, sunny day or no, you're still waiting to hear the old air-raid sirens.

Epilogue

There's something else you can see from the ruins of Centralia, which sums up so much of the way the region feels to an outsider like myself.

Throughout the region, there are enormous, flat topped tailings piles, the remains of open-pit mines where machinery has chewed up all the coal and spat out the pieces we didn't want to burn. They are ugly sores on the landscape, though you do see places where plants have begun to move back in. From Centralia, standing in the bulldozed shadow of a house, you can see one of these flat-topped monstrosities lined with the graceful white forms of enormous windmills, blades turning slowly in the breeze.

With the stink of sulfurous coal smoke permeating the air, the windmills really do feel like a distant promise, one that you might be able to reach if you can just stretch your arms far enough.

For a little more about the history of Centralia and its underground fire here is one site.
For the rest of my pictures from Centralia you can look through my online album.

Spec Tech post up

Okay, a little belated, but I wrote a post for the Clarion blog about sandstone as a building material, since a commenter had asked about it a while ago: Sandstone: It's a Living.

My next post will be due mid-December... I'm trying to decide what to write about. I'm kind of tempted to talk about undersea hydrothermal systems (black smokers, white smokers, carbonate chimneys) because they're really cool. And it lets me share something I've learned in oceanic geochem this semester.

I'm Going to Wyoming, for SCIENCE! (and this is why you should care)

In a few short hours, I'll be on my way to the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, to participate in the coring portion of the Bighorn Basin Coring Project. Things are moving much faster than expected - the rig is already at Polecat Bench, where it wasn't planned to be until Friday, because coring went so quickly at the first location, called Basin Substation.

(All of the amazing pictures for this post taken from the BBCP Facebook page.)

This was kind of a surprise, but a good one. It also means my advisor and I are scrambling to get up to the Basin as soon as we can. And that instead of one two week stretch, I'll be coming back to Denver with her, and then flying back out to Wyoming on July 31 to help out at the third site. (The third site, Gilmore Hill, is on BLM land and we're literally not allowed to start until August 1.)

I've set up a twitter account for just BBCP-related stuff. I don't know how many good pictures I'll get, since I'm on the nightshift, but here's hoping! Please follow and spread the word. It's a chance to see some science in action.

So why should you care about this project? Two words: climate change. In geology, the present is often the key to the past - we can observe processes today and use them to figure out the how and why of ancient rocks. During the PETM, the Earth's climate changed remarkably, and in a fairly short period of time. I've written about it in more detail here, and you can also get more information on the project's website. While the Bighorn Basin Coring Project is focused on understanding the PETM and many related issues, there is also this to consider:

This will allow us to investigate, in an unprecedented way, the high-frequency climatic and biotic variability of a continental depositional system during greenhouse conditions.

There are no guarantees in science, but there's a possibility that this time, the past might provide a key to the present. Climate change induced by a rapid influx of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? While it's not a perfect parallel (for the PETM it was methane, rather than our own carbon dioxide), it still could be very relevant. And I would think it's something we want to understand well before our personal contributions of carbon get anywhere close to the rather voluptuous 6800 gigatons of methane that went into the atmosphere during the PETM. (As of 2004 we were at ~500 Gt.)

One thing we're hoping is that we'll not only capture the PETM, we'll also maybe get some data for the other, smaller hyperthermals in the Eocene. How much carbon input equals how much climate change? As part of a species with a vested interest in climate not changing much, that's a question I'd personally like to examine, and I'm hoping I'll get my chance.

(And don't worry, Mom, I'll watch out for snakes!)

New Spec Tech Article Online!

Actually, it's been online for a few days, but there was this whole TAM thing (you may have heard of it) and I had no real internet access for four days because the Southpoint Casino is run by vampires¹.

It's 1000+ words about tuff, which is a good example of how geology influences culture. And there are also bad puns. Because, you know, tuff: The Whole Tuff and Nothing But the Tuff




1 - Leave my non sequitor alone. Something about bloodsuckers. I'm tired.

