Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica. The total global ice mass lost from Greenland, Antarctica and Earth’s glaciers and ice caps during the study period was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles), adding about 0.5 inches (12 millimeters) to global sea level. That’s enough ice to cover the United States 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) deep.

“Earth is losing a huge amount of ice to the ocean annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change,” said University of Colorado Boulder physics professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study. “The strength of GRACE is it sees all the mass in the system, even though its resolution is not high enough to allow us to determine separate contributions from each individual glacier.”

About a quarter of the average annual ice loss came from glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica (roughly 148 billion tons, or 39 cubic miles). Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica and their peripheral ice caps and glaciers averaged 385 billion tons (100 cubic miles) a year. Results of the study will be published online Feb. 8 in the journal Nature.

For more on GRACE, visit: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace and http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov .

Image from NASA MODIS. Click the image to see the animation between vis and IR.

The snowstorm in the Mid Atlantic on Sunday left snow on the ground over much of the region. The view below is from the NASA MODIS sensor riding on the Terra and Aqua satellites. Using different wavelengths in the infrared, you can also tell the difference between cloud cover (white cloud) and white ground (in red). The other pic is in the visible portion of the spectrum. Hat tip to Scott Bachmeier’s CIMMS blog.

The new GOES R satellite which launches in 2015 will have many more channels in the IR and allow forecasters an even better view of snow and ice than is possible now. If you’re a weather geek in high school and are interested in this kind of science, then the Univ. of Wisconsin Atmos. Science program is the place to enroll!

I’m back in Oklahoma for a few days to see my daughter, and as we drove in the sky had a LOT of dust in it Tuesday. This is not an unusual occurrence in Oklahoma, and the MODIS image below shows why. High winds blew the dust hundreds of miles from New Mexico. Saharan dust regularly makes it across the Atlantic to Florida in the warm season.

From NASA MODIS- click image to see animation.

If the circuit I have described, can be fairly proved to owe it’s very existence to Volcanick explosions, at various, and in some parts at very remote periods, and be not meerly a country torn to pieces by subterraneous fires, as has been hitehrto the generally received opinion, I flatter myself, I shall have open’d a new field for observation on this curious subject.

But since this Accretionary Wedge is about the illustrations, I’d really better comment on Hamilton’s Illustrator, Pietro Fabri (or Peter Fabris, as Hamilton calls him):

…I employed Mr. Peter Fabris, a most ingenious and able artist, a native of Great Britain, to take Drawings of every interesting spot, descibed in my letters, in which each stratum is represented in its proper colours; The exteriour, and interiour forms of Mount Vesuvius, the Solfaterra, and of every other ancient Volcano in the neighbourhood of Naples, are represented faithfully in these Drawings, as are likewise the different specimens of Volcanick matter, such as lava’s, Tufa’s, pumice stones, ashes, sulphurs, salts &c., of which the whole country I have described, is evidently comprised.

I haven’t been able to discover much more about Fabri, but it’s clear that he was a brilliant illustrator, and managed to capture some really beautiful (and useful!) moments of ephemeral geologic phenomena. Which brings us to the illustration I like the most:

"View of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius Monday morning August the 9th 1779 and of the magnificent column of smoke, which attended that eruption; taken from an original Drawing done from nature at Pausilipo by Mr. Peter Fabris."

This is my favorite geologic illustration for a number of reasons. The first is simply aesthetic; it’s a lovely piece of work, and I particularly enjoy the observers in the foreground, for whom this seems to be an occurrence that merits a bit of sightseeing but not panic. But there are geologic aspects that I find intriguing as well. Fabri has captured not only the Plinian (or sub-Plinian) eruption column, but the ballistics falling out of the cloud (some of which must have been quite large, judging from the scale at which they’re depicted). In addition, he’s managed to show a vital process in the growth and maintenance of a volcanic plume – the entrainment and heating of outside air. This is occurring where Fabri shows the column curling in on itself, and it shows that this column was probably in its initial stages of formation, when there was still enough hot material (ash or hot gas jets) in the plume to trap and heat outside air. This heated air provides lift to the column, and allows it to grow to the impressive heights that we see in Plinian eruptions.

