Posts
May 18, 2013
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5:17 PM | Geo 365: May 18, Day 138: Balls!
Sitting on the rim of the basalt flow here are three objects that the interpretive sign describes as lava balls. These are said to form in the same way as cartoon snowballs: a bit up high breaks loose and rolls down the slope of the active flow, accreteing more lava as it goes, growing into a large, roughly spherically-shaped, ball. It makes good sense to me, but the reason I'm putting it into such equivocal terms is that I have never seen the name "lava balls" anywhere else, nor have I seen […]
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Our Atmosphere is Escaping!
MinuteEarth provides an energetic and entertaining view of trends in earth’s environment — in just a few minutes!
Created by Henry Reich, with Alex Reich, Peter Reich, Rose Eveleth, Emily Elert, and John Guittar.
Music by Nathaniel Schroeder: http://www.soundcloud.com/drschroeder
References:
Atmospheric escape on Earth:
http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf
via Minute Earth.
facebook - http://facebook.com/minuteearth
twitter -
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4:26 AM | Rock n’ Roll
After a day in the field, we stopped by C & E Rock Sales to visit a friend and owner of this local business. C & E Rock Sales specializes in producing prepped and polished fossilized wood which is then sold locally from the shop or sold to external gift shops for public purchase. This […]
May 17, 2013
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Frontier deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is becoming more difficult as we enter deeper water, much deeper reservoirs and potential under salt. As a result, we are faced with prospects that are supported by little to no amplitude, tiny seismic bandwidth as well as flat amplitude variation with offset (AVO) that sit in [...]
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4:06 PM | Geo 365: May 17, Day 137: 7000
Reading the Wikipedia article yesterday, I found that this lava flow and Lava Butte are about 7000 years old. That's quite a bit of time in human terms, but not really enough in rock terms to allow weathering to create soils that will support plants. We do see some sage and rabbit brush here, but for the most part, it's barren rock. Mount Bachelor to the left, Three Sisters to the right on the horizon, and I think that's Broken Top as the lower peak in the middle.Photo unmodified. August 21, […]
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By Neal Lineback and Mandy Lineback Gritzner, Geography in the NewsTM and Maps.com KEYSTONE PIPELINE AND CANADIAN TAR SANDS CONTROVERSY Supporters and protesters continue to lobby both the White House and U.S. Congress for and against the 1,700-mile long (2,736-km) Keystone pipeline running from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The Keystone XL, as…
May 16, 2013
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8:30 PM | Earth's Core Is Weaker Than We Thought
Earth's Core Wikimedia Commons Like so many of our own! No judgments, Earth. A new study in Nature Geoscience, from two Stanford researchers, indicates that our planet's super-dense, super strong core may not be as strong as we'd thought. It's very difficult to replicate the kind of ultra-high-pressure environment of Earth's iron core; we can't dig down there and monitor it, so researchers have relied on reading and tracking seismic waves and extrapolating other information from there.
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The interpretive trail on the breach flow at Lava Butte, looking north at that cinder cone. The summit road is apparent, spiraling up the peak. While the flow is pretty fresh, there are some colonizing pines visible.Photo unmodified. August 21, 2011. FlashEarth location.
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2:44 PM | Port Townsend Morgan Hill Divot
Northwest of the Port Townsend waterfront is a great shoreline beach walk with a very steep high bluff. Morgan Hill Bluff, Port TownsendI've walked this bluff beach for work possibly more than any other shoreline. For one thing there are homes on the top of the bluff, it is a steep bluff, and it is an eroding bluff. I have not really had that may project sites on the top of the bluff, but two of them required follow up visits as Port Townsend planners are legitimately concerned about any
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Astronomy Cast Ep. 293: Earthquakes
We always say that the Universe is trying to kill you, but actually, the Earth isn’t so fond of you either. Certain parts of planet Earth are prone to earthquakes, where the planet’s shifting plates can cause the ground to shake violently. We’ve had a few devastating earthquakes in recent years, but do they also happen on other worlds?
Duration: 44:57
via Astrosphere Vids.
