Friday, July 27, 2012
Arizona Field Geology
Back in June my internship took a week long excursion to Martian analog sites in Arizona. We have our own blog and I finally got around to putting up my post so here it is. I would also recommend that you check out the other posts on the blog as well, we have a variety of majors in the program, from engineering to biology to physics and of course geology, so everyone took something different away from the trip.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Robots and Humans across the Solar System
Over at Wired Science, there is a post with the fairly dramatic title Humans vs. Robots: Who Should Dominate Space Exploration Now I enjoy Wired's articles despite their somewhat inflammatory titles. While this article has some interesting information, I dislike the false dichotomy between the two sides. Especially since the tech heavy readership (if the comments are anything to go by-and I know it isn't the best representation) do not understand geological field work in the slightest. The problem with robots are simply that they aren't people, they can have automatic functions and carry out experiments on other worlds, but they can't make snap decisions based on years of expertise. In short, robots are tools, but there has to be people working those tools for them to be useful.
One of the main problems for robots is the delay between the robot detecting something, sending that to Earth, Earth receiving it, deciding what to do, then sending the instructions to the robot, the robot performing that operation, sending the results back to the Earth, and then the researchers ensuring that the robot did what it was supposed to do and then analyzing the data. As it can take several minutes for radio waves to travel from Mars to Earth, the delay eats up a lot of time; in addition, the rover teams always have to consider if the robot can accomplish its goals. Can the robot make it up the hill? Is the sand too loose for it to drive through? Are the systems operating efficiently? These questions eat up time, and if you read about the MER rovers you'll see stories about the rovers spinning their wheels for several meters worth of travel, but being stuck in the sand and not moving. These are problems humans can identify and fix quickly, without the need of caretakers back on Earth.
The article brings up a comparison of Apollo 17 (the only moon trip which NASA decided that a geologist might be useful) and the MER rovers, now I love the little guys; however, it took them eight years to cover the ground that the astronauts covered in three days, and at the end of the robot's leash were human experts. I don't mean to come down on the side of Team Human (though I guess I'd have to in a robot uprising) because the robots are an invaluable tool and extremely important for our understanding and future exploration of the solar system.
There is truth in the old saying "look before you leap" and that is where robots come in, we don't know exactly what is out there, thus rather than sending humans into the unknown without a clue as to what they are landing in, we send robots to scout the trail ahead. I believe the first Mars colonists will be extremely grateful for the information gained by the different rovers and probes that went before them, that information will be invaluable for telling us the dangers facing the first human explorers, and is vitally important. In addition, NASA has been experimenting with different robotic systems to help humans in outer space, Robonaut is already aboard the ISS working with astronauts, and the engineers at NASA have also developed similar 'centaur' systems which may be useful on other planets.
Although, I'm not sure that these robots can ever replace human explorers in the long run, as even compared to a burdensome space suit they are not as natural for an astronaut to use to collect samples or to operate heavy instruments like drills. While robots will most likely be a vital part of human exploration, they will most likely work along side humans, helping planetary geologists gather data and perform experiments.
Especially if we expect to find life on Mars, we will have to rely on human explorers. Robert Zubrin, the president of the Mars Society, once commented that if you dropped a fleet of robotic explorers into Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado they wouldn't be able to find a single fossil, and most paleontologists I've talked to tend to agree with this as well. It will take meticulous human exploration, not weighed down by extensive lag times to conduct a thorough geologic investigation of the Moon and Mars. Robots will always be useful and at the forefront of planetary exploration. However, it will take the boots of trained geologists (of which there has been only been one) on the other terrestrial objects in the solar system before we can develop a clear pictures of the geologic processes throughout the Solar System.
Edit: Sorry but I realized yesterday that I had something I needed to add
Yesterday I watched the TAM9 Future in Space panel discussion, and as usual (I've seen it several times) really enjoyed it; however, one thing really bugged me. When they talked about human or robotic exploration of the planets, there was fairly diverse opinions, but they all agreed to some extent that the point of human exploration was to keep the public interested and that in the near future robots could do it better than humans. I won't comment on the feasibility of autonomous robotic telescopes in astronomy as I am not all that knowledgeable in that field. I would ask, though, that if they feel the need to comment on planetary exploration they would return the consideration and ask a planetary geologist. The problem is that the panel had two astrophysicists (three if you include Phil Plait but he didn't talk much), a cosmologist, and a mechanical engineer, but no geologists or planetary scientists.
It is not like there wasn't any highly qualified scientists with experience with public speaking or outreach that they could have contacted. In fact, Dr. Jim Bell is the president of the Planetary Society (thus he works with Bill Nye) and is on the same facility as Dr. Lawrence Krauss, so it seems like somebody could have gotten a hold of him for this. In addition, the Planetary Society's great blogger Emily Lakdawalla has her degree in geology, there is also Dr. Bell's student, Dr. Ryan Anderson, who blogs at Martian Chronicles at the AGU blog network and the MER Principle Investigator and author Dr. Steven Squyres. I don't see how none of these people were tapped for this panel. They all would have provided a different point of view than those present, and I would think that they could have provided some interesting insight into future planetary exploration.
As any immediate future in Space will involve landing on rocky bodies which planetary scientists are already studying, it again is strange that any panel discussion on this wouldn't include somebody with a background in both space science and geologic field work. I hope that any other organizations that decide to hold similar panels will include planetary scientists or geologists as astronomers usually don't do field work.
However, if you have not seen the video please do so, it is highly entertaining and very informational.
One of the main problems for robots is the delay between the robot detecting something, sending that to Earth, Earth receiving it, deciding what to do, then sending the instructions to the robot, the robot performing that operation, sending the results back to the Earth, and then the researchers ensuring that the robot did what it was supposed to do and then analyzing the data. As it can take several minutes for radio waves to travel from Mars to Earth, the delay eats up a lot of time; in addition, the rover teams always have to consider if the robot can accomplish its goals. Can the robot make it up the hill? Is the sand too loose for it to drive through? Are the systems operating efficiently? These questions eat up time, and if you read about the MER rovers you'll see stories about the rovers spinning their wheels for several meters worth of travel, but being stuck in the sand and not moving. These are problems humans can identify and fix quickly, without the need of caretakers back on Earth.
The article brings up a comparison of Apollo 17 (the only moon trip which NASA decided that a geologist might be useful) and the MER rovers, now I love the little guys; however, it took them eight years to cover the ground that the astronauts covered in three days, and at the end of the robot's leash were human experts. I don't mean to come down on the side of Team Human (though I guess I'd have to in a robot uprising) because the robots are an invaluable tool and extremely important for our understanding and future exploration of the solar system.
There is truth in the old saying "look before you leap" and that is where robots come in, we don't know exactly what is out there, thus rather than sending humans into the unknown without a clue as to what they are landing in, we send robots to scout the trail ahead. I believe the first Mars colonists will be extremely grateful for the information gained by the different rovers and probes that went before them, that information will be invaluable for telling us the dangers facing the first human explorers, and is vitally important. In addition, NASA has been experimenting with different robotic systems to help humans in outer space, Robonaut is already aboard the ISS working with astronauts, and the engineers at NASA have also developed similar 'centaur' systems which may be useful on other planets.
Although, I'm not sure that these robots can ever replace human explorers in the long run, as even compared to a burdensome space suit they are not as natural for an astronaut to use to collect samples or to operate heavy instruments like drills. While robots will most likely be a vital part of human exploration, they will most likely work along side humans, helping planetary geologists gather data and perform experiments.
Especially if we expect to find life on Mars, we will have to rely on human explorers. Robert Zubrin, the president of the Mars Society, once commented that if you dropped a fleet of robotic explorers into Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado they wouldn't be able to find a single fossil, and most paleontologists I've talked to tend to agree with this as well. It will take meticulous human exploration, not weighed down by extensive lag times to conduct a thorough geologic investigation of the Moon and Mars. Robots will always be useful and at the forefront of planetary exploration. However, it will take the boots of trained geologists (of which there has been only been one) on the other terrestrial objects in the solar system before we can develop a clear pictures of the geologic processes throughout the Solar System.
Edit: Sorry but I realized yesterday that I had something I needed to add
Yesterday I watched the TAM9 Future in Space panel discussion, and as usual (I've seen it several times) really enjoyed it; however, one thing really bugged me. When they talked about human or robotic exploration of the planets, there was fairly diverse opinions, but they all agreed to some extent that the point of human exploration was to keep the public interested and that in the near future robots could do it better than humans. I won't comment on the feasibility of autonomous robotic telescopes in astronomy as I am not all that knowledgeable in that field. I would ask, though, that if they feel the need to comment on planetary exploration they would return the consideration and ask a planetary geologist. The problem is that the panel had two astrophysicists (three if you include Phil Plait but he didn't talk much), a cosmologist, and a mechanical engineer, but no geologists or planetary scientists.
It is not like there wasn't any highly qualified scientists with experience with public speaking or outreach that they could have contacted. In fact, Dr. Jim Bell is the president of the Planetary Society (thus he works with Bill Nye) and is on the same facility as Dr. Lawrence Krauss, so it seems like somebody could have gotten a hold of him for this. In addition, the Planetary Society's great blogger Emily Lakdawalla has her degree in geology, there is also Dr. Bell's student, Dr. Ryan Anderson, who blogs at Martian Chronicles at the AGU blog network and the MER Principle Investigator and author Dr. Steven Squyres. I don't see how none of these people were tapped for this panel. They all would have provided a different point of view than those present, and I would think that they could have provided some interesting insight into future planetary exploration.
As any immediate future in Space will involve landing on rocky bodies which planetary scientists are already studying, it again is strange that any panel discussion on this wouldn't include somebody with a background in both space science and geologic field work. I hope that any other organizations that decide to hold similar panels will include planetary scientists or geologists as astronomers usually don't do field work.
However, if you have not seen the video please do so, it is highly entertaining and very informational.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Political "Science" versus Geology
I was once a political science major, and while it wasn't a huge waste of my time, I wouldn't exactly describe it as a positive experience. For one thing I quickly grew tired of, as a fellow science major put it, "classes where my opinion counts more than facts" secondly I quickly fell in love with geology after my first class, and changed from another directionless college student, to a dedicated geology student because it is simply more fun.