Entrainment is part of what ‘feeds’ an eruption column, so seeing that Fabri and Hamilton took note of it even this early on in the development of volcanology is pretty exciting. I will note that some of his ballistic trajectories are a bit suspect – material falling out of an eruption column should pretty much just ‘rain’ out, and probably wouldn’t be arcing like the upper ballistics in this illustration. But the lower ones, which are presumably being expelled directly from the vent and not rising in the column, are doing precisely what they should. It’s also unlikely that the upper bombs are going to be the same size as the lower ones; material that rises in an eruption plume has to be light enough for the upward thrust of gases and hot air to push it that high in the first place, so bigger bombs will fall out earlier. (Want to see what paths ballistics follow depending on things like velocity, ejection angle and bomb size? Try the bomb trajectory simulation at Stromboli Online.)

Finally, I always liked to think about the woman standing in the foreground. Who was she? What was she saying about the eruption? She doesn’t look particularly upset at the sight of a volcanic plume, but why is that? Has she seen so many that she’s jaded by them? (This eruptive period lasted for a decade, after all!) Is she describing something to her friends, or pointing out a feature of the plume? Or is she just a creation of the artist, there for scale and color and perhaps to balance the center of the image? Since it’s hard to find much information about the artist, we’ll probably never know anything about his subjects – or if they were even real. But it’s always fun to imagine things.

Did you spot the imposter?

The second of these, assisted with some information from the first, suggests that this was a multi-phase landslide event.  Let’s start by looking at the central portion of the landslide:-

I have annotated on the image above three key areas.  In A there is an area of disrupted but intact vegetation, which must have come ass an almost intact block from the slope above.  It is not back tilted, so the slide is not rotational, which is consistent with the very planar form of the (presumably joint-controlled) back scarp.  At B there is an arcuate secondary scarp cut into the block that forms A, and below this is a flow deposit, of which the upper component clearly derives from B.

If we now look at the upper part of the landslide we see another secondary failure:

This landslide, marked D above, appears to be a late stage earthflow (it is mostly soil) over the back scarp.

Let’s now take a look at the mid-part of the landslide.  There is a marked difference between the left and right (as viewed from the image) sides of the landslide.  The left side (marked E below) has a steep scarp that appears to be at least 10 m high:

The right side on the other hand still shows the extension of the ridge that runs across the slope, albeit with the vegetation stripped off, suggesting that the landslide was shallow in this region.  So the landslide was deep on one side and quite shallow on the other.  At G the landslide debris appears to have in part ridden over a section of rock, but presumably most of the debris was diverted around this into the centre of the landslide.

Done at the toe the landslide debris clearly spilt into two and followed the drainage lines.  On the left side there is some evidence that it “cut the corner” on the inside of the first bend (marked H below) and super-elevated on the outside (marked as I):

On the other (right) side the debris appears to have travelled straight down the drainage line:

Of course what is not shown by all of this is the first event – i.e. the major failure that started the sequence of failures.  We really need some idea of the form of the topography before the slides to get an idea of this, and we need to get on the ground to look in detail at the deposits that are not covered by the secondary failures.  The  most intriguing aspect is that the distribution of volume change in the head scarp source area does not seem to match the distribution along the track very well.  In the image below, the zone of largest volume change is at J (ignore the superficial earthflow that has partially filled this area), but most of the debris appears to have passed through the area marked K (look at the flow lines, and bear in mind the almost vertical scarp on the left side).  This implies that the initial part of the landslide may have followed the general trajectory shown by the arrow:

However, for the material highlighted in A in the third image above to move into the landslide, material from this zone must have moved out first.  It seems likely therefore that the initial failure occupied the deeper portion of the area from J to K.  To understand how and why this section failed we really do need to have an idea of the pre-failure topography and, critically, the location of the quarry and its spoil.  I am particularly interested in the latter as none of the images show any  waste tips that I can see, which means that this debris was either removed from the site or it has been incorporated into the slope failure.

So the burning questions remain:

1. Where was the quarry excavation?

2. Where was the spoil?

3. What was the rainfall in the period leading up to the slip?

It is deeply frustrating that we seem to be no closer to an answer to any of these questions.

Comments and thoughts, and alternative suggestions, are very welcome. It would be good to crowd-source an interpretation of this landslide head of the official investigation (?).  My interpretation above should be considered to be no more than a set of hypotheses that need testing properly by the investigation team.

Researchers studied the effect of large-scale removal of vegetation in tidal marshes in the Schelde estuary, Belgium and southwest Netherlands. (Credit: https://beeldbank.rws.nl, Rijkswaterstaat/Joop van Houdt)

When the plants go, the whole marsh falls apart.