May 15, 2013
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Water found deep in an Ontario mine could have been isolated and untouched for the last billion years. José Manuel Suárez via Wikimedia Scientists may have discovered the oldest free-flowing source of isolated water ever known. Scientists digging around roughly one-and-a-half miles below the Earth's surface in an Ontario mine may have just discovered the oldest free-flowing source of isolated, untouched water ever known. Though they don't know if anything has been living in this water, it
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The closest Jurassic rocks are likely 150 miles away or so, in the Josephine ophiolite along I-5. Nevertheless, we found this Jeep fun, on our visit to Lava Butte. As yesterday, Three Sisters to the right, Mount Bachelor mostly behind the pine to the left.Photo unmodified. August 21, 2011. FlashEarth location.
May 14, 2013
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Looking west from Lava Butte toward the Cascade crest. Three Sisters are to the right on the horizon, and Mount Bachelor to the left. The late-stage lava flow, which occurred after the cinder eruption, is visible at the foot of the peak. A version run through Paint.Net's autolevel routine can be viewed here.Photo unmodified. August 21, 2011. FlashEarth location.
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This was initially posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=600 Conserving our world’s biodiversity is currently one of the biggest challenges we face. I wrote a post recently about some of the issues palaeontologists face when trying to make our science relative to current conservation … Continue reading →
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via artandsciencejournal:
Mineral Microscopy
Stephanie Bateman-Graham does mineral microscopy, or as she prefers to call it “using a low-powered digital toy microscope to take pictures of beautiful minerals”. In these works Bateman-Graham discovers the parts of nature that are weirdly similar to recognizable art styles — from Van Gogh impressionism to the fractured lines of Picasso. I’ve included her descriptions of the three works above:
Ecosystem (Moss Agate): Do you see a
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12:00 AM | Is this burning an Eternal Flame?
Pretty neat, spooky and natural. Mystery Eternal Flame Reveals New Gas Source : Discovery News. Nestled behind a waterfall in western New York state is an eternal flame whose beauty is only surpassed by its mystery. It is one of a few hundred “natural” eternal flames around the world, fed by gas seeping to the Earth’s surface from underground, said Arndt Schimmelmann, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. But even within this rarefied group, this flame is […]
May 13, 2013
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6:35 PM | The Center Of The Earth Is Out Of Sync
We all know that the Earth is in constant motion, rotating beneath our feet, but new research in Nature Geoscience
reveals that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet and is frequently speeding up and slowing down.Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth’s inner core over the last 50 years and discovered that not only did the inner core […]
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6:33 PM | Geo 365: May 13, Day 133: Pilot Butte
Looking roughly north-northeast from the top of Lava Butte, Pilot Butte in Bend stands out just below the horizon to the right of center. Of similar sizes, these two cinder cones are both likely to be parasitic cones on the flanks of Newberry Volcano.Photo run through Paint.Net's autolevel routine. August 21, 2011. FlashEarth location.
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Posted by Kate Voss, UCCHM Water Policy Fellow. This is the fourth in a series of posts on our Water Diplomacy trip to Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Other posts in the series: 1) Middle East Lost a Dead Sea Amount of Water in 7 Years, by Jay Famiglietti, 2) Parallel Worlds: Water Management in Israel…
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Birth of a Giant Iceberg — Climate Change Evidence?
An enormous plain of Antarctic ice is splitting in two. Airborne NASA scientists discovered the nearly 20 mile-long crack during a research flight, capturing its contours by laser imaging. From our video series Over Earth with Andrea Mustain. Discover more about this at: http://goo.gl/J8K6I
via Video From Space.