Well recently I came across a post at Cosmic Variance about this New York Times editorial. If you have seen either, the editorial basically said that poly sci researchers should not bother themselves with testing their hypothesis as unsubstantiated assertions work just as well. Well as you can expect every scientist who saw that article was understandably upset about it, and my main problem goes right back to the reason I dropped that major, Political Science isn't a science no matter how much they tell themselves otherwise. At best it should be called Political Studies, as you do study political systems but because you can't come up with any universal theories or even agreement within the discipline about important phenomena, like why do voters vote the way they do.
However, I can be somewhat sympathetic, as when political studies researches look at the success that physics has had in the past centuries it can seem daunting to try to replicate that work. It would be hard for just about any field to have analogous successes to Newtonian Mechanics or General Relativity, but it is important to remember the work it took to get there, and that the physicists' work hasn't finished. Although I would assert that political science (if it followed the scientific method in any sense or fashion) would resemble Geology more than anything.
You might wonder why I would say that. Well first off I don't mean to disparage geology at all by comparing it to political science; however, if political scientists acted like scientists, their research would probably be very similar to geology. First off the whole idea that the present is the key to the past would be a necessary part to this hypothetical political science as it is to geology. Presumably political scientists would have to look through much of history and retrace events that led to important political events, then they would have to hypothesize a cause for this change, find evidence to support their assertion WHILE PAYING SPECIAL ATTENTION TO EVIDENCE THAT CHALLENGES OR DISPROVES THEIR HYPOTHESIS. That was in all-caps because that is where political studies abandons all pretext of following the scientific method, and when they do provide evidence they cherry pick it, ignoring inconvenient facts. I know that it is human nature to do so, which is why political studies needs true peer reviewed journals if they want a legitimate claim to the "science" part of the field.
Political Scientists will say that the systems they study are too complicated to follow the scientific method, thus they should be exempt. However, geology is incredibly more complicated, it covers almost 4.5 billion years of Earth history, looking at evidence which has been changed into new and hard to read forms or in some case destroyed and now requires inference from analogous areas elsewhere in the world. Geologists try to understand how mountains formed, the history of life, and they retrace the movement of continents backwards in time; in addition, I would bet that nearly every geologist has seen a geologic cross-section that resembles a Jackson Pollack painting more than any stratigraphic layers deposited under Steno's laws; however, dedicated work by many real scientists can eventually clarify these confusing maps and turn them into coherent stories.
In the end, though if those involved in political studies want to be considered scientists they would have to start applying statistical methods and probably create mathematical and computer models to try and explain their research areas. In addition, they will have to learn to look at all of their previously hypothesis with a skeptical eye and evaluate them based off of the evidence not whether or not they align with their personal beliefs. This would require a tremendous amount of work to so completely change the discipline, and I doubt that those involved would be willing to do so. This is a shame as they could presumably discover some fascinating aspects of human nature, but until it does so I will refuse to call it a science.
Well recently I came across a post at Cosmic Variance about this New York Times editorial. If you have seen either, the editorial basically said that poly sci researchers should not bother themselves with testing their hypothesis as unsubstantiated assertions work just as well. Well as you can expect every scientist who saw that article was understandably upset about it, and my main problem goes right back to the reason I dropped that major, Political Science isn't a science no matter how much they tell themselves otherwise. At best it should be called Political Studies, as you do study political systems but because you can't come up with any universal theories or even agreement within the discipline about important phenomena, like why do voters vote the way they do.
However, I can be somewhat sympathetic, as when political studies researches look at the success that physics has had in the past centuries it can seem daunting to try to replicate that work. It would be hard for just about any field to have analogous successes to Newtonian Mechanics or General Relativity, but it is important to remember the work it took to get there, and that the physicists' work hasn't finished. Although I would assert that political science (if it followed the scientific method in any sense or fashion) would resemble Geology more than anything.
You might wonder why I would say that. Well first off I don't mean to disparage geology at all by comparing it to political science; however, if political scientists acted like scientists, their research would probably be very similar to geology. First off the whole idea that the present is the key to the past would be a necessary part to this hypothetical political science as it is to geology. Presumably political scientists would have to look through much of history and retrace events that led to important political events, then they would have to hypothesize a cause for this change, find evidence to support their assertion WHILE PAYING SPECIAL ATTENTION TO EVIDENCE THAT CHALLENGES OR DISPROVES THEIR HYPOTHESIS. That was in all-caps because that is where political studies abandons all pretext of following the scientific method, and when they do provide evidence they cherry pick it, ignoring inconvenient facts. I know that it is human nature to do so, which is why political studies needs true peer reviewed journals if they want a legitimate claim to the "science" part of the field.
Political Scientists will say that the systems they study are too complicated to follow the scientific method, thus they should be exempt. However, geology is incredibly more complicated, it covers almost 4.5 billion years of Earth history, looking at evidence which has been changed into new and hard to read forms or in some case destroyed and now requires inference from analogous areas elsewhere in the world. Geologists try to understand how mountains formed, the history of life, and they retrace the movement of continents backwards in time; in addition, I would bet that nearly every geologist has seen a geologic cross-section that resembles a Jackson Pollack painting more than any stratigraphic layers deposited under Steno's laws; however, dedicated work by many real scientists can eventually clarify these confusing maps and turn them into coherent stories.
In the end, though if those involved in political studies want to be considered scientists they would have to start applying statistical methods and probably create mathematical and computer models to try and explain their research areas. In addition, they will have to learn to look at all of their previously hypothesis with a skeptical eye and evaluate them based off of the evidence not whether or not they align with their personal beliefs. This would require a tremendous amount of work to so completely change the discipline, and I doubt that those involved would be willing to do so. This is a shame as they could presumably discover some fascinating aspects of human nature, but until it does so I will refuse to call it a science.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Accretionary Wedge 44: My Most Important Teacher
Metageologist over at the All-geo blog network has put out calls for posts about most important teachers, which really wasn't something I had to think much about. I easily could identify that person.
My sophomore year of high school I decided to participate in Science Olympiad, I wasn't sure what I would do, but I knew I liked science so I went out. Well at the first meeting I committed a great heresy; when my friend asked me to team up with her to try out for the Rocks and Minerals competition, I told her no, that it would be too boring. However, she called in an old favor or something like that, and twisted my arm into trying out for the team.
I barely knew anything about rocks and next to nothing about minerals, so when I met up with the team mentor I had no idea what to expect, but I was quickly proved wrong in my initial assumptions. The mentor, Coach Ford, was a science teacher I had never met, but I had only been on campus for a few weeks so it wasn't suprising. He was fairly tall, a little lanky, grey and wrinkled, but with a kind and wiley smile. He spoke extremely softly, and if the room wasn't silent you could easily miss almost every word he said. We started in on minerals, which was interesting, especially the crystalline geometries, though I had some trouble grasping them at first.
I wouldn't say I was that interested in the subject until he opened up a textbook and went over the rock cycle. I believe we might have gone over it once before, but after having a grasp on the basics of geology, I was blown away by the implications of the cycle. The idea that all material on the Earth had been recycled was amazing and I sat at home dumbstruck that night. Then he started talking about igneous rocks, and showed us the basic identification chart and I was sold hook, line, and sinker.
If that's all he had done it probably wouldn't have been enough to become my most important teacher; however, you have to understand the trouble he had to go through to reach me. First off, I was a high school athlete, so instead of meeting after class we had to meet after wrestling practice (either at 7:00 or 8:00 pm) and then he would go over geology (as well as other competitions such as astronomy, ecology, oceanography, etc.) for up to two or three hours, thus he came back to work at all hours of the night just to teach us subjects; not because it was his job, but just because he wanted to.
Then during my junior and senior years, I took his classes and he still liked me afterwards, which is in of itself somewhat impressive. I wasn't a good student, I got good grades, but I didn't pay attention, I had a tendency to nap in classes, and was given to flights of fancy. School had never been challenging and I was bored, but he didn't get frustrated; instead he inspired me. We learned about a numerous miraculous phenomena, he took us on field trips, and he made us teach each other. Other classes were fun and other classes were useful, but the two classes I took (Environmental Science and Astronomy, Meteorology, Geology) were the most useful and the most interesting.
The best part of his classes was that he pushed scientific literacy; he honestly believed that our lives would be improved by a greater understanding of the natural world. Those of his students who took advantage of his teachings were greatly improved by this philosophy, although most probably didn't do so as we lived in a very religiously conservative area, and I would say this made his work even more impressive as he reached out his hand to students who slapped it away.
Suffice it to say that I would not be in this amazing field if it was not for Coach Ford, to the extent that whenever I receive a great opportunity (like a NASA internship) I e-mail him and thank him for inspiring me so much.
My sophomore year of high school I decided to participate in Science Olympiad, I wasn't sure what I would do, but I knew I liked science so I went out. Well at the first meeting I committed a great heresy; when my friend asked me to team up with her to try out for the Rocks and Minerals competition, I told her no, that it would be too boring. However, she called in an old favor or something like that, and twisted my arm into trying out for the team.
I barely knew anything about rocks and next to nothing about minerals, so when I met up with the team mentor I had no idea what to expect, but I was quickly proved wrong in my initial assumptions. The mentor, Coach Ford, was a science teacher I had never met, but I had only been on campus for a few weeks so it wasn't suprising. He was fairly tall, a little lanky, grey and wrinkled, but with a kind and wiley smile. He spoke extremely softly, and if the room wasn't silent you could easily miss almost every word he said. We started in on minerals, which was interesting, especially the crystalline geometries, though I had some trouble grasping them at first.
I wouldn't say I was that interested in the subject until he opened up a textbook and went over the rock cycle. I believe we might have gone over it once before, but after having a grasp on the basics of geology, I was blown away by the implications of the cycle. The idea that all material on the Earth had been recycled was amazing and I sat at home dumbstruck that night. Then he started talking about igneous rocks, and showed us the basic identification chart and I was sold hook, line, and sinker.
If that's all he had done it probably wouldn't have been enough to become my most important teacher; however, you have to understand the trouble he had to go through to reach me. First off, I was a high school athlete, so instead of meeting after class we had to meet after wrestling practice (either at 7:00 or 8:00 pm) and then he would go over geology (as well as other competitions such as astronomy, ecology, oceanography, etc.) for up to two or three hours, thus he came back to work at all hours of the night just to teach us subjects; not because it was his job, but just because he wanted to.