Creationists at GSA

I didn't actually go to GSA, even though it was in Denver. Mostly because I didn't want to cough up the registration fee, and had projects I should be working on besides. And of course, no one I know heard about this at the time, probably because I don't think people tend to get excited about field trips into their own backyards when it costs money.

But apparently, there were young earth creationists at GSA. And they ran a field trip to Garden of the Gods without telling anyone that they were young earthers. And then later bragged about how convincing it was to the real geologists. Please see PZ's blog post, since he's already done a lovely job of laying it all out and I see no reason to reproduce his links and do my own less entertaining version of the commentary.

I'll just note here for anyone not familiar with the geology of Colorado, that the pretty bits of Garden of the Gods are mostly from two formations: Fountain and Lyons.

The Fountain Formation is a series of alluvial fan deposits that run up and down the Front Range of Colorado (and have a sister formation on the western side of the continental divide, called the Maroon Formation) which was laid down on a probably dry plain at the feet of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains. The formation was mostly deposited by flash floods screaming out of mountain canyons, carrying loads of poorly sorted sediment. So in it, you see rocks ranging from conglomerates to sandstones to mudstones, which vary depending upon which flood stage they were laid down in. And you see these layers repeated over and over. You also see some very nice sedimentary structures that indicate successive floods, such as scours and channels cutting through lower layers.

So technically, the Fountain Formation was laid down by water, but it was fresh water. Fresh water in what was likely an otherwise dry environment. And it was also technically laid down by flooding, but by a lot of flash floods rather than one enormous Noah's flood. I think trying to fuzzy the two together is pretty disingenuous.

And then there's the Lyons. The Lyons is a quartz arenite, which means it's almost pure quartz. All the grains are super well-sorted and well-rounded. (And those of you that remember undergrad sed/strat are probably now nodding your heads, because you know what sort of thing typically makes these deposits already...) It's got enormous cross-beds as well as fissile ripple laminations that occasionally show as classic reverse-graded pinstriping, though pinstriping in the Lyons is much less common or pronounced than it is in other similar formations.

Dunes. In a desert. Giant sand dunes. We see formations like this all over the world, and we understand pretty well how they form.

I personally have a very, very hard time believing that any honest (as in not self-deluding) geologist who can even dimly remember anything about undergrad (let alone graduate) sedimentology/stratigraphy would look at the Lyons in particular and say, "Oh yeah, totally a giant flood."

But it sounds like the young earthers spend a lot of time muttering their more wacky assertions or dropping them in to the discussion quickly and moving on, so those not listening for it just didn't notice. From the article in Earth magazine, that's certainly what it sounds like.

The Earth article also makes this point:

Creationists may come to conclusions that the geological community challenges, but as long as they present their conclusions as derived from accepted scientific methodology, rather than religion, it is unfair to reject their participation. In any event, the field trip I attended was not a platform for proselytizing to participants, but involved real observations on real outcrops — even if the perspective was slanted towards a nonstandard interpretation. No harm, no foul.

To me, this seems like a really tricky thing. Because Mr. Newton makes a good point that completely excluding the young earthers from meetings isn't really going to do us much good. It just gives them ammunition. And to a certain extent, I think it's healthy for geologists who aren't necessarily involved in organized skepticism to run across young earthers, because if you're in academia it's pretty easy to forget that cranks like this exist or just dismiss them out of hand. They're a lot harder to forget if you're actually confronted with them and forced to consider what they're claiming, which then calls for a response.

On the other hand, what causes the downside of participation is the basic dishonesty the young earthers displayed at GSA. They're not being upfront about what their driving hypothesis is. They're being very subtle and cagey about their most scientifically insupportable views, and then running off to claim that they've convinced people. Because let's be honest, it's pretty easy to nod vaguely at a poster at GSA or AAPG or SEG or any other meeting when it's extremely technical and not precisely your area of expertise; it's easy to make fine details sound reasonable when the main crux of the research - trying to prove a young earth - is hidden precisely to prevent academic disagreement.