That’s what researchers have found in an innovative experiment in Belgium in which acres of reeds were literally mowed down, enabling the team to observe the consequences of extensive plant loss, which were more severe than expected.

“Once you lose the vegetation, the conditions for plant growth get worse and worse and worse – toward permanent loss of the vegetation,” said Stijn Temmerman, a geomorphologist with the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who led the research team.

Observations of this sort might help land managers in areas such as the Mississippi Delta, where tidal marshes are in peril, he added. Without marshes, coastal areas can become more vulnerable to storm surges, and lose a key natural water filter.

In tidal wetland ecosystems, vegetation ordinarily roots the soil in place and helps trap sediments, building up the marsh. Past computer models and studies in small research plots of a few square meters or yards have shown that plant die-off deprives marshes of new mud that elevates the land. The new study examines what happens in nature when the vegetation disappears over 4 hectares (about 10 acres) of a tidal wetland. Once the plants were lost, the new research shows, the marsh changed shape, creating difficult conditions for new vegetation to take root.

The study was published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

It’s the first time researchers have been able to directly investigate the effects of removing the plants from a large tidal marsh, Temmerman said. And the findings reflect what could happen in the coming years, as rising sea levels flood coastal wetlands with more water than they can handle.

“The wetland plants that are growing there, they are stressed by this increase. We’ve seen in several places around the world that this leads to die-offs of the vegetation,” Temmerman said. Those places include Venice’s lagoons and the Mississippi Delta, where huge sections of marshes are shrinking.

At the Belgian marsh where the experiment took place, land managers routinely mow all the reeds, which helps the plants come back healthier the next year. Before and after that grooming, the scientists took measurements of water depth, velocity, and direction at several places across the marsh, including in the channels that drain the flats.

They found that when the tides came in, without the plants as a speed trap, the water flowed two to four times faster over the plain – and at those speeds, the sediment didn’t settle out to help build up the marsh. The water in the channels, however, slowed down to a third of its normal speed. And there, the sediments did drop out of the flow, causing channels to fill up.

This second finding was an unexpected result, Temmerman said. Blocked channels led to less drainage of the previously vegetated marsh, which created unfavorably soggy growing conditions. So without new marsh-building mud on the plains, and with blocked up drainage channels, the tidal marsh was swamped, making it more difficult for plants to grow back. Rising sea levels are expected increase the odds that a marsh will go under and no longer support new plant growth.

For land managers and others tasked with keeping wetlands healthy, the study is a warning to work as hard as possible to ensure the vegetation doesn’t disappear, Temmerman said. In places like the Mississippi basin, where managers direct water into surrounding wetlands to build up sediments, those actions need to be taken as soon as plants start dying. If vegetation is lost for a couple years, he said, it’s harder for the sediments to stick on the marsh plains, and rebuilding the wetland gets tricky.

“Once the marshes die off,” Temmerman said, “it’s very, very difficult to restore them.”

Temmerman, S., Moonen, P., Schoelynck, J., Govers, G., & Bouma, T. (2012). Impact of vegetation die-off on spatial flow patterns over a tidal marsh Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (3) DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050502

– Kate Ramsayer, AGU science writer

[gigapan src="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/98984/options/nosnapshots,hidetitle/iframe/flash.html"  height="250" scrolling="no" width="100%"] link

[gigapan src="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/98840/options/nosnapshots,hidetitle/iframe/flash.html"  height="250" scrolling="no" width="100%"] link

It seems to me that students could use images like these in an introductory lab assignment on igneous rocks (crystal nucleation and growth, lava eruption and degassing), or in a sedimentary lab, thinking about the relationship between sedimentary characteristics and provenance. The professor could even assign students to make a rough quantification of how much basalt had to be weathered to generate a given volume of this sand. The professor could ask about other sources of particles in the sand, like orange/white shell fragments.

Other themes of connected GigaPans that occur to me:

Appalachian geology or Rocky Mountain geology (location is the theme)

Subduction zone geology, clastic sedimentation geology, karst geology (process is the theme)

Hand-samples, sediment samples, and outcrops from each physiographic province (scale is the theme)

An online sample set for Physical Geology, Historical Geology, Economic Geology, Structural Geology, etc. (an academic program is the theme)

What sorts of themes can you dream up that it would be useful to have gigapixel-resolution imagery for? How can we help you?