Then during my junior and senior years, I took his classes and he still liked me afterwards, which is in of itself somewhat impressive. I wasn't a good student, I got good grades, but I didn't pay attention, I had a tendency to nap in classes, and was given to flights of fancy. School had never been challenging and I was bored, but he didn't get frustrated; instead he inspired me. We learned about a numerous miraculous phenomena, he took us on field trips, and he made us teach each other. Other classes were fun and other classes were useful, but the two classes I took (Environmental Science and Astronomy, Meteorology, Geology) were the most useful and the most interesting.
The best part of his classes was that he pushed scientific literacy; he honestly believed that our lives would be improved by a greater understanding of the natural world. Those of his students who took advantage of his teachings were greatly improved by this philosophy, although most probably didn't do so as we lived in a very religiously conservative area, and I would say this made his work even more impressive as he reached out his hand to students who slapped it away.
Suffice it to say that I would not be in this amazing field if it was not for Coach Ford, to the extent that whenever I receive a great opportunity (like a NASA internship) I e-mail him and thank him for inspiring me so much.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
New Mexico Geology: Where Rocks Grow out of the Ground
I had this mostly written back in January, but then I got distracted and forgot about it. I will do my best to finish the New Mexico Geology series. Sorry for the delay
Almost a year ago I participated in a community service project called Eastern In Action, which is basically a beautification project for the town, and if you had ever seen a town in Southeast New Mexico you would think that would be sorely needed. Unfortunately, there is no oversight process so anybody can ask for help, so instead of being sent to help the elderly, disabled, or disenfranchised who needed the help, my group was sent to help a well off farmer in his fields. Now besides doing 'charity' work for a man who could afford to pay for that service, I was most annoyed at the fact that the problems in his fields were his own fault.
Why you might ask? Well you have to understand that the area I live in has a classic arid soil referred to as caliche soil. Caliche is easily identifiable due to the layer of calcite at varying layers within the soil. So what does this have to do with the greedy farmer? I'm getting to that; calcite dissolves in water so on the rare occasion that we do get rain, the mineral goes into solution, and then in the more common high heat, the water evaporates and as it does it pulls the calcite towards the surface. So when the farmer was watering his fields he was speeding up the caliche forming process, pulling up the calcite very quickly and creating numerous evaporite rocks in his fields. Thus we toiled in his fields for several hours in order to rid the field of the rocks he created.
Moral of the story? Mostly that trying to grow water intensive crops in an arid (well semi-arid, but it feels like a desert) environment is not a good idea. However, if you feel like doing so learn from the cultures who have been successful in that goal. One such group are the Mormons in Utah. When they built their society in Utah the only water they had access to was from the Great Salt Lake, so in order to water their crops without salting the land and rendering it useless they saturated the soil pushing the salt deeper into the ground away from the plant roots. However, when there is very little water to go around this doesn't work, and since we rely on fossil aquifers this solution is unworkable and would kill the area..
However, here are a few photographs of a cut into the soil, with the caliche soil is brilliantly displayed.
So this is probably the most interesting geology near the college, but there is one more thing. The area is a very slight valley and this is because it was once a large meandering river. The water dried up after the last ice age when the Pecos River was formed; this River is much faster and thus moved up through what is now New Mexico and pirated the ancient streams that once flowed off of the Rio Grande Rift.
After the river was cut off, some of its water was stored in the sands it once carried forming a perched aquifer (an aquifer sitting on top of an impermeable layer) so when settlers first came to Portales they had ample water and like all humans they quickly depleted them. In fact there used to be year long lakes in Portales where the ground dropped beneath the water table, something most of the students at the university would find quite surprising. Well I exaggerate, there is still one aquifer that hasn't been depleted, but the geniuses out here put a dairy on top of it because there is no way that the dairy could pollute the aquifer with E.coli.
Luckily we do have the Ogallala Aquifer to fall back on
Right there, where the star is, you know where it is losing water instead of recharging. Hey, can I come live with one of you? I don't think there is going to be much water here anymore.
Almost a year ago I participated in a community service project called Eastern In Action, which is basically a beautification project for the town, and if you had ever seen a town in Southeast New Mexico you would think that would be sorely needed. Unfortunately, there is no oversight process so anybody can ask for help, so instead of being sent to help the elderly, disabled, or disenfranchised who needed the help, my group was sent to help a well off farmer in his fields. Now besides doing 'charity' work for a man who could afford to pay for that service, I was most annoyed at the fact that the problems in his fields were his own fault.
Why you might ask? Well you have to understand that the area I live in has a classic arid soil referred to as caliche soil. Caliche is easily identifiable due to the layer of calcite at varying layers within the soil. So what does this have to do with the greedy farmer? I'm getting to that; calcite dissolves in water so on the rare occasion that we do get rain, the mineral goes into solution, and then in the more common high heat, the water evaporates and as it does it pulls the calcite towards the surface. So when the farmer was watering his fields he was speeding up the caliche forming process, pulling up the calcite very quickly and creating numerous evaporite rocks in his fields. Thus we toiled in his fields for several hours in order to rid the field of the rocks he created.
Moral of the story? Mostly that trying to grow water intensive crops in an arid (well semi-arid, but it feels like a desert) environment is not a good idea. However, if you feel like doing so learn from the cultures who have been successful in that goal. One such group are the Mormons in Utah. When they built their society in Utah the only water they had access to was from the Great Salt Lake, so in order to water their crops without salting the land and rendering it useless they saturated the soil pushing the salt deeper into the ground away from the plant roots. However, when there is very little water to go around this doesn't work, and since we rely on fossil aquifers this solution is unworkable and would kill the area..
However, here are a few photographs of a cut into the soil, with the caliche soil is brilliantly displayed.
 |
| The white rocks are evaporite calcite minerals |
 |
| This is right above the main layer, with a hammer for scale |
 |
| Here is the main layer with a hammer in it |
After the river was cut off, some of its water was stored in the sands it once carried forming a perched aquifer (an aquifer sitting on top of an impermeable layer) so when settlers first came to Portales they had ample water and like all humans they quickly depleted them. In fact there used to be year long lakes in Portales where the ground dropped beneath the water table, something most of the students at the university would find quite surprising. Well I exaggerate, there is still one aquifer that hasn't been depleted, but the geniuses out here put a dairy on top of it because there is no way that the dairy could pollute the aquifer with E.coli.
Luckily we do have the Ogallala Aquifer to fall back on
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Falling into Jargon
Last week was spring break and I took the opportunity to take visit two universities in Colorado, CU Boulder and Colorado School of Mines, which I am interested in for graduate school. Because I value her opinion above all others (in many cases my own), my fiance came along for the ride. I had an amazing time, meeting with two professors who apparently went to graduate school together and are approaching very similar problems in fairly different ways. I learned a lot about planetary geology and what would be expected of me in my next step.
However, when we were driving back my fiance told me that when we were talking to the two professors that she felt stupid and couldn't understand what we were talking about. Now she is an elementary education major, not a science major, and she hasn't taken any high level science classes; however, I view her as representative of the interested public, and that started me thinking about the nature of science communication, but first a tangent.
I believe in science outreach, and have started trying to reach out to the community around me. This started about two years ago when my RA friend told me about a program one of the dorms was about to put on which was going to include an astronomy portion. However, she was only going to tell stories about constellations, so I volunteered and buffed up on astronomy and went over to talk to college students. I gave a quick little presentation about the solar system, and then answered questions for about 45 minutes mostly relating to common misconceptions and some controversies (i.e. Pluto's status). This was my first attempt at outreach, which was in a field I'm interested in, but cannot actually study yet (my school only offers one astronomy class), and even though my information came largely through popular science books, blogs, and miscellaneous articles, my friend felt the need to "translate" me into normal speak.
That time I couldn't even recognize the jargon I used, and couldn't understand why college aged students couldn't follow what I was saying (to be fair, most of my school isn't exactly known for academic rigor, and these were mostly art and music majors). This last week, though, I could understand what caused my fiance's difficulty in understanding our conversations in which we used terms like astrobiology, geochemistry, geophyics, obscure mineral names, and talked about the mundane in highly technical terms. For example, instead of water studies we said hydrology, these are words that come from common terms, but used in highly precise terms which are daunting to the uninitiated. Most people will associate "hydro" with water and "ology" usually indicates a science of some sort (barring astrology) thus many people can hazard a guess that hydrology is a "water science" but they will also not know what this "water science" entails.
I don't fault the professors for this. They weren't trying to communicate to my fiance. They were telling me what they did and giving me the information I needed and wanted to make an informed decision about their program. However, this is something we have to take into account when communicating to those uninitiated into the terminology of science; just because a word has become second nature to you, where you can't even remember where you learned it, doesn't mean anyone outside your field understands it. For example, last summer when you collected undergraduates from different STEM fields and we talked about what we were doing, everyone had to stop and explain the more technical terms. I explained what calderas and maar's were and I learned about mechanical engineering and chemical analysis.
My suggestion is if you are talking to people who are in high school or older, identify where you are going to use jargon and make sure you explain it, but please make sure you use it so that those who are not in your field can learn about the terms and become familiar with it. Give plenty of time for questions (I think Q&A sessions are more important than the lectures in these situations) and make sure that you are yourself. If you have decided to go out of your way to talk to somebody unfamiliar with your work about the basics, you have to love it and that translates really well.
I enjoy outreach, my day job is currently a science tutor at my college and most of the people who come to my sessions don't like the subject they are learning, and I try to fix that. I've gotten so excited about talking about evolution that my coworkers had to ask me to shut up (my voice kind of carries). My family loves to ask me questions (during winter break I explained how the periodic table is set up and what that can tell us to my dad) and my fiance loves to test me by asking about various science topics when we go to different places (like how ocean waves work when we were at the beach and where does the wind come from during an especially windy drive home). I even had the amazing opportunity to explain what NASA is doing in the future to a bunch of elementary school kids, and I really encourage anyone in the STEM fields to talk to kids; they are a trip.
However, when we were driving back my fiance told me that when we were talking to the two professors that she felt stupid and couldn't understand what we were talking about. Now she is an elementary education major, not a science major, and she hasn't taken any high level science classes; however, I view her as representative of the interested public, and that started me thinking about the nature of science communication, but first a tangent.