There's not any easy answer to this problem. You can't really make young earthers wear dunce caps at meetings, as amusing and righteous as that idea must feel, because it ultimately leads to the same place as excluding them entirely. I think maybe the best solution would be outreach and education to let geologists know that hey, these people are out there, and by the way, they're coming to meetings to try to give themselves a veneer of credibility so you ought to pay attention. Not that I think turning GSA into a pit of seething hostility is the way to go, but it'd also be a good idea to make sure people know why there will occasionally be confrontations at presentations. And also maybe give some hints on how to be listening for the subtle, cagey distortions that are apparently all the rage.

Ultimately, it's just a bitch and a half to try to engage in a scientific debate with people who aren't being up front and honest to begin with. But I think this also makes the point that we need to be a little more cautious about our nods of vague approval when we're browsing the posters.

Thoughts?

Geology photos for you...

It's been a long, long weekend. I am only slightly sunburned, but my brain has melted. Have some photos:

Core photos:
Orchard Core
Almond Core

These are the two cores that were the final project for the facies analysis class I took last semester. Lots of pretty sands and muds.

Snowmastadons - these are pictures I took of some of the fossils recovered in Snowmass. I had the privilege of seeing them while I was at the Bighorn Basin Coring Project meeting at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The pictures really don't do these amazing remains justice. For more information, please see the Snowmastodon Project at DMNS. There are a lot of absolutely amazing pictures of the dig site and more fossils there.

The Amazing Kung Fu Adventure in Moab - the Shaolin Hung Mei Kung Fu School went to Moab this Memorial Day weekend to perform at the Moab Arts Festival. While we were there, we spent a few hours at Arches, and I got some beautiful pictures. I love Moab so much.

Magnetic Bacteria Fiesta on the Proto-Potomac

I met with my advisor last week, and she asked me to do some background research for her on a couple of papers she's working on. So I spent the last week-ish doing a lot of searching across the internets for papers, and then reading of papers. Considering how I feel about reading most papers, this was no small task. My schedule pretty much ran like this:

Wake up
Read papers until brain melts
Lunch break
Read more papers until hysterical giggling starts
Afternoon walk
Read papers because we live in a godless universe of pain
Mike gets home, incoherent gibbering commences

But I got this round done, and my advisor is pleased with my results so WOOOOOO GO ME. And here's a tip for my fellow newb grad students - get yourself a copy of the John Williams Superman theme song. Play it while you're writing, and then it feels like not only are you doing science, you're SAVING THE GODDAMN WORLD OH YEAH.

So anyway, I wanted to share with you all my favorite paper I read over this last week:
An Appalachian Amazon? Magnetofossil evidence for the development of a tropical river-like system in the mid-Atlantic United States during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (Kopp et al 2009)

I don't think you'll be able to read the entire paper without an AGU membership (or without using a university library computer), but if you can give it a read. It's a fun, fun, fun, and cool paper. The summary goes like this:

1) At the PETM in the Salisbury Embayment (which runs from northern Virginia to southern New Jersey on the Atlantic sheld) there's a clay layer called the Marlboro, which is "...the thickest single-domain magnetite-dominated sedimentary unit yet reported in the literature."

2) The magnetite is all from magnetofossils produced by bacteria and other organisms that need crystals of magnetite for their own nefarious purposes.

3) The conditions necessary for that kind of bacterial block party are pretty specific, since it's got to be conducive to the little critters being able to live and make their magnetite.

4) Hey, in modern day, the best example of these conditions are tropical river shelves, like the Amazon shelf. So what if the Potomac during the PETM was like that?

Of course, there's a lot of really fascinating detail from the paper that I'm leaving out. But even just the concepts are awesome and interesting.

Slow Motion Landslide

This is just awesome:



The flow looks like it's really cooking along... until people make an appearance in the video and you see just how much it's been sped up. The flow is actually moving at around 50 cm per hour, which to us fast-living humans makes it practically solid ground.

More info over at the AGU Landslide Blog.

And I totally agree with the first commenter over at the post. This thing needs some Benny Hill music, starting right when the first person pops into the frame. WIN.