____________________________________

* M.A.G.I.C. = Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection

1. On-going problems on the A980 in Scotland

Back in December the A980  Lochcarron to Plockton road was closed at the Strome Ferry due to rockfalls from a steep section of cliff.  This has had major impacts in terms of diversions, resulting in the Highland Council laying on a car ferry service to provide a detour.  There have been multiple unsuccessful attempts to re-open the road, which remains closed until at least next Monday.

2. A near-miss in Dorset

Meanwhile, a couple had a near-miss from a coastal rockfall near to Burton Bradstock in Dorset:

” The couple were enjoying a gentle stroll along the beach when giant boulders – some the size of cars – began tumbling down the 45 m cliff.It was only because Ms Pollard stopped to pick up a shell on the beach at Burton Bradstock, Dorset, that the couple didn’t walk under the mass of falling rocks.  The 45-year-old, from West Horrington, Somerset, said: ‘All of a sudden these big boulders rolled down the cliff and out along the beach towards the sea.  ‘It all took about five seconds or so to come down. It made the most horrendous crash, I was terrified.”

Looking at the image of the landslide provided in the paper, this was no trivial event:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/890797-couple-saved-from-dorset-cliff-collapse-after-stopping-to-pick-up-shell

It is also interesting to note the steep overhang that has been left – there is probably a further rockfall to come at this location.

3. Plans for upgrades to the A83 Rest and Be Thankful

Back to Scotland, where the A83 road and the beautifully named Rest and be Thankful has been the site of repeated landslide problems in recent years, most recently in December 2011:

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2011/12/01/motorists-facing-26-mile-diversion-as-landslide-closes-a83-near-rest-and-be-thankful-86908-23602604/

The Scottish Government has announced a £1 million scheme to upgrade a forest road that will allow traffic to still pass, even when the road is closed.  At the same time £100,000 is being spent exploring engineering solutions to the problem, focusing either on the construction of a landslide shelter over the road , elevating the road onto a viaduct to cross the landslide zone., or finding a new alignment.  Sensibly, addressing the cause of the landslides by better managing the hillslope vegetation is also being considered.

Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, Utah, Fall 2005.

I don’t have much time to blog today, but here’s a pretty picture of Delicate Arch. I hope everyone is having a happy President’s Day!

I got these photos from Rick Diecchio of George Mason Univerisity, who got them from a local fellow who dug it up in his yard in Dale City, Virginia. Rick says:

I was stumped at first, but the more I look at it, the more I think it’s a lightning strike into sand or more likely sandstone, maybe the Cretaceous Potomac Formation.

The host rock is all sandstone. The sand appears under hand lens to be fused, and on the surface there is a chert-like coating which I think may have been the result of melting. The sample is a lot heavier than I would expect, and very well indurated.

What do you think? Are there other options? Have you ever seen anything like this? If it is a fulgurite, how common or rare is a sample this size? Feel free to share these pics with others who may be interested or who may be able to provide information.

A silcrete concretion is possible. Then it becomes significant whether or not the sand grains are fused. maybe will have to get a thin-section. There is no sign if anything fozzilized. No bone or petrified wood as far as I can tell. The size is the biggest problem for me. Most fulgurites I have seen are an order of magnitude smaller.

Any ideas, wise readers?

It was mediocre. If you’ve read Sphere, Congo, Timeline, Prey, Jurassic Park, or the Andromeda Strain, you’ve already pretty much read Micro. A band of diverse characters encounter adversity in a world where natural processes meet high technology, and only those who are both brave and lucky survive.

In this case, the adventurers are a team of graduate students from MIT, and they get tossed into a plot on Oahu, Hawaii. The big bad company (a standard Crichton trope) has developed shrinkage technology, and they are using it to shrink people and machines so that they can more efficiently access the microscopic world for the purpose of finding drugs and other useful biomolecules. Plus, they’ve got a side business going to weaponize the technology to create micro-assassins.

The head of the company is megalomaniacal and doesn’t mind killing people who get between him and his business plan. So the bodies start piling up, and when the grad student gang tries to intervene, he shrinks them all to about a few millimeters tall, and throws them into the jungle. There, they encounter the extraordinary diversity of very small organisms, and start getting killed by things like centipedes and wasps and ants. (As opposed to gorillas in Congo, jellyfish in Sphere, dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, microbes in Andromeda Strain, nanobots in Prey, or the British in Timeline). It’s always something!