I believe in science outreach, and have started trying to reach out to the community around me. This started about two years ago when my RA friend told me about a program one of the dorms was about to put on which was going to include an astronomy portion. However, she was only going to tell stories about constellations, so I volunteered and buffed up on astronomy and went over to talk to college students. I gave a quick little presentation about the solar system, and then answered questions for about 45 minutes mostly relating to common misconceptions and some controversies (i.e. Pluto's status). This was my first attempt at outreach, which was in a field I'm interested in, but cannot actually study yet (my school only offers one astronomy class), and even though my information came largely through popular science books, blogs, and miscellaneous articles, my friend felt the need to "translate" me into normal speak.
That time I couldn't even recognize the jargon I used, and couldn't understand why college aged students couldn't follow what I was saying (to be fair, most of my school isn't exactly known for academic rigor, and these were mostly art and music majors). This last week, though, I could understand what caused my fiance's difficulty in understanding our conversations in which we used terms like astrobiology, geochemistry, geophyics, obscure mineral names, and talked about the mundane in highly technical terms. For example, instead of water studies we said hydrology, these are words that come from common terms, but used in highly precise terms which are daunting to the uninitiated. Most people will associate "hydro" with water and "ology" usually indicates a science of some sort (barring astrology) thus many people can hazard a guess that hydrology is a "water science" but they will also not know what this "water science" entails.
I don't fault the professors for this. They weren't trying to communicate to my fiance. They were telling me what they did and giving me the information I needed and wanted to make an informed decision about their program. However, this is something we have to take into account when communicating to those uninitiated into the terminology of science; just because a word has become second nature to you, where you can't even remember where you learned it, doesn't mean anyone outside your field understands it. For example, last summer when you collected undergraduates from different STEM fields and we talked about what we were doing, everyone had to stop and explain the more technical terms. I explained what calderas and maar's were and I learned about mechanical engineering and chemical analysis.
My suggestion is if you are talking to people who are in high school or older, identify where you are going to use jargon and make sure you explain it, but please make sure you use it so that those who are not in your field can learn about the terms and become familiar with it. Give plenty of time for questions (I think Q&A sessions are more important than the lectures in these situations) and make sure that you are yourself. If you have decided to go out of your way to talk to somebody unfamiliar with your work about the basics, you have to love it and that translates really well.
I enjoy outreach, my day job is currently a science tutor at my college and most of the people who come to my sessions don't like the subject they are learning, and I try to fix that. I've gotten so excited about talking about evolution that my coworkers had to ask me to shut up (my voice kind of carries). My family loves to ask me questions (during winter break I explained how the periodic table is set up and what that can tell us to my dad) and my fiance loves to test me by asking about various science topics when we go to different places (like how ocean waves work when we were at the beach and where does the wind come from during an especially windy drive home). I even had the amazing opportunity to explain what NASA is doing in the future to a bunch of elementary school kids, and I really encourage anyone in the STEM fields to talk to kids; they are a trip.
Friday, January 27, 2012
When My Optimism and My Cynicism Collide:
A lot has already been said about Newt Gingrich's promise of a moon base; however, I still want to talk about it because I sort of agree with the two ways this statement has been met-optimism and cynicism. First lets go with cynicism, it should be obvious this is shameless pandering from a politician who will hedge back and forth on science insulting it or complementing it depending on when it suits him. I am almost positive that if he was elected he would either forget all about or make a half-hearted attempt which wouldn't work. I think The Crux had one of the best cynical responses, and I have to agree with all of their points; however, I don't have to like it.
We should always meet all claims of politicians with skepticism, and just because they pander to our interests (or our dreams) doesn't mean we should throw away our rational thought and embrace them. I do not think many, if any, space professionals, students, or knowledgeable public took these promises at face value, though judging by some of the comments r/space the interested public did, and that's not good. It is very easy for politicians to play to people's emotions on a subject like this, and we have to be careful and not be taken for a ride. So it is a good thing that many people like Neil deGrasse Tyson are coming out to temper expectations. Newt's plan is unworkable, and anybody who pays attention to the space industry knows it won't work.
One last thing about Gingrich, in an early speech he criticized NASA as an overblown bureaucracy and said they have had "failure after failure" well maybe NASA, like any government agency has a lot of red tape, but are the Mars Exploration Rovers failures? They have outlasted their warranties by an incredible amount. They were supposed to last three months, and their mission duration is now measured in years.
Last year when I told my friends, family, and coworkers that I had an internship with NASA they were astounded and impressed. Why? Because NASA is on the frontier of science, they are the dream. It is the only government agency that continues to inspire everyone from small children dreaming about the moon and stars to college students planning their careers in STEM fields to old men and women thinking about the changes they have seen and the changes yet to come. If you dismiss NASA, you are ignorant of what they have accomplished and I pity you for living in that darkness.
Okay, on the optimistic side I want a moon base! A moon base is an amazing idea, and those of you interested in engineering or space science should go wide-eyed and misty just thinking about it. That was my initial reaction when I heard Newt's statement, then I crashed back down to reality.
However, I couldn't stand the hyper-cynical reactions many people had after the speech, many people who are fascinated with space had a visceral reaction to the speech. And understandingly so, because here is another politician offering something we love for votes with no intention to follow through. Though I can see some good coming from this speech though, maybe a lot of Americans may remember that they love space and they want this base. When they remember they may come looking for information on it, and be exposed to some amazing science and learn a thing or two (or hundred).
Let's not let our cynicism overcome us, this is important and a permanent human presence on another world is something we need to do, not just to prove we can do it, but to give us the ability to do amazing science and to start our manned exploration of the solar system and beyond. And if you don't think our government is investing enough in exploration write to your representatives and tell them so, and if they don't vote the way you want, vote them out. At this point, if we can change a few minds on capital hill that would be an improvement.
An article on io9 has some amazing reasons why; however, I want to go farther. We don't know much about the moon, there is only so much remote sensing and a half a dozen manned missions can tell us. What we need to really understand the moon are boots on the lunar surface. We need planetary scientists doing field work to further our understanding of the moon and how the Earth-Moon system formed. In addition, this will be valuable experience for Mars. Not just in how to live and work in the isolated environment of space travel, but also the development of new scientific tools and field techniques that will be needed. Planetary geologists will need new ways of taking measurements because a space suit isn't as easy to move around in as a flannel shirt and cargo pants. We have been studying the Earth for centuries and we still don't understand every geologic process on it; we need field planetary geologist to map the structure and features of the moon, and then we need field versions of every imaginable discipline of planetary science to really understand the moon. Then we will have to do this for every planet or moon that we want to understand and we can land on, and the adventure will be incredible.
I would love for Gingrich's plan to work, because by the time the moon base was up and working I would be finished with my doctorate and I still young enough to work there. I want that, we live in the future and we should have a moon base.
We should always meet all claims of politicians with skepticism, and just because they pander to our interests (or our dreams) doesn't mean we should throw away our rational thought and embrace them. I do not think many, if any, space professionals, students, or knowledgeable public took these promises at face value, though judging by some of the comments r/space the interested public did, and that's not good. It is very easy for politicians to play to people's emotions on a subject like this, and we have to be careful and not be taken for a ride. So it is a good thing that many people like Neil deGrasse Tyson are coming out to temper expectations. Newt's plan is unworkable, and anybody who pays attention to the space industry knows it won't work.
One last thing about Gingrich, in an early speech he criticized NASA as an overblown bureaucracy and said they have had "failure after failure" well maybe NASA, like any government agency has a lot of red tape, but are the Mars Exploration Rovers failures? They have outlasted their warranties by an incredible amount. They were supposed to last three months, and their mission duration is now measured in years.
Last year when I told my friends, family, and coworkers that I had an internship with NASA they were astounded and impressed. Why? Because NASA is on the frontier of science, they are the dream. It is the only government agency that continues to inspire everyone from small children dreaming about the moon and stars to college students planning their careers in STEM fields to old men and women thinking about the changes they have seen and the changes yet to come. If you dismiss NASA, you are ignorant of what they have accomplished and I pity you for living in that darkness.
Okay, on the optimistic side I want a moon base! A moon base is an amazing idea, and those of you interested in engineering or space science should go wide-eyed and misty just thinking about it. That was my initial reaction when I heard Newt's statement, then I crashed back down to reality.
However, I couldn't stand the hyper-cynical reactions many people had after the speech, many people who are fascinated with space had a visceral reaction to the speech. And understandingly so, because here is another politician offering something we love for votes with no intention to follow through. Though I can see some good coming from this speech though, maybe a lot of Americans may remember that they love space and they want this base. When they remember they may come looking for information on it, and be exposed to some amazing science and learn a thing or two (or hundred).
Let's not let our cynicism overcome us, this is important and a permanent human presence on another world is something we need to do, not just to prove we can do it, but to give us the ability to do amazing science and to start our manned exploration of the solar system and beyond. And if you don't think our government is investing enough in exploration write to your representatives and tell them so, and if they don't vote the way you want, vote them out. At this point, if we can change a few minds on capital hill that would be an improvement.
An article on io9 has some amazing reasons why; however, I want to go farther. We don't know much about the moon, there is only so much remote sensing and a half a dozen manned missions can tell us. What we need to really understand the moon are boots on the lunar surface. We need planetary scientists doing field work to further our understanding of the moon and how the Earth-Moon system formed. In addition, this will be valuable experience for Mars. Not just in how to live and work in the isolated environment of space travel, but also the development of new scientific tools and field techniques that will be needed. Planetary geologists will need new ways of taking measurements because a space suit isn't as easy to move around in as a flannel shirt and cargo pants. We have been studying the Earth for centuries and we still don't understand every geologic process on it; we need field planetary geologist to map the structure and features of the moon, and then we need field versions of every imaginable discipline of planetary science to really understand the moon. Then we will have to do this for every planet or moon that we want to understand and we can land on, and the adventure will be incredible.
I would love for Gingrich's plan to work, because by the time the moon base was up and working I would be finished with my doctorate and I still young enough to work there. I want that, we live in the future and we should have a moon base.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Update on Rio Grande Rift
In my last post on the Rio Grande Rift, I was hesitant to say if it was still spreading. I don't have access to all the journals, I had heard some conflicting opinions from a few geologists, and my cursory search didn't find a lot of information. However, the January issue of Geology did have a study dealing with exactly that. And guess what, the rift is spreading, about one inch every forty years, so that's pretty cool. I can't wait to read the full article (once I get my reimbursement check from my school and can afford to pay my student dues to the GSA).