May 12, 2013
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5:42 PM | Geo 365: May 12, Day 132: Ring Dikes
A panorama of three photos, taken at Otter Crest State Park. We're looking south here. At this scale, you can't make out the sea cave at Devil's Punchbowl, on the point in the top middle, but full-size, I can make out that dark spot. In response to a G+ query, I guessed that the reason for the ring shape (emphasis on guess) might be that as a lobate toe of the CRB flow responsible for this structure advanced out onto unconsolidated sediment, it hit a weak spot where it could plunge down and […]
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4:15 PM | Bolton Peninsula Introduction
The Bolton Peninsula is a bit out of the way and a bit off the beaten path. That said part of my purpose is to share a few geologic notes - there are some important geologic features on this not so easy to get to place. By one example there is an active 1,600-foot wide translational landslide calving blocks of soil off of a 200-foot cliff. This area is slated to be mapped by the Department of Natural Resources Geology Division this year so I am motivated to put together some
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May 11, 2013
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8:11 PM | Weekend procrastination for geonerds
The lectures are done, and the grading is over: now we can get on with that research stuff that we’ve been moaning that we don’t have enough time for, right? Well… Sadly, the internet has conspired against us, with not … Continue reading →
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6:01 PM | Geo 365: May 11, Day 131: May 10 Teasers
We had hoped to get a good view of the Cascade Crest from the summit parking lot at Marys Peak, but we've already had a month of summery weather with little rain. Additionally, the humidity was headed up; as a result, the haze was nearly as bad as during our visit last summer. I could make out Hood and, barely, Jefferson, but photos were right out. So yesterday ended up being more bio than geo, but still, a good day.Sphereoidal weathering in the Marys Peak Sill, a bit above Parker Creek Falls. […]
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12:38 AM | Laying it all out at the Core Conference
Bobbing in the wake of the talks, the Core Conference turned out to be more exemplary of this year's theme, Integration. Best of all were SAGD case studies, where multi-disciplinary experiments are the only way to make sense of the sticky stuff.
Coring through steam
Travis Shackleton from Cenovus did a wonderful presentation showing the impact of bioturbation, facies boundaries, and sedimentary structures on steam chamber evolution in the McMurray Formation at the FCCL project.
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May 10, 2013
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12:00 PM | Friday Headlines: 05-10-13
Friday Headlines, May 10, 2013 THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES RUSSIAN RESEARCHER CLAIMS TO HAVE FOUND ROCKS FROM AN OBJECT THAT CAUSED THE TUNGUSKA EXPLOSION In 1908, there was a tremendous explosion over Siberia, called the Tunguska explosion or event. … Continue reading →
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5:50 AM | Geo 365: May 10, Day 130: May 9 Teasers
Soda straws in Oregon Caves National Monument, early in the on-trail tour. (They now have an off-trail tour, which looks like it is an add on to, and near doubling of the length of, the other one) I like how this photo caught the droplets of water hanging on the ends.Paradise Lost, near the end of the cave tour.Dana highlights a recumbent fold on the road between the parking area and the park offices at OCNM. We managed to arrive here a bit before 10 AM, when registration began for the tours, […]
May 09, 2013
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Interested in what might happen if the Earth’s magnetic field suddenly vanished? I blogged about it, but not in my own blog. Check it out here!
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Water found on the moon and Earth came from small meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites in the first 100 million years or so after the solar system formed, according to researchers who found evidence in samples of moon dust returned by lunar crews of Apollo 15 and 17.
Comets did not deliver the molecules, they conclude in their Science Express article.
The discovery's telltale sign is found in the ratio of an isotopic form of hydrogen, deuterium, to standard hydrogen. The ratio in the
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The longest continuous Arctic land sediment core shows that the last time CO2 levels reached current levels, over 2.6 million years ago, North-East Russia was taken was 8°C warmer.
Melles, M., Brigham-Grette, J., Minyuk, P., Nowaczyk, N., Wennrich, V., DeConto, R., Anderson, P., Andreev, A., Coletti, A., Cook, T. & Haltia-Hovi, E. (2012). 2.8 Million Years of Arctic Climate Change from Lake El'gygytgyn, NE Russia, Science, 337 (6092) 315-320. DOI: 10.1126/science.1222135
Julie Brigham-Grette, Martin Melles, Pavel Minyuk, Andrei Andreev, Pavel Tarasov, Robert DeConto, Sebastian Koenig, Norbert Nowaczyk, Volker Wennrich, Peter Rosén, Eeva Haltia, Tim Cook, Catalina Gebhardt, Carsten Meyer-Jacob, Jeff Snyder, Ulrike Herzsch (2013). Pliocene Warmth, Polar Amplification, and Stepped Pleistocene Cooling Recorded in NE Arctic Russia, Science, Other: 10.1126/science.1233137
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