Quibble: if you shrink someone to that tiny size, what happens to their mass? Do they retain their full complement of atoms, or are some of those atoms removed from the system? If so, to where? The tiny grad students are pretty much weightless (they “fall” through the air like ants would, and land without harm from “great” heights), so that doesn’t mesh very well with the idea that they retain their same mass. I guess this is just one of those details that a reader is supposed to suspend disbelief about, but it does undermine the entire basis for the plot.

Highlight: bugs are fascinating, and they appear quite alien when we view them through a macro lens. They do amazing, freaky things, both biochemical and behavioral, and it’s worth indulging in an implausible plot if only to reveal some of those things to a wider audience. My favorite scene was when the most unlikable character (another Crichton standard, who previously appeared as Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park) gets his arm parasitized by a wasp. She lays eggs in there, and the eggs hatch into larvae and consume his arm, bulging against the skin while he is still alive. This horrific occurrence is standard fare in the natural world. As you might have heard, it’s red in tooth and claw. Parasitism as a way of life for such a large proportion of the Earth’s species is a beautiful, brutal distillation of evolution’s “anything goes” attitude to differential reproduction. It’s a good reminder for us humans, I think, to spend some time contemplating that. Bugs are extraordinary and amazing and they remind us of the fundamentals of natural selection. This would be my #1 reason to recommend the book for your reading.

Spoiler alert: A major flaw in the book is that the death of one character about 2/3 of the way through the book feels very much like the point where Crichton stopped writing and Preston took over. Up to that point, it really felt like Crichton was setting up the whiny environmentalist for a gruesome death (Crichton was a global warming denialist) and the even-tempered leader for the “last man standing” role. But then their roles pretty much switch most of the way through the book, with the good guy getting killed, and the blowhard greenie making it to the finish line (with the girl, of course: gotta have the token romance thrown in!).

All in all, I’d give it a 5 out of 10 possible.

The Express Tribune in Pakistan is reporting that the Attabad landslide (see summary post and Authorstream presentation), which formed two years ago and has caused huge disruption in Gilgit-Baltistan, will be blasted net week:

The spillways need to be blasted which in turn result in flashfloods due to the sudden release of water. The authorities, in an effort to minimise losses for the population living in low-lying areas, have sought time to make adequate preparations.

The district administration of Hunza Nagar made an announcement last week to blast the spillway on February 18, but put off the task till the 27th of this month.

“We have been informed by the home department about a change in date, with instructions to complete the preparations by the revised date,” Deputy Commissioner of Hunza Nagar, Burhan Afindi said.

Explosives will be used to blast the boulders currently obstructing the outflow of water though a spillway dug in 2010.

The article describes the measures that need to be taken downstream to protect the population against a potential flood:

An official said that traffic on the Gilgit-Hunza portion of the Karakoram Highway would be stopped on that day. Authorities also warned residents settled downstream to avoid venturing to the riverside. Pakistan Red Crescent society (PRCS) has deputed a team of volunteers to assist the administration in case of an emergency.

“Assistant Director, Youth, Wajid Ali has been assigned the task of assisting rehabilitation work if something untoward happens,” said Safdar Ali, an official in the PRCS. He added that the team has been trained and equipped to deal with any emergency.

I will provide updates as they become available.  It is going to be very important to protect the downstream populations, and I hope that efforts are made to record the ways in which the dam behaves and the flood develops – we can learn a great deal about the ways that landslide dams breach from this event.

Update (22nd Feb): according to a comment below, this is the removal of a coffer (i.e. temporary) dam.  This explanation differs from that in the article, which suggests that it is the boulders that are being blasted.

I know personally of scientists who have received death threats for their work in the field of climate physics, and teachers whose jobs were threatened for teaching basic biology. The National Center for Science Education has recently added defending climate science to its mission because of the many reports from teachers that they are having issues with parents over the issue.

Click the image below to read the Guardian story. I noticed this very same feeling at the AGU meeting in San Francisco last December. This story comes in the same week that the BBC reports on scientists in Canada allegedly being muzzled for political reasons as well.

What we do about issues like climate change is a political question requiring agreement among all sides of the political aisle. Attacking scientists or teachers for explaining well understood science is doing a grave disservice, not just to teachers and scientists, but in the long run, to our children as well.