However, due to my status as a college kid with limited funds; I unfortunately did not read about this from a cool source, instead I learned about it from this Yahoo News article which didn't even turn out to be an intelligent source. It doesn't start out bad, but then it starts saying a few things which demonstrate a lack of real understanding about geology. First off, it says this is a very slow pace (direct quote is "paltry rate", and it is compared to Usain Bolt or a landslide or really anything we deal with in our day to day experience. However, this is geology so almost everything happens slowly, so if you are going to say it happens slowly compare it to another plate. It is moving slowly compared to other plates which can move around 2.5 cm a year, while this rift is widening around 1 mm per year, 1/250 slower!
Then, the author makes a comment about controlling the expansion which seems odd and raised a few questions. First, why, it is barely moving and at those rates shouldn't disrupt humans at all; however, stopping the motion would just mean all the energy is pent up and then released when whatever is keeping from moving fails, causing an earthquake. Second, since when is it the goal of geology to stop plate tectonics? I've heard of geo-engineering projects, but I don't think anybody has ever even thought of something this large.
The article did leave a few questions I had unanswered. Do the scientists know if this rate is accelerating, decelerating, or remaining the same? This would be nice to know; is another East African Rift opening up in Southwest America or is this movement dying out. I would like to know this because there are inactive volcanoes around the rift (including near Albuquerque) and it would be nice to know if they might wake up. In addition, does this movement have any implications for earthquakes around the rift, especially in the Sandia Mountains where New Mexico's largest city sits on loosely compacted sediments from the mountains surrounding it oh and an aquifer. So as my Intro to geology professor once (somewhat gleefully) pointed out, should a large earthquake hit the city, the soil would probably liquify and consume large parts of the city.
By the way, I'm not too worried about earthquakes or volcanoes as a result of the spreading; however, it is not a stretch that some people who live in Albuquerque might be, and it would only take a extra sentence worth of effort to soothe these fears. Questions like this is why you should talk to a scientist before you publish a story because now I have to wait to gain anything valuable until I either bum the latest copy of Geology, or get the money to look at it online. Thanks Yahoo News, for all the effort you put into the story.
However, due to my status as a college kid with limited funds; I unfortunately did not read about this from a cool source, instead I learned about it from this Yahoo News article which didn't even turn out to be an intelligent source. It doesn't start out bad, but then it starts saying a few things which demonstrate a lack of real understanding about geology. First off, it says this is a very slow pace (direct quote is "paltry rate", and it is compared to Usain Bolt or a landslide or really anything we deal with in our day to day experience. However, this is geology so almost everything happens slowly, so if you are going to say it happens slowly compare it to another plate. It is moving slowly compared to other plates which can move around 2.5 cm a year, while this rift is widening around 1 mm per year, 1/250 slower!
Then, the author makes a comment about controlling the expansion which seems odd and raised a few questions. First, why, it is barely moving and at those rates shouldn't disrupt humans at all; however, stopping the motion would just mean all the energy is pent up and then released when whatever is keeping from moving fails, causing an earthquake. Second, since when is it the goal of geology to stop plate tectonics? I've heard of geo-engineering projects, but I don't think anybody has ever even thought of something this large.
The article did leave a few questions I had unanswered. Do the scientists know if this rate is accelerating, decelerating, or remaining the same? This would be nice to know; is another East African Rift opening up in Southwest America or is this movement dying out. I would like to know this because there are inactive volcanoes around the rift (including near Albuquerque) and it would be nice to know if they might wake up. In addition, does this movement have any implications for earthquakes around the rift, especially in the Sandia Mountains where New Mexico's largest city sits on loosely compacted sediments from the mountains surrounding it oh and an aquifer. So as my Intro to geology professor once (somewhat gleefully) pointed out, should a large earthquake hit the city, the soil would probably liquify and consume large parts of the city.
By the way, I'm not too worried about earthquakes or volcanoes as a result of the spreading; however, it is not a stretch that some people who live in Albuquerque might be, and it would only take a extra sentence worth of effort to soothe these fears. Questions like this is why you should talk to a scientist before you publish a story because now I have to wait to gain anything valuable until I either bum the latest copy of Geology, or get the money to look at it online. Thanks Yahoo News, for all the effort you put into the story.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Erosion vs. Weathering
I never really explained why I named this blog what I did, but there is a reason. You see, since I'm an undergraduate student (for only two more semesters) I wanted to tell the story of my journey from lowly and ignorant undergraduate through graduate school and into my own career (however long that takes). However, that only makes sense if you know the actual definition of erosion:
Erosion-The physical removal of rock by an agent such as running water, glacial ice, or wind.
And compare that to weathering:
Weathering- The group of processes that change rock at or near the Earth's surface
Now why do I care about that? Well besides confusing the two makes it seem like I feel like my education is disappearing or being torn down some how, the real problem is that erosion is used as a literary device by several people and it is almost always used wrong. Here are two examples:
http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2008/apr/19/halt-us-educational-erosion/
http://chronicle.com/article/Public-Higher-Education-Is/124292/
Now I understand that educational erosion makes a good almost alliteration (look at my blog title) however, they are not describing erosion. They are describing weathering, and there is a fundamental difference.
Weathering can be broken up into two categories, chemical and physical. Physical is the easiest to understand, as it is simply mechanical processes which break apart the source rock. Examples include frost wedging, water running over rocks or rivers down cutting into the ground, wind sand blasting formations, or even animals walking over the same trail numerous times.
Chemical weathering is different. This is when the minerals withing a source rock are changed into different minerals, which is often caused by water. Near Albuquerque are the three peaks, three inactive volcanoes which spewed basaltic lava thousands of years ago. On these volcanoes you can see the mechanical weathering from the water flowing down the slopes creating the classic V-shape indicative of mountain streams. However, the most interesting part is that where the black lava is along the stream, you can see how high the water gets when it does flow. As the once black rocks are turned white where they were submerged in the stream. This is due to chemical weathering, the Calcium Feldspars, indicative to basalts, are chemically weathered into calcite, a much softer mineral, which compromises the integrity of the formation.
Erosion, on the other hand, is all about transportation. So while the forces of weathering and erosion may be the same, the processes are different. Weathering breaks down a mountain, while erosion spreads the pile of rubble far and wide, flattening out the landscape. Some of the mechanisms of erosion include landslides, turbidity flows, rivers, and wind.
So please remember, I'm on an educational journey and my education is not being torn down. Thank you
Erosion-The physical removal of rock by an agent such as running water, glacial ice, or wind.
And compare that to weathering:
Weathering- The group of processes that change rock at or near the Earth's surface
Now why do I care about that? Well besides confusing the two makes it seem like I feel like my education is disappearing or being torn down some how, the real problem is that erosion is used as a literary device by several people and it is almost always used wrong. Here are two examples:
http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2008/apr/19/halt-us-educational-erosion/
http://chronicle.com/article/Public-Higher-Education-Is/124292/
Now I understand that educational erosion makes a good almost alliteration (look at my blog title) however, they are not describing erosion. They are describing weathering, and there is a fundamental difference.
Weathering can be broken up into two categories, chemical and physical. Physical is the easiest to understand, as it is simply mechanical processes which break apart the source rock. Examples include frost wedging, water running over rocks or rivers down cutting into the ground, wind sand blasting formations, or even animals walking over the same trail numerous times.
Chemical weathering is different. This is when the minerals withing a source rock are changed into different minerals, which is often caused by water. Near Albuquerque are the three peaks, three inactive volcanoes which spewed basaltic lava thousands of years ago. On these volcanoes you can see the mechanical weathering from the water flowing down the slopes creating the classic V-shape indicative of mountain streams. However, the most interesting part is that where the black lava is along the stream, you can see how high the water gets when it does flow. As the once black rocks are turned white where they were submerged in the stream. This is due to chemical weathering, the Calcium Feldspars, indicative to basalts, are chemically weathered into calcite, a much softer mineral, which compromises the integrity of the formation.
Erosion, on the other hand, is all about transportation. So while the forces of weathering and erosion may be the same, the processes are different. Weathering breaks down a mountain, while erosion spreads the pile of rubble far and wide, flattening out the landscape. Some of the mechanisms of erosion include landslides, turbidity flows, rivers, and wind.
So please remember, I'm on an educational journey and my education is not being torn down. Thank you
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
NASA Tweetup: The Pretweetup-Wednesday
A few weeks ago when I found out that I was picked to attend the Mars Science Laboratory with NASATweetup, I was ecstatic as I would not have expected to have been chosen in a million years. However, I am a college student, and as a college student I do not have much money, so I would like to thank my parents and Aunt Marty for providing me with transportation and lodging for the event.
Originally, MSL was supposed to go up on Friday, so we were going to have the first round of speakers and a tour of KSC on Wednesday then nothing on Thursday and the final round of speakers and the launch on Friday. However, due to a battery malfunction the launch was postponed to Saturday. Changing my travel schedule to accommodate this was actually pretty difficult, and I realized just how isolated my little corner of the world is as it was very difficult to find flights coming back this way on the Sunday after the launch. However, registration and the tour was tentatively still on Wednesday so I had no qualms about going early, and I had never been to Florida and this would be only the second time I had been on the East Coast so I was excited to see something new.
One thing I do have to confess is that I'm not a very social person. In large groups, I have a tendency to sit in the back and keep quiet and it usually takes me a while to feel comfortable around new people and I usually don't start talking until I feel comfortable. So when I arrived in St. Louis around noon and saw the tweet that all events had been postponed until Friday I was scared and thought that I would spend the first two days alone. Luckily, I couldn't be more wrong.
First off, NASATweeps are awesome people, besides the fact that they, as a prerequisite, are Space Nerds, they are incredibly kind and giving. From @conductor222 driving nearly an hour away from the Pre-Tweetup dinner to pick me up from the airport and driving around, to literally everybody stopping and saying hi if they saw you wearing your NASATweetUp badge; every space tweep demonstrated immense kindness and compassion, and on top of that each and every one of them was very interesting to talk to you, as they liked to talk about space which is one of the two coolest conversation topics(the other being geology).