Spec Tech Article Online

When I first joined the SFWA, I admitted on their forums that I'm a geology sort of person. This eventually led me to being contacted by the wonderful lady that runs the Clarion Foundation Blog and offered the chance to write the occasional bit about geology. My first piece is now up over there:

The Making of Mountains

It's a basic overview of the tectonic processes that are involved in creating most mountain ranges - and what those mountain ranges generally look like on maps. Which I hope will be helpful for people who are worldbuilding.

Not that I'm implying anyone making a map for a fantasy world is at all interested in realism, or ought to be. If your mountains are that way because the god that created the world wanted them there, good for you.

But I'll admit, there's been a time or two where I've looked at a map for a fantasy world and giggled - I'm looking at you, Mr. Tolkien. Which is silly, I know, since this is fantasy. But what can you do, I guess we each have a little item or two that just destroys the suspension of disbelief. It's the same reason I can't look at maps from WoW without snickering - I could practically write a book about how silly they are.

Hydrocarbon Formation at Depth

I think this got mentioned on this week's Skeptic's Guide to the Universe in the science or fiction. I thought it might be the fiction, but wasn't all that surprised when it turned out to be science:

Hydrocarbons in the deep earth (press release...?)
Stability of hydrocarbons at deep Earth pressures and temperatures (PNAS article)

And this of course ties back in to my previous linking and random ruminations about abiotic oil.

Mostly, I think this article is interesting, but not something explosive in terms of what we know about the formation of petroleum. I actually found this PNAS article via a post with the faceplam-worthy title "Oil and Gas Forever?"¹ on the website of The Global Warming Policy Foundation - which is apparently supposed to be "devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change." I do think that if you just check the front page of the site (The GWPF's, not the Daily Mail's), the axe they're grinding is evident. Though maybe it is with the Daily Mail's too, I wouldn't know.

But I digress.

Despite the murky chain of links I followed to find the little PNAS article, I think it's interesting. And will probably be horribly misused by excited people who think "Oil and Gas Forever" sounds like a lovely concept in general. The article itself is about computer simulations run to see if methane could form in to longer hydrocarbon chains at deep pressures and temperatures, and according to the simulations, the answer is yes. Which can be considered a point in the camp of abiogenic oil, but I would add the following cautions:

1) Whether long hydrocarbons can form abiogenically or not, that doesn't in any way mean that all hydrocarbons - or even the majority - form in that way. Please see the bit about kerogens in my previous post.

2) This doesn't really address any of the other questions important to developing hydrocarbons, such as: What's the migration path, and how long does it take to get there? (And many more...)

3) It's also not necessarily a realistic simulation. Quoting the first article:

"Our simulation study shows that methane molecules fuse to form larger hydrocarbon molecules when exposed to the very high temperatures and pressures of the Earth's upper mantle," Galli said. "We don't say that higher hydrocarbons actually occur under the realistic 'dirty' Earth mantle conditions, but we say that the pressures and temperatures alone are right for it to happen."

Emphasis mine. So, like much science that gets slapped with melodramatic headlines, this is more of a, "Huh, that's interesting," than anything else.




1 - Actually, it's not what you'd imagine out of an article with that title... it's just the LLNL press release, and a C&P from a blog post that also pretty much emphasizes that there's not really evidence for this being a major source of hydrocarbons, but that this is just sort of interesting.

Climate Change and Plate Tectonics

My awesome mom found the following article on Alternet and sent it to me, with the question "Plausible or wingnutty?" : Scientists Find Link Between Global Warming and Earthquakes

At this point, I know better than to accept at face value what an article claims that a scientific paper says, so I set out to find the paper - particularly since for once I have a chance of understanding at least some of the paper since it's about geology! I had to comb through the RawStory article that the Alternet article links to in order to actually find the paper in question. Which is:

Giampiero Iaffaldano, Laurent Husson, Hans-Peter Bunge, Monsoon speeds up Indian plate motion, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 304, Issues 3-4, 15 April 2011, Pages 503-510, ISSN 0012-821X, DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2011.02.026.

