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1 August 2011
9800 Feet
We got to Kidd Creek mine at 6:45 am. As we entered the mine site, we passed a billboard proudly announcing that it had been 15 days since the last accident, and someone in our group joked that 15 days wasn’t much to brag about. We laughed, a little nervous but excited at the prospect of entering one of the world’s deepest mines, to study the underground geology of the Canadian shield.
31 July 2011
Agouron Photo Album
I lieu of detailed blog posts covering the rest of my Agouron trip, I’ll let these pictures do the talking (along with my annotations).
24 July 2011
Agouron Day 2: Greenstone Belts 101
On the second day of the Agouron field trip, we piled into the vans and drove out of town, down some rather rugged road (especially for minivans!) and parked next to waste rock from an old mine. But instead of investigating this rock, we set off into the swamp on the other side of the road. After a muggy walk through tailings-stained swamp and tall cattails, along a beaver dam, and than up a rise into the forest, we came to a clearing under some power lines where rocks were exposed.
22 July 2011
MSL to Land at Gale Crater
Curiosity is going to Gale Crater, the landing site that I have studied for the past few years! Mountains of layered rocks and spectacular canyons, here we come!
Agouron Day 2: Photo Filler
I haven’t had the chance to do a proper entry about day 2 yet, but here are some photos to whet your appetite…
20 July 2011
Agouron Day 1: Introduction and Kam Kotia Mine Tailings
The Kam Kotia mine site is famous for being an environmental disaster. Mines tend to dump their ground-up waste rock into a reservoir nearby, typically a lake, where the finely ground rocks rapidly alter leading to nasty acidic chemicals that tend to make the area uninhabitable for a while. The Kam Kotia tailings have been partially “reclaimed” but the area is still pretty devastated.
19 July 2011
Agouron