Properly dressed for clean lab chemistry, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 2006.

I am a geochemist. For my PhD thesis, undergraduate, and summer internship research, I have spent thousands of hours in geochemistry labs. I enjoy labwork, and I take laboratory safety seriously. When I work in the laboratory, I usually wear an outfit similar to the above. In the above photograph I am wearing an acid-resistant lab coat, long pants, closed-toed plastic lab clogs (out of the picture, but believe me), gloves, safety glasses, and a hair net to keep my long hair out of my way (and also out of my samples). As much as possible, I keep the chemicals I work with inside fume hoods, which protect me from dangerous acid vapors. When I work with especially dangerous chemicals such as hydrofluoric acid or aqua regia, I usually add a full face shield, an extra pair of gloves, and sometimes an extra labcoat or apron to the above outfit. In some labs I wear a full tyvek jumpsuit  rather than a labcoat so that my legs are better protected.

The clothes I wear in geochemistry labs may not always be the most flattering (although, personally, I think I look pretty good in a labcoat), but that’s not the point. The point of these clothes is to protect me from dangerous chemicals. Everyone dresses like this in geochemistry labs (or should), and no one worries over fashion when donning laboratory gear. Why? Because looking fashionable is not particularly important when you are trying to prevent acid exposure. Preventing acid exposure can literally be a matter of life-and-death. Unfortunately, rocks (especially silicate rocks) do not like to dissolve. So, geochemists use a very dangerous acid called hydrofluoric acid to bring them into solution for chemical analysis. Exposure to hydrofluoric acid is initially painless (because it interferes with nerve function), so you often don’t know that you’ve been exposed until hours later, when your flesh and bones have started to dissolve. A large hydrofluoric acid exposure is lethal, so I always, always, always wear my protective laboratory gear when working with hydrofluoric acid and also when working with other, slightly less dangerous acids.

You might be wondering why I’m posting the above photograph and explaining how geochemists generally dress. I am posting this photograph because there has been a disturbing stock photograph titled “lab work” that has been circulating around the science blogosphere recently. Here is the picture:

Image taken from here: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-13771784-lab-work.php

In the above photograph the female chemist is either (1.) naked or (2.) wearing a strapless top or dress. Neither type of attire (or lack thereof) is appropriate for chemistry. There is far too much skin that could be exposed to dangerous acids. Furthermore, if that beaker contains acid, the chemist really should be handling that beaker under a fume hood. Perhaps that is the problem– maybe the acid fumes have dissolved her clothes? In that case, she really should consider wearing a more acid resistant tyvek suit or coat.

Joking aside, the stock photograph really disturbs me. Is this how we want the general public to view lab work? Why does the female chemist look naked? Is it to make her more attractive? Why is it important for her to look attractive?  I suppose that I understand that stock photos usually feature more-attractive-than-average people, but does she have to look naked to look attractive?

Even Barbie, who is definitely a fashionista, is smart enough to wear proper laboratory safety clothing when doing geochemistry:

Geochemist Barbie takes safety seriously. Image taken from the "Dress Barbie Like a Geologist" Accretionary Wedge here: http://blogs.agu.org/georneys/2011/11/18/accretionary-wedge-39-geologist-barbie/

Geochemist Barbie and I are appalled at the stock photo of the naked female chemist. I really hope that not too many people actually purchase this stock photo. Rather than use that stock photo, I encourage you to– please– rather use a photograph of a real scientist dressed in real laboratory safety gear. If you’re considering purchasing that stock photo, you’re more than welcome to rather take the picture of me (for free!) or of Geochemist Barbie (also free!) in our more realistic laboratory clothing instead. Also, I have a proposal for other chemists: why not post pictures of you in your laboratory clothing, as I have posted here? If you don’t have a blog, I’d be happy to host your picture here at Georneys. I’ve been really impressed with the recent This is What a Scientist Looks Like effort, which was initiated by Kevin Zelnio. Why not start a similar effort, perhaps titled “This is What a Chemist Looks Like” or “This is What Lab Work Looks Like” ?

Sand dune field overprinting desert vegetation and human roadways:

Outcrop pattern of horizontal strata (tracing out the contours of this hill), and the weird geometry of human road systems:

More contour-hugging outcrops of horizontal strata, and a vertical joint set:

Same thing:

Bajada (apron of sediment, made from multiple alluvial fans coalescing) on the flank of fault-block mountain range, playa (salt flat) in the foreground.