The article is available on ScienceDirect, though you may not be able to read the whole thing for yourself if you don't have a subscription to the service. You should be able to at least read the abstract, which should give you the gist of it.

So what does Alternet take out of this paper? "Climate change can affect plate tectonics, oh shit, that's why we've got all the huge earthquakes OH MY GOD."

I will point out that there's one VERY salient quote from Giampiero Iaffaldano (the lead scientist) that's in the RawStory article that Alternet leaves completely out:

Iaffaldano stressed that his study did not mean that global warming would translate to stronger earthquakes happening more often, with the relevant patterns developing over "the order of millions of years."

"Of course earthquakes do occur at the boundaries between plates because of plate motions, but our work doesn't imply at all that we will see an increase in these types of events," he told AFP.

Emphasis added by me. This little omission really leaves me wondering about the motivations of the Alternet author.

As for the paper itself, what does it actually say, and is it interesting? The paper does make a reasonable case for linking climate change with an effect on plate motion and speed. However, the important part that also gets left out of the Alternet article is that this link is explored on a million year scale. It's an examination of how the change in climate over the last 10 million years or so - the climate change in question being a strengthened Indian monsoon - has affected the erosion of the Himalayas, which ultimately lead to decreased resistance in the convergence between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

Now, personally, I find this fascinating, since it links relatively "fast" surface processes (eg weathering and erosion) to much slower tectonic processes. I think that opens up a lot of very interesting research questions - Iaffaldano points out that he's curious to see if there's a climate signature to be found in other fairly recently uplifted areas.

But I think for general interest, it's VERY important to note that when we're talking a scale of millions of years - which is what plate tectonics operates on - the current climate change we are inflicting on the planet is NOTHING in terms of duration. It's not even a blip. Now, if we keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere and manage to really fuck things up in the long, long, long, long term, maybe in ten million years future humans or aliens will be using simulations to wind the tectonic clock back and say, "DAMN, look at those plates move!" But this will have no measurable effect on our short little human lives.

It really bothers me that an interesting study is being misrepresented in this way. While I appreciate wanting to add some urgency to the issue of climate change - trust me, I do, BIG TIME - this is not the way to do it. It smells like a scare tactic, and it plays into the hands of the climate change deniers.

The Bighorn Basin Coring Project

From mid-July to the beginning of August, I'm going to be outdoors, in Wyoming. No, I'm not crazy. Yes, I have a good reason for doing this. Because in the summer, that's when we'll be coring through the Willwood Formation in the Bighorn Basin. And this is a big deal.

The Willwood Formation is about Eocene in age, and sits on top of the Paleocene Fort Union Formation. The Willwood Formation is mostly a lot of paleosols (lithified soils) and river sandstones. And more importantly, the sediments that form these rocks were laid down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and then the later, smaller thermal maximums during the Eocene. As a quick summary, taken from a thesis proposal I've been using in order to beg for money¹:

The sedimentary geologic record can be used as a window into the past conditions of the Earth, including the climate in which sediments were laid down. In the Cenozoic, there are many examples of shifts in global climate. Potentially significant to the modern climate in which humans live are the hyperthermal events that occurred during the Eocene. Hyperthermals are relatively brief (~100,000 years) warming events that coincide with the release of massive amounts of carbon from terrestrial reservoirs. The most well understood of these hyperthermals is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 55.5 million years ago. During the PETM, 6,800 Gt of carbon were added to the shared carbon pool of the atmosphere and ocean, and global temperatures rose 5-9° C (Sluijs et al. 2006, Zachos et al. 2008). Slightly more recently (53.7 Ma), the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 (ETM2, also called ELMO) occurred. ETM2 is about half the size of the PETM isotope excursion (Lourens et al. 2005), and generally much less well understood.