So the Tuesday before the Tweetup passed without incident, I reached my hotel room watched NASA TV for a bit, and went to sleep. Wednesday started slowly @conductor222 picked me up and then we went and picked up @libbydoodle (who thankfully let me use her photographs as mine suck). We found KSC pretty easy; however instead of going to the press accreditation building we went to the employee badging office.
They may look similar, but they were on different roads and a fair distance apart (if the press accreditation building was the bulls-eye on the dart board, we hit the wall). After we registered and met some of our fellow space nerds, we then decided to go take pictures of the Astronaut Hall of Fame (it wasn't open yet and it took us a bit to remember and decide to go to the Visitor Center.
We took a lot of pictures, but the area basically boils down to these three sites, at least on the outside. We then decided that we should go check out the Visitor Center as it was open. I don't think any of us knew how much there was to do there, and how it would consume all our time (in a good way, like a whale with an amusement park in its stomach).
We didn't have a solid plan when we entered the gates as there was so much to do. We ended up seeing a 3-D Imax movie about the ISS (highly recommend it) then there was lunch. Afterwards we decided to pay our respects at the Astronaut memorial
The memorial is amazing. First off it is huge, and as you can (somewhat) see it has a mirrored surface with the names of the astronauts engraved into the surface and lit from behind. This creates an amazing effect which makes these heroes name seem to be floating among the clouds.
Here we then met up with @ridingrobots and @french_marc, two other NASATweetup participants, and were able to get a picture with one of them!
Afterwards we wandered over to the rocket park which is amazing, I have seen the ones at JSC and the Space History Museum in Alamagordo, but this puts both to shame by the shear size and quantity of the rockets.
This is where we made a mistake, and wandered into the gift shop. You see, I usually have pretty good impulse control; however, I lose this when I become surrounded by amazing space memorabilia.
@libbydoodle and I ended up spending way too much time in the gift shop and I ended up with a meteorite.
After an undisclosed amount of time, we left the gift shop (I really don't want to tell you how long) and wandered around a bit. Eventually our wanderings brought us to these two amazing people
who we initially mistook as LEGO employees, which would have been really cool, but you know what assuming makes out of 'u' and 'me'. They were two engineers with decades worth of experience on the shuttle. We ended up talking to them for almost an hour which was one of the most inspirational and informative personal conversations I have ever had, and definitely the most of my conversations with strangers. They talked about the importance of hard work and STEM fields; they talked about their experiences from accidentally sitting on the shuttle toilet while moving components into the ship to the procedures they followed in their jobs. My favorite, though, was how they kept coming back to how you have to move forward, how you can't become complacent with where you are, instead you have to always be moving forward. While this was directed at the Shuttle and the 30 years we spent in the same place, their advice resonates with anybody at any stage of your life. You can become complacent and never strive to improve your lot in life, or you can push forward and achieve new and amazing things.
After about an hour, we had to cut our conversation in order to make it to Dr. John Grotzinger's talk about the geology of Gale Crater (MSL's landing site). It was an interesting and informative talk and made me even more excited for Curiosity to start finding new evidence about early Mars. I also got the opportunity to ask him questions about graduate school and I received some advice about what I should do to get ready.
We then were able to explore the Explorer building which had some of my favorite exhibits
Then, as we are very much adults, Libby and I did the most grown-up thing possible; we played with LEGO blocks! NASA and LEGO were having an event where they were encouraging creativity among kids by having them build their own space themed LEGO designs. These ranged from the highly practical to the highly fanciful
@conductor222 had already tried her hand at building, so we felt that we should try to do something as well, which were were pretty enthusiastic about so we hopped right to it. The best part was when the two engineers we talked to earlier stopped by and ended up helping Libby with her rocket and explaining what parts of the rocket would do in real life.
By this time, we had filled up our day with as much space nerdery as the operating hours of the park would allow, so we headed back to the car for dinner with more space nerds and to rest up for tomorrow. But as we left, we were treated to a beautiful view of rocket park at sunset which was a great way to end the day.
Originally, MSL was supposed to go up on Friday, so we were going to have the first round of speakers and a tour of KSC on Wednesday then nothing on Thursday and the final round of speakers and the launch on Friday. However, due to a battery malfunction the launch was postponed to Saturday. Changing my travel schedule to accommodate this was actually pretty difficult, and I realized just how isolated my little corner of the world is as it was very difficult to find flights coming back this way on the Sunday after the launch. However, registration and the tour was tentatively still on Wednesday so I had no qualms about going early, and I had never been to Florida and this would be only the second time I had been on the East Coast so I was excited to see something new.
One thing I do have to confess is that I'm not a very social person. In large groups, I have a tendency to sit in the back and keep quiet and it usually takes me a while to feel comfortable around new people and I usually don't start talking until I feel comfortable. So when I arrived in St. Louis around noon and saw the tweet that all events had been postponed until Friday I was scared and thought that I would spend the first two days alone. Luckily, I couldn't be more wrong.
First off, NASATweeps are awesome people, besides the fact that they, as a prerequisite, are Space Nerds, they are incredibly kind and giving. From @conductor222 driving nearly an hour away from the Pre-Tweetup dinner to pick me up from the airport and driving around, to literally everybody stopping and saying hi if they saw you wearing your NASATweetUp badge; every space tweep demonstrated immense kindness and compassion, and on top of that each and every one of them was very interesting to talk to you, as they liked to talk about space which is one of the two coolest conversation topics(the other being geology).
So the Tuesday before the Tweetup passed without incident, I reached my hotel room watched NASA TV for a bit, and went to sleep. Wednesday started slowly @conductor222 picked me up and then we went and picked up @libbydoodle (who thankfully let me use her photographs as mine suck). We found KSC pretty easy; however instead of going to the press accreditation building we went to the employee badging office.
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| Wrong building |
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| Correct building |
We took a lot of pictures, but the area basically boils down to these three sites, at least on the outside. We then decided that we should go check out the Visitor Center as it was open. I don't think any of us knew how much there was to do there, and how it would consume all our time (in a good way, like a whale with an amusement park in its stomach).
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| The Gate way to Nerdvana |
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| They were ready for the holiday season |
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| As were the Astronauts |
We didn't have a solid plan when we entered the gates as there was so much to do. We ended up seeing a 3-D Imax movie about the ISS (highly recommend it) then there was lunch. Afterwards we decided to pay our respects at the Astronaut memorial
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| Astronaut memorial |
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| An engraving of those who have gave their lives in the pursuit of discovery |
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| @ridingrobots was taking the picture |
Afterwards we wandered over to the rocket park which is amazing, I have seen the ones at JSC and the Space History Museum in Alamagordo, but this puts both to shame by the shear size and quantity of the rockets.
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| I am still fascinated by the Saturn V |
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| You look so inviting; little did I know you would take all my money! |
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| I wanted one of everything (so I guess I did control my spending...a bit) |
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| My Precious! |
who we initially mistook as LEGO employees, which would have been really cool, but you know what assuming makes out of 'u' and 'me'. They were two engineers with decades worth of experience on the shuttle. We ended up talking to them for almost an hour which was one of the most inspirational and informative personal conversations I have ever had, and definitely the most of my conversations with strangers. They talked about the importance of hard work and STEM fields; they talked about their experiences from accidentally sitting on the shuttle toilet while moving components into the ship to the procedures they followed in their jobs. My favorite, though, was how they kept coming back to how you have to move forward, how you can't become complacent with where you are, instead you have to always be moving forward. While this was directed at the Shuttle and the 30 years we spent in the same place, their advice resonates with anybody at any stage of your life. You can become complacent and never strive to improve your lot in life, or you can push forward and achieve new and amazing things.
After about an hour, we had to cut our conversation in order to make it to Dr. John Grotzinger's talk about the geology of Gale Crater (MSL's landing site). It was an interesting and informative talk and made me even more excited for Curiosity to start finding new evidence about early Mars. I also got the opportunity to ask him questions about graduate school and I received some advice about what I should do to get ready.
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| Some interesting slides from the talk |
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| Dr. Grotzinger, if you are reading this, I would like to apologize for cornering you and asking about grad school |
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| Like these awesome posters (does anyone know where you can buy copies?) |
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| And an awesome mockup of Curiosity! |
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| Yep, these kids are having an amazing childhood |
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| Libby's rocket |
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| And I built a rover with a robotic arm. Its collecting a sample |
New Mexico Geology: Seas of Gypsum
Sorry right now I don't have pictures of my own for this, two weekends ago I was going to meet up with family in Alamagordo then visit White Sands, but the family activity ended up taking over twice as long as planned, so it was dark by the time we finished. I will update with better pictures when I get them.
Update: Check out Ron Schott's post about White Sands, he has two amazing GigaPans of the dunes.
In second grade we took a field trip to White Sands, and I still remember that day. It wasn't too far of a drive, just on the other side of the Sierra Blanca, but it was amazing. After we passed through the military sign posts warning us of the dangers should we trespass on to the base, we drove into the national monument. It was like a sea of white stretched out before us as far as we could see; the white waves, frozen in time, just asked for a bunch of little kids to run up and down on and try to sled down. Eventually we gave up on trying to sled down the hills (damn you friction!!!) and instead took to rolling ass over teakettle down the huge dunes, burying each other in the sand and jumping off the dunes into soft(ish) piles of loose sand below us.
White sands is amazing because it is a beautifully bizarre place that illuminates some already pretty awesome geologic processes, but in an unique and beautiful way.
Dune Formation:
White Sands (which is a very original name) is the largest gypsum dune field in the world, and demonstrates the highly variable nature of dune formation. First off, there are Barchan Dunes which are crescent shaped dunes which move in the same direction of their limbs. These dunes move incredibly fast up to 100 meters in a year (hey anything you can measure in terms of years instead of 100's or 1000's or 1x10^6 years is really fast to a geologist). Barchan dunes are common when there isn't much sand and the dunes are free to move across the desert pavement (highly cemented surface common in desert, it is this phenomena which allowed Rommel to quickly move across North Africa in WWII).
Then there are Parabolic dunes, which look like Barchan Dunes, but they are going the wrong way. This happens when Barchan Dunes move into areas with more vegetation, the vegetation bogs down the limbs of the dune first and turns them around. The vegetation acts as an anchor and makes these dunes really slow.