Annotated version:

Meandering river with cut-off loops (dried-out oxbow lakes):

I love sitting in a window seat on a clear day!

High reolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) model of snowfall over the next 60 hours. While models are never spot on, the odds are high that KY,WV, and Central Virginia will see snow Sunday. It will overspread Delaware and the Eastern Shore of MD Sunday night. Click image for higher res.

This is teh snowfall forecast from the NWS in Baltimore. It only includes their county warning area. Click image to see larger version.

Several inches of snow may fall over the next 48 hours in the Mid Atlantic. It looks now as if the heavier snows will be SW of the Washington/Baltimore area but an inch or two is possible even there and out onto the Delmarva. I’m moving to Salisbury on the Eastern Shore in a couple of weeks (will be forecasting WBOC TV). As a snow lover, all I have to say is that it could have waited until I got there!

Those of you in areas of Virginia, from Richmond back into Kentucky and WV, may see several inches of snow. Something there has been very little of this winter. In the DC area, this winter is one of the least snowiest in record so far, and the warm ground will likely melt a lot of what does fall. Steve Scolnik over at Capital Climate has a nice post on how events like this in the past have turned out.

Snow forecasting is always difficult, and there seems to be a lot of extra uncertainty in the NWP models with this system. The cold air may not be all that cold either, and unlike most winters, the air that flows into the Mid Atlantic will be travelling over bare ground instead of snow cover. That can make a significant difference, but if you really want a good chance of sledding in some deep snow, head to Bath County, Virginia.

I’ll bet they get over 5 inches there.

Rotated 90° to the right:

And then rotated another 90° to the right, so now you’re looking at the opposite side relative to the first shot:

This was not a sample I found personally, but one that was collected by Josh Villalobos of El Paso Community College. He sawed it in half, gave it a coat of shellac, and then gave half to me, and half to Elizabeth Nagy-Shadman on our field trip the week before last. The sample was collected out at Kilbourne Hole, a maar volcanic complex west of El Paso, in southern New Mexico. Maars are big explosive craters that form when hot magma encounters groundwater, and steam explosions ensue. Chunks of rock and lava get flung through the air to land like geologic shrapnel around the hole.

Apparently what happened with this sample is that a xenolith of peridotite* (olivine-rich intrusive igneous rock) was tumbling along in the conduit of basaltic magma when the explosion occurred. It was flung through the air as a solid chunk surrounded by a coating of liquid mafic lava, which congealed and solidified as it traveled through the cold air, like a volcanic bomb. It landed, and eventually Josh found it, sliced it, and shared it.

Wild, right? It’s both a xenolith and a volcanic bomb. I hereby propose a new term for such a thing: I call it a xenobomb.

Similar xenobombs can be found at Kilbourne Hole of many other xenolith rock types, including migmatite.

It reminds me of a chocolate-covered almond.

____________________________

* Several sites online refer to these inclusions not as xenoliths but “giant crystals” of olivine. Others say they’re xenoliths. It’s clearly not a single coherent crystal – you can see the central portion of the xenobomb includes hundreds of 1mm – 2mm sized olivine grains. But are those actually separate crystals with independent nucleations and growth histories? (i.e., crystallization of an ultramafic magma, which then solidified into peridotite and had a chunk of that solid rock stoped off to be included in a later mafic magma?) Or are they clasts still in situ relative to the larger crystal they used to be part of?  (In other words, does this represent a case of positive dilation and ensuing fracturing of a single original crystal into many fragments upon depressurization?) Is this just a case of people on the internet confusing minerals with rocks? That’s my bet.

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Whilst the camerawork is shaky (understandable given that the landslide came over the wall of the pit), the first part of the video shows a very large and very mobile slide.  It is worth viewing the first part twice as the second time it is possible to get a better idea of what is going on.

Another sample from the collection on display, both indoors and out, at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Don’t know anything about it beyond its lovely differential weathering.

Happy Friday.