This project is a big deal, for several reasons. Just to start, coring is not a cheap process, and this project is funded by a pretty major grant from the NSF. But what's more important is what we hope to learn from the cores. The PETM is of great interest to climate scientists and geologists right now, because it's perhaps our best historic example of what humans are currently doing to the planet. There weren't a bunch of little proto-horses in the Eocene burning oil so they could roar around in ridiculous cars, but it was a sudden, rapid surge of carbon being put in to the atmosphere, even if the source is being debated.

This is important because, no matter how many people² in the world are short-sighted and basically sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "Lalala can't hear you" every time someone brings up this science, that doesn't make it any less real and pressing.

The paleosols, which are what I'm mostly interested in, can tell us a lot about how the local climate shifted in response to the PETM. This is important, since most human beings have a vested interest in their local environment not suddenly changing and, say, making it impossible for them to grow food. Also, one of the cores will be through the ELMO thermal maximum, which I think will end up providing a valuable set of comparative data. There's already some pretty robust data for the PETM in the Bighorn Basin, and the cores will give us even more. If we then compare that data to what we come up with from ELMO, that may give us a sense of just how far a local environment will shift pushed by how much carbon - because it may not need an input as big as that in the PETM to really mess things up.

Hopefully, that's enough to get you interested! The BBCP has a facebook page now, here. When we're actually coring during the summer, there will be a blog for the project hosted by Smithsonian, which I'll link to when it's up. I'll also no doubt be blogging about it here, and I think I'm going to be responsible for tweeting about it as well.

The coring is going to run from July 13 through August 8. I'll probably be on the rig from July 19 through the end of the project, since I'm going to try to go to TAM before I head up to Wyoming. I'll also be on the night shift the whole time - coring is a 24/7 process - so I guess I'll be documenting BBCP - After Dark³.

Once we've got our cores, we'll actually be sending them out of the country (since this is a project with multinational investigators!) to Bremen, Germany. They'll be living at the Marum core repository, which is also where all of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program cores go. That means in January 2012 (if I can find the funding for it!) I'll be heading off to Bremen for three weeks of intensive core prep, description, and sampling.

And then, science! Lots of science!

Year two of grad school is looking ridiculously exciting.


1 - It's a time-honored scientific endeavor. I wish I was joking when I say that.

2 - Here, I use the term people in place of the perhaps more true but less polite term: idiots.

3 - I actually volunteered for this. If you knew how badly I sunburn, you would understand why. I also don't like the heat, and it'll be much cooler at night.

References
Lourens, L. J., Sluijs, A., Kroon, D., Zachos, J. C., Thomas, E., Rohl, U., Bowles, J., and Raffi, I. 2005. Astronomical pacing of late Palaeocene to early Eocene global warming events. Nature, vol. 435, p. 1083-1087.

Sluijs, A., Schouten, S., Pagani, M., Woltering, M., Brinkhuis, H., Sinninghe Damsté, J. S., Dickens, G. R., Huber, M., Reichart, G.-J., Stein, R., Matthiessen, J., Lourens, L. J., Pedentchouk, N., Backman, J., Moran, K., and and the Expedition 302 Scientists. 2006. Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum. Nature, vol. 441, p. 610-613.

Zachos, J. C., Dickens, G. R., and Zeebe, R. E. 2008. An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics. Nature, vol. 451, p. 279-283.

The Sendai Earthquake

I haven't had anything to say about the Sendai earthquake; it has quite literally left me speechless with horror, and pain, and agonizing worry. I know and care about people who live there. I've been to Japan twice, myself, and hope to travel there many more times in the future. There is something more personally horrible about knowing a place - if even a little - remembering its sights and sounds and smells, and knowing that something terrible has happened there.

I can't really focus enough to think about the science behind what has happened. If you're interested in the details, the USGS is the place to go. Or Chris Rowan has an excellent synthesis of the data at Scientific American.

Garry at Geotripper has tried to put things in a perspective of why the geosciences really are important to each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not. It's an excellent post. You should read it. The one thing that really stuck with me is:

Many will watch an event like this unfold and try to find some meaning. In one sense, there was no meaning; this was something the Earth does.