When there is plenty of sand, the Barchan Dunes join together into Transverse dunes, which are long lines of wavy sand. This is very common at White Sands.
Evaporite Minerals
If you are not familiar with geology, you might be curious what exactly is Gypsum, and if you are not, you should be curious (don't make the gypsum angry it is probably right behind you, hiding in plain sight). Chemically Gypsum is CaSO4*2H20, translated to Calcium Sulfate (Sulfur plus four Oxygens) and two water molecules within the crystalline structure; it is an ionic compound, like table salt, which means it dissolves in water into ions (a +2 Ca and -2 SO4) and is precipitated out when the water evaporates. If you are unfamiliar with this, take a bowl fill it up with water and then a lot of salt into it, then hang a string where it is only just in the water and tape it to the sides. Put the bowl in a window (or under a heat lamp to speed things up) and as the water evaporates salt will precipitate on the string. SCIENCE!!
One cool thing about this mineral is that crystalline gypsum can come in three forms, satin spar, selenite, and alabaster.
Satin Spar gypsum is fibrous gypsum that has a silky luster (luster refers to the way the mineral interacts with light, so Satin Spar gypsum reflects light similar to the way silk does).
Selenite is the transparent and colorless (geologists hate the word clear) version of gypsum. In New Mexico you can sometimes find dunes with large selenite crystals within them. A good place to check these out is the Living Desert Zoo and Garden in Carlsbad, NM, which has a whole exhibit dedicated to this feature.
And Alabaster resembles the sands at White Sands, just clumped together into a soft rock.
One important thing to note about Gypsum is that it is all around, as the mineral is used to make wallboard. In addition, Gypsum is used in art and other applications as Plaster of Paris. This application highlights a very cool property of gypsum, remember when I said earlier that Gypsum has two water molecules in its crystal lattice? Well if you heat gypsum you can drive off the water molecules and you end up with annhydrite which is just CaSO4 and if you know anything about making plaster casts, you know that the plaster first comes ground up in a fine powder which is the gypsum that has been ground up and heated which drives off most of the water, then you mix it with water and pour it into you want to make a cast of. The annhydrite then absorbs the water becoming gypsum after it crystallizes thus hardens or sets. Well that's White Sands in a nutshell.
Update: Check out Ron Schott's post about White Sands, he has two amazing GigaPans of the dunes.
In second grade we took a field trip to White Sands, and I still remember that day. It wasn't too far of a drive, just on the other side of the Sierra Blanca, but it was amazing. After we passed through the military sign posts warning us of the dangers should we trespass on to the base, we drove into the national monument. It was like a sea of white stretched out before us as far as we could see; the white waves, frozen in time, just asked for a bunch of little kids to run up and down on and try to sled down. Eventually we gave up on trying to sled down the hills (damn you friction!!!) and instead took to rolling ass over teakettle down the huge dunes, burying each other in the sand and jumping off the dunes into soft(ish) piles of loose sand below us.
White sands is amazing because it is a beautifully bizarre place that illuminates some already pretty awesome geologic processes, but in an unique and beautiful way.
Dune Formation:
White Sands (which is a very original name) is the largest gypsum dune field in the world, and demonstrates the highly variable nature of dune formation. First off, there are Barchan Dunes which are crescent shaped dunes which move in the same direction of their limbs. These dunes move incredibly fast up to 100 meters in a year (hey anything you can measure in terms of years instead of 100's or 1000's or 1x10^6 years is really fast to a geologist). Barchan dunes are common when there isn't much sand and the dunes are free to move across the desert pavement (highly cemented surface common in desert, it is this phenomena which allowed Rommel to quickly move across North Africa in WWII).
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| Photo Credit: getintravel.com |
When there is plenty of sand, the Barchan Dunes join together into Transverse dunes, which are long lines of wavy sand. This is very common at White Sands.
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| Photo Credit: wikipedia.org |
If you are not familiar with geology, you might be curious what exactly is Gypsum, and if you are not, you should be curious (don't make the gypsum angry it is probably right behind you, hiding in plain sight). Chemically Gypsum is CaSO4*2H20, translated to Calcium Sulfate (Sulfur plus four Oxygens) and two water molecules within the crystalline structure; it is an ionic compound, like table salt, which means it dissolves in water into ions (a +2 Ca and -2 SO4) and is precipitated out when the water evaporates. If you are unfamiliar with this, take a bowl fill it up with water and then a lot of salt into it, then hang a string where it is only just in the water and tape it to the sides. Put the bowl in a window (or under a heat lamp to speed things up) and as the water evaporates salt will precipitate on the string. SCIENCE!!
One cool thing about this mineral is that crystalline gypsum can come in three forms, satin spar, selenite, and alabaster.
Satin Spar gypsum is fibrous gypsum that has a silky luster (luster refers to the way the mineral interacts with light, so Satin Spar gypsum reflects light similar to the way silk does).
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| Satin Spar Gypsum in a unique shapePhoto Credit utexes.edu |
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| Selenite Hills at the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Carlsbad, NM |
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| An example of Alabaster Gypsum from Geology.com |
Thursday, November 17, 2011
The Fallibility of Heroes
I have a personal hero, and like all humans he is flawed. However, he is flawed in such a way that I have to question my admiration of him, and I am left wondering what I should think.
I have looked up to Harrison Schmitt for a few years now for a few reasons. First he is the only geologist to walk on another world. Which is an amazing feat, and one that I dream about repeating myself (I doubt this would ever happen). As planetary geology is my dream field, this is the most amazing thing one could do in my eyes, actual field geology on another celestial object, and this alone would make him one of my favorite scientists of all time. I even have a poster taken of the Apollo 17 mission on my wall, I don't know if Dr. Schmitt is the astronaut pictured but there is a 50/50 chance that it is, and I like to think it is him.
Dr. Schmitt and I also share something in common, in that we are from the same state, not only from the same state, but we are both from small, southern New Mexican towns whose entire economy rested on the exploitation of a limited resource (copper for him, oil for me). Maybe this isn't the strongest connection; however, growing up I saw the people around me and thought that my home town was like a black hole and the people born or raised there were already past the event horizon. I honestly feared for years that I would never escape, that no matter what I did, there would be no way out. Thus the idea that there were people from the crappy and poor areas of my state (one Political Science professor at my school referred to much of southern New Mexico as the Third World within the First World) had lived the dream filled me with hope and confidence that I was not already past the event horizon, that there was a way out.
However, Dr. Schmitt is a Climate Change denier, a position I find irresponsible and uninformed. He has tried to do a tremendous amount of harm to the good science done by the climate scientists; I wouldn't be so upset about this if he wasn't a good geologist, but his body of work is impressive and he rightly won accolades earlier in his career. Thus to the uniformed his presence among the deniers seems like damning evidence.
It is becoming more and more evident that the position held by Schmitt and others like him is both wrong and dangerous. We see the effects all the time, pacific island nations looking for places to evacuate after the sea swallows their home, heat waves, storms; the evidence is so solid that the pentagon has become concerned that it poses a risk to national security. At times like these we need our best and brightest to look at the evidence without bias. It is pointless to bicker about the reality of situation, when its consequences are already barreling down on you.
I would like to remember Dr. Schmitt as the type of person I want to be, a brave explorer who advanced the cause of science both by increasing our knowledge about the universe and by keeping scientific progress close to our hearts and in our imagination. However, these wonderful things that he did are tainted by his recent actions as a politician and I cannot separate the two, though I wish I could.
I won't take the poster down, though, because at the moment it was taken, he was doing something noble and beautiful, something that I can still strive to emulate and surpass.
For more information here is NASA biography, and in the interest of fairness, his biography on desmog blog as well.
I have looked up to Harrison Schmitt for a few years now for a few reasons. First he is the only geologist to walk on another world. Which is an amazing feat, and one that I dream about repeating myself (I doubt this would ever happen). As planetary geology is my dream field, this is the most amazing thing one could do in my eyes, actual field geology on another celestial object, and this alone would make him one of my favorite scientists of all time. I even have a poster taken of the Apollo 17 mission on my wall, I don't know if Dr. Schmitt is the astronaut pictured but there is a 50/50 chance that it is, and I like to think it is him.
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| This is the image I'm referring to |
Dr. Schmitt and I also share something in common, in that we are from the same state, not only from the same state, but we are both from small, southern New Mexican towns whose entire economy rested on the exploitation of a limited resource (copper for him, oil for me). Maybe this isn't the strongest connection; however, growing up I saw the people around me and thought that my home town was like a black hole and the people born or raised there were already past the event horizon. I honestly feared for years that I would never escape, that no matter what I did, there would be no way out. Thus the idea that there were people from the crappy and poor areas of my state (one Political Science professor at my school referred to much of southern New Mexico as the Third World within the First World) had lived the dream filled me with hope and confidence that I was not already past the event horizon, that there was a way out.
However, Dr. Schmitt is a Climate Change denier, a position I find irresponsible and uninformed. He has tried to do a tremendous amount of harm to the good science done by the climate scientists; I wouldn't be so upset about this if he wasn't a good geologist, but his body of work is impressive and he rightly won accolades earlier in his career. Thus to the uniformed his presence among the deniers seems like damning evidence.
It is becoming more and more evident that the position held by Schmitt and others like him is both wrong and dangerous. We see the effects all the time, pacific island nations looking for places to evacuate after the sea swallows their home, heat waves, storms; the evidence is so solid that the pentagon has become concerned that it poses a risk to national security. At times like these we need our best and brightest to look at the evidence without bias. It is pointless to bicker about the reality of situation, when its consequences are already barreling down on you.
I would like to remember Dr. Schmitt as the type of person I want to be, a brave explorer who advanced the cause of science both by increasing our knowledge about the universe and by keeping scientific progress close to our hearts and in our imagination. However, these wonderful things that he did are tainted by his recent actions as a politician and I cannot separate the two, though I wish I could.
I won't take the poster down, though, because at the moment it was taken, he was doing something noble and beautiful, something that I can still strive to emulate and surpass.
For more information here is NASA biography, and in the interest of fairness, his biography on desmog blog as well.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Labradorite Meme
Okay, so the whole meme labradorite meme that started recently made me really excited, not really because I'm the world's greatest fan of labradorite (I like it but there is a lot of minerals that are just as amazing), but because there was a sample of feldspar in my Mineralogy lab quiz and it showed labradorescence!