The Yallourn open cast mine landslide in Australia:

Courtesy of Caner Zanbak, is the Collolar lignite mine landslide in Turkey:

Chuquicamata mine, Chile, pit wall failure in 1969 (see the great resource on mine wall failures here)

http://www.amcconsultants.com.au/2005_june.asp

Mine wall failure at Round Mountain in Nevada (courtesy of Dan Bartlett)

Start:

http://www.danbartlett.net/Pictures2.htm

During:

http://www.danbartlett.net/Pictures2.htm

After:

http://www.danbartlett.net/Pictures2.htm

Huckleberry Mine, SE of Smithers BC, Canada, June 2007

Courtesy of Jimmy James: “East Zone Pit north wall failure. (2×10^6 m^3 est volume). No injuries or equipment damage were reported and mine life was nearing conclusion in that pit so there was minimal loss of production. Mining is ongoing in an adjacent pit.”

Bing Aerial View:

Mine level view looking NE at failure head scarp (http://goo.gl/QRyPo)

Another mine level view looking slightly east of previous view (http://goo.gl/NfG3J):

BC EMPR Mines Report 2007 (this includes a view of failure toe and brief discussion of mine geology on page 6)

The 2011 Mine Optimization PDF report discusses the geology of the mine area, including in the completed East Zone Pit. Pages 37, 40 illustrates faulting and slide location. Pages 65, 66 illustrate and describe dyke and faulting along the north wall of the Main pit, just west of the east pit.

The Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia (the best landslide video of all time):

My blog post on the landslide

As noted above, I’d like to add more to this collection, so your suggestions are welcome.

Update: Several of the top climate experts (Dr. Ben Santer, Michael Mann and others) who have been the target of Heartland’s smear campaigns have written an open letter in the UK Guardian here.

I wrote a blog post about a pamphlet full of pseudo-science sent to me (and hundreds of other on-air weathercasters) over a year ago. It was, in a scientific sense laughable, and you can read that post here. Unfortunately the propaganda in the pamphlet was repeated by quite a few weathercasters. Fast forward to this week and the news that someone stole private documents from Heartland that put them in a rather bad light. Theft is theft, and this is no more legal than the theft of thousands of private emails from climate scientists two years ago.

The Heartland claim that the weather stations in the U.S. are not acceptable is not supported by the science. Heartland is paying more money to spread this kind of disinformation through a California blogger.

Heartland has screamed foul, which rings a bit hollow, since they were the ones that tried intently to make something out of the climate emails. This failed of course because there was nothing there and EVERY investigation into those who wrote them said so. Those who live from one conspiracy theory to the next will not accept that, but most reasonable people do. The press certainly accepts it, because they gave a big yawn when a new batch of these emails were released recently. It actually had the opposite effect than the thief hoped. Most of the press articles pointed out that all of the claims that Heartland promoted were shown to be false.

Heartland claims that at least one piece of the stolen material is faked, but the documents that seem to be real show that they are paying California weatherman Anthony Watts (who was behind the pamphlet sent to weathercasters) money to keep riding that train, even though the track was washed away by the facts. Watts has apparently confirmed this regardless of the veracity of the released documents from Heartland. Even more concerning is the project to produce a curriculum funded by fossil fuel contributors to confuse students on the issue of climate change. This is apparently being produced not by someone with a background in atmospheric or climate science but an adviser to the fossil fuel industry.

American students are falling ever more behind in math and science, while more and more teachers are reporting they get grief from parents and even administration over basic science like evolution or climate change in the classroom. In science, there is the peer-reviewed literature and scientific method. Anything outside of that may be the other-side but it is not science. It’s belief. There are plenty of subjects students can take to study political and religious beliefs, but  they have no place in a science classroom.

The connection between those who manufactured doubt on tobacco smoke and those who are doing the same on climate science is detailed in a book by Dr. Naomi Oreskes.

A number of other bloggers who I greatly respect have written on this issue. Below are links to their thoughts on the matter. Many of these people have backgrounds in science.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy

Richard Black at The BBC (The BBC remains one of the best mainstream media outlets for accurate science reporting)

The NY Times Coverage

John Cook at Skeptical Science

From the AP via the CBS

Andy Revkin at Dot Earth

Peter Sinclair has embedded a video that shows the close connection between Heartland, and other think tanks with those who claimed cigarette smoking was not dangerous. In many cases it’s the same campaign, and the same handful of scientists involved with manufacturing doubt on tobacco and climate science. Read Naomi Oreskes for the amazing details on this.

Note: Heartland says it was duped into emailing the private documents to someone, and they could release that email if they wish to show that some of what was sent by the thief was doctored. Comments are open as always, but be prepared to back up your claims, (esp. with anything to do with climate science) and do not waste your time name calling. I will not approve those kind of comments.