There is a quote that I have in my e-mail signature, which I've seen attributed to Will Durant - though there's a good argument that it's probably an anonymous quote:

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

The Earth is so very, very old, and so very, very vast. We are tiny, and frail, and even the longest life any one of us can hope to have is less than the blink of an eye in the history of our planet. The Earth does not care about us. We have no special significance. We have only each other.

(photo from Getty Images)

In a way, studying geology has been the most humbling experience of my life. There is not a day that goes by that I am not reminded that our world operates at a scale that we cannot even begin to grasp, and that it did so long before we existed, and will continue on long after the last human is gone.

I've seen people - and here I use the term loosely - cheer, as if this is some sort of cosmic vengeance for Japanese misdeeds during World War II. I have seen others try to use this tragedy to justify the self-satisfied little voice in their head that they think is god, but is only actually themselves. First I was angry. Now, I'm just sick. I'm sick that there are people so small-minded and cruel that they take joy in the suffering of others. I'm sick, and worried, and I hurt for my fellow humans who are in so much pain, and so far away.

There is no meaning to the Sendai earthquake. There is no capricious god, no vast karmic wheel. It is simply a thing that has happened, that we as humans must struggle against, and fight to overcome, and mourn those who have died afterward. Because there is nothing more to it - it's just the summation of physics and time - what we do is so very important. We have only this world, only this life, and only each other.

(photo from the Sacramento Bee)

Doctors Without Borders
Red Cross
Japan America Society of Colorado

What I've been doing lately...

It's been a busy week... couple of weeks... month... well, from about January on. But I've been doing things with my time, at least.

For example, today I went to Denver, CO's Rally for the American Dream. With 3000 of my fellow Coloradoans - including my husband and my parents - I was in good company indeed.

We did a lot of cheering, a lot of chanting. There were maybe ten or twenty "Tea Party" counter protesters. One of whom wandered around in the crowd and tried to start trouble with his bizarre "Can't get a taxi? Blame the Dems" and "Shame on Colorado Dems for Voting for an African" signs. He was completely ignored by the crowd, and then the cops chased him off.

The IAFF was out in force, as were a lot of other union people - and ordinary citizens. At the end of the rally, the Walk for Choice took off. A lot of us joined in, since it's another important thing to support. We walked from the capital to Writer Square and back, shouting chants like, "Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate!"

At the end of the Walk for Choice, there were maybe ten crazy anti-choice people waiting at the capital, on the other side of the street. It was standard "OMG THE BABEEZ" bullshit. It was also the most surreal moment of the afternoon - there was a very odd old guy with the anti-choicers, holding a very standard sign in one hand. His other hand was raised in a fist and covered with - I swear I am not making this up - a sagging latex mask of Ronald Reagan. Overcome by just how bizarre it was, I shouted across the street, "Dude, you've got a severed head on your hand!"

So yeah. The disembodied zombie head of Ronald Reagan doesn't want you to have an abortion. Or something. Weird. Eerie.

I have also been putting a lot of time in at the core lab. If you want to see what's been eating up most of my spare time, here are some pictures from our current core, which is from a meandering river deposit. I've tried to add some description to the photos, and hopefully it's not too technical.

Busy busy!

Emerging From Under My Rock

So, where have I been since Thanksgiving? The easy yet melodramatic answer is: in a black pit of horrible despair. Really, I just mean that I was working on an intensely awful end of semester group project, which I was having to spend over twenty hours a week on. With the other end of semester goings-on, it meant that I spent several weeks where I didn't get to see my friends and barely got to see my husband while he was awake. There was other awful drama connected with it that I'd rather not go in to now; let's just say that I'm glad I survived it without ending up in jail.

Thankfully, that's all done with now! WOO! I survived my first semester of grad school. I have been assured by many friends that grad school is normally not quite this horrible, so I'm going to try not to worry too much about next semester.