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| And here it is! |
Sunday, November 13, 2011
New Mexico Geology: Rio Grande Rift
I still vividly remember learning the words to the Beach Boys’ Surfin USA when I was five years old. I was due to graduate from my preschool and we were going to sing that song for our families at the graduation ceremony. For those of you who don’t know, the songs begin with the quintessential Californian Boys lamenting the lot in life for the rest of their countrymen. Specifically they bemoan that:
If everybody had an ocean
Across the U. S. A.
Then everybody'd be surfin'
Like Californi-a
You'd seem 'em wearing their baggies
Huarachi sandals too
A bushy bushy blonde hairdo
Surfin' U. S. A.
While learning this song I remember trying to imagine a United States cut in half by a body of water large enough to generate waves like the ocean. I imagined cowboys surfing from Texas up to Kansas herding cattle who were chilling on rafts, or businessmen windsurfing through city streets to their office buildings (I had a really overactive imagination as a kid). I didn't think an ocean in the middle of the continent would be such a great idea, but I thought it would be interesting none the less. On a side note, when we went over the Vietnam War in high school, guerrilla warfare was described as like your whole country being an ocean, and all your people floating in it which always made me think of this song. Yeah, I know I'm weird.
However, what I didn’t know was that the interior of America did share some features with the ocean (the Atlantic though not the Pacific) and even more surprising, that this feature cut my home state in half. What could dry, land-locked New Mexico have with the Atlantic Ocean? It would seem that no two regions could be less alike. But somehow they are, but for that to be obvious, first we need to understand a very fundamental aspect of our Earth's surface.
However, what I didn’t know was that the interior of America did share some features with the ocean (the Atlantic though not the Pacific) and even more surprising, that this feature cut my home state in half. What could dry, land-locked New Mexico have with the Atlantic Ocean? It would seem that no two regions could be less alike. But somehow they are, but for that to be obvious, first we need to understand a very fundamental aspect of our Earth's surface.
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| Change in Location of continental Plates from the Permian to the present, Photo Credit Geology.com |
While the ground beneath our feet may feel solid and static, we know that it is not. Instead the surface is made up of tectonic plates which floats on the flowing plastic of the Upper Mantle. The plates can be divided into two groups, oceanic and continental plates; the continental plates are mostly composed of granite with a thin veneer of sediments coating it and the oceanic crust is composed mainly of basalt. Since granite is composed of lighter (in color and density) than the iron rich basalt, it stands to reason that the continental plates would float above the basalt. Now look at the changes our world has undergone, specifically look at how the continents were torn apart, forming the east and west hemispheres. This formed a divergent plate boundary, and you can almost make out the change in this picture from the initial valley (in the Triassic) that the rift formed to the ocean we see now.
Plates can interact in three primary ways. If two plates strike together head on, this is called a converging plate boundary, and in this instance three different outcomes are possible. If a light continental plate and heavy oceanic plate converge, then the oceanic plate will subduct, or sink, beneath the continent. In this instance a lot of oceanic water end up mixing with the magma, this creates some seriously violent volcanoes, like Mount St. Helens. If two light continental plates crash together, they push each other up like a rug bunching up when you slip on it; this creates massive mountain ranges a great example being the Himalayas. Two heavy oceanic plates can meet, here both plates get pushed down, partially melt and form a volcanic arc. Plates can also slide past each other, like in California at San Andres Fault, and if those movement is interrupted then the plates will lurch forward in a jerking motion causing an Earthquake.
Plates can interact in three primary ways. If two plates strike together head on, this is called a converging plate boundary, and in this instance three different outcomes are possible. If a light continental plate and heavy oceanic plate converge, then the oceanic plate will subduct, or sink, beneath the continent. In this instance a lot of oceanic water end up mixing with the magma, this creates some seriously violent volcanoes, like Mount St. Helens. If two light continental plates crash together, they push each other up like a rug bunching up when you slip on it; this creates massive mountain ranges a great example being the Himalayas. Two heavy oceanic plates can meet, here both plates get pushed down, partially melt and form a volcanic arc. Plates can also slide past each other, like in California at San Andres Fault, and if those movement is interrupted then the plates will lurch forward in a jerking motion causing an Earthquake.
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| Photo Credit: cotf.edu |
However, none of those are what makes the Atlantic Ocean similar to New Mexico. Instead we have to discuss the third type of plate interaction, divergent plate boundaries which are places where plates pull away from each other . Like we saw in the break-up of Pangaea, this small crack in the plates can grow into a huge rift valley and eventually into an ocean! Luckily we have the opportunity to see a Rift Valley in the process of growing farther a part; we see in the aptly named East African Rift Valley the convergence of a few rifts cutting up the eastern coast of Africa. While the mechanism which cause this phenomena are not well known, the popular model among Earth Scientists involves elevated heat flow from the mantles causing bulges under the plates, forcing those plates apart.
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| Photo Credit: Geology.com |
In New Mexico we have our own example of this process, a massive structure that cuts the state in two and formed mountains and volcanoes at its sides making it one of the two features that dominate the geology of the state (the other being the Jemez Lineament). It began about 35 million years ago and then entered a phase of major volcanism for around 15 million years, and the first phase of crustal extension occurred about 5 million years after the start of the volcanism and lasted for ten million years. The rift then took it easy for a few million years, until the northern and southern portions of the rift underwent a period of expansion in the last 10-12 million years.
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| Photo Credit: Originally produced by the USGS |
The rift formed numerous interesting features, but I like the Sandia's the best, so that is a great place to start. Why do I like the Sandia Mountains the best? It might be because they translate to the Watermelon Mountains, it might be because my fiance is from Eastern flank of those mountains, or it might be because it was the first stop on my structural geology field trip. Whatever the reason, they are really cool. Here the crustal extension resulted in horst and graben mountains; the grabens were mostly filled in with sediments eroded off of the Sandias.
The Sandia's culminate at the crest, which is a beautiful sight and I could not more highly recommend that anyone visiting Albuquerque drive up to the top and look out over the city.
In addition to being beautiful the Sandia's also hold some amazing geologic features. First and for most is the amazing unconformity which represents a 1.2 billion year gap in the geologic feature. I have to give you my sincerest apologies for not taking pictures of it on my trip, but I'll try to get some the next time I'm in the area. However, just imagine the ancient granite crumbling into a pile of grus at its base tilted slightly with sandstone and limestone laying on top of it. The bottom of the sedimentary layers have been exposed in some places by crumbling granite, and you can walk under the rock and pull out fossils buried above your head! The Sandias also contain hydrothermal vents perforating the area which have resulted in mineral deposits (including some gold).
On the western edge of the Rift are the Three Sisters, who are now kind of old and cold but they used to be HOT...get it because they are dormant volcanoes, I'm hilarious...In all seriousness these three volcanoes are not that large, but they are awesome. These were also caused by the tectonic forces which shaped the valley, and sit on top of a 5 mile long fissure. They are dormant now, but they once spewed out basaltic lava over the area - side note you can actually see the path and level of the rain water over these volcanoes, the calcium minerals in the lava have been weathered in some parts into calcite, so that you have rocks which are black on top and white on bottom.
It would be easy to write a book just about the Sandia's, but the rift gave us more than just this, including the Organ Mountains near Las Cruces which is made up of granite, rhyolite, some sedimentary rocks and even some welded volcanics. The rift dominated much of New Mexican geology and most the North-South trending features in New Mexico were caused by the Rift (East-West trending features are a result of the Jemez Lineament. Including the very river that named the rift.
You see the Rio Grande is a fairly unique river, in that it formed within the valley, instead of forming the valley it now resides in. When the rift was opening up it created several lakes which then began to start linking up, eventually they started to flow south, and provide part of our border with Mexico. These massive forces are at their most striking at the Rio Grande Gorge which drives home more than any other site the awesome power that was tearing apart the crust millions of years ago.
I should really go into more depth about these features; however, when I first said I would talk about this feature I forgot about how freaking huge it was and just how much the rift affects the geology of the entire state, so when I take some trips out to the areas I'll write them up, but until then why don't we just try to imagine what if the rift had expanded farther until there was an ocean across the U.S.A, do you think everybody would be surfin' like Californi-a?
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| Photo Credit: academic.emporia.edu |
The Sandia's culminate at the crest, which is a beautiful sight and I could not more highly recommend that anyone visiting Albuquerque drive up to the top and look out over the city.
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| From my Structural Geology field trip |
In addition to being beautiful the Sandia's also hold some amazing geologic features. First and for most is the amazing unconformity which represents a 1.2 billion year gap in the geologic feature. I have to give you my sincerest apologies for not taking pictures of it on my trip, but I'll try to get some the next time I'm in the area. However, just imagine the ancient granite crumbling into a pile of grus at its base tilted slightly with sandstone and limestone laying on top of it. The bottom of the sedimentary layers have been exposed in some places by crumbling granite, and you can walk under the rock and pull out fossils buried above your head! The Sandias also contain hydrothermal vents perforating the area which have resulted in mineral deposits (including some gold).
On the western edge of the Rift are the Three Sisters, who are now kind of old and cold but they used to be HOT...get it because they are dormant volcanoes, I'm hilarious...In all seriousness these three volcanoes are not that large, but they are awesome. These were also caused by the tectonic forces which shaped the valley, and sit on top of a 5 mile long fissure. They are dormant now, but they once spewed out basaltic lava over the area - side note you can actually see the path and level of the rain water over these volcanoes, the calcium minerals in the lava have been weathered in some parts into calcite, so that you have rocks which are black on top and white on bottom.
It would be easy to write a book just about the Sandia's, but the rift gave us more than just this, including the Organ Mountains near Las Cruces which is made up of granite, rhyolite, some sedimentary rocks and even some welded volcanics. The rift dominated much of New Mexican geology and most the North-South trending features in New Mexico were caused by the Rift (East-West trending features are a result of the Jemez Lineament. Including the very river that named the rift.
You see the Rio Grande is a fairly unique river, in that it formed within the valley, instead of forming the valley it now resides in. When the rift was opening up it created several lakes which then began to start linking up, eventually they started to flow south, and provide part of our border with Mexico. These massive forces are at their most striking at the Rio Grande Gorge which drives home more than any other site the awesome power that was tearing apart the crust millions of years ago.
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| Photo Credit: NM BLM |
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