The last thing I did in the semester was actually write a paper for sedimentary petrology. That was actually a lot of phone, particularly when compared to the soul-destroying awfulness of the group project. I enjoyed spending time with my thin sections, and it also means I've got a new round of photo micrographs to share! The ooid grainstone micrographs are cooler looking than the lithic arenite, though I think the diagenetic history of the lithic arenite is more interesting. But that's because sandstones tend to be a diagenetic nightmare.
Lithic arenite photo micrographs
Ooid grainstone photo micrographs

Now that school's done with until January, I'm hoping I can manage to get some writing done. I'll also be in England from December 23-January 1, since Mike and I are going to see his family. There's a lot to look forward to this vacation.

Other things:

I love my Senator. Mark Udall, I mean. Bennet, well, the best I can still say for him is that at least he isn't Ken Buck.

Tron: Legacy was a fun movie. Don't bother seeing it in 3D, in case you're one of those people that actually likes the 3D thing. It's great in 2D, and I have it on good authority that the 3D really doesn't add anything. If you want something deep, it's not the movie for you, but if you want lightcycles and Jeff Bridges being stoner!God, it's a great time.

My parents gave me a Galaxy S as my early (and only) Christmas present. I am deeply in love with my amazing phone, and am greatly enjoying the fact that I no longer have the most pathetic phone out of all of my friends.

There is now a Jack'n'Grill by my house. We went there yesterday and the food is fantastic. It's also huge. We didn't realize until we got there that it was the home of the seven pound breakfast burrito once featured on Man vs. Food. The rest of the food is in keeping with that. You can't get a burger that's smaller than 10 ounces. But it's 10 ounces of pure awesome, that's for sure.

Yesterday Kat came up to hang out. During the afternoon we worked on some writerly stuff. The end result is that I sent out five query letters to agents. I am both excited and terrified about this. I hope the rejection callouses that I've built up over the last nine months with my short stories will help me in this process.

Curse you, passive voice!

I've been reading a lot of scientific papers lately; I'm in two classes, and I'm trying to get in a sufficient amount of reading on topic before my research starts up. Easier said than done... for the most part, scientific papers tend to knock me out, even if I'm not tired when I start reading. And it's not a fatigue issue, anyway; if I'm reading something that I'm interested in, it doesn't matter how tired I am. I'll stay up until four in the morning just because I need to read One More Page.

I think papers just knock me out because, for the most part, they're badly written. There's a lot of jargon, but that's unavoidable in a specialized field. I think the bigger problem tends to be writing style. I'll go out on a limb and guess that most scientists aren't like me (writing fiction as a masochistic hobby) or my friend Evan (who has a BA in English). When I took my "writing in the geosciences" undergrad course - which I wasn't terribly impressed by - most of the other students were just miserable about being there, because they hated writing so much.

Actually disliking the process of writing is not going to help when it comes to producing a coherent, interesting paper. I suppose the more the writer feels like he or she is fighting with the English language, the more the reader will feel like it, too.

There are a lot of things that make scientific papers a giant slog to read. I think one of the major ones is the ubiquitous use of passive voice. In prose, passive voice is the kiss of death. It's something to be avoided entirely or used only sparingly, because it tends to interfere with the reader's ability to connect with the action.

Of course, scientific articles aren't fiction. Most of the time.

But the thing is, a lot of people who write scientific papers tend to use passive voice. I think it's because it makes them sound somehow more impartial - one of the big uses of passive is to remove the doer from a sentence. "A simulation was run" as opposed to "we ran a simulation." I can understand that desire, but it makes it damn hard to read and stay interested, particularly when it sounds like the methods section is just kind of running itself without any sort of human intervention.

I bring this up because I read an article in Geology over the weekend that didn't hammer the reader with passive sentences, and it was a treat to read. I was tired, and it didn't knock me out. I was interested. I felt engaged by the writing. Now, I can't really say too much about the subject itself, since it deals with climate modeling and that's not something I personally do. But the writing was definitely a step above most of the other articles I've read lately.

Go check it out for yourself, if you have Geoscience World subscription: CO2-driven ocean circulation changes as an amplifier of Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum hydrate destabilization (Lunt et al)

It's a sad statement on the writing in this field when article that doesn't make me fall asleep at my desk warrants an excited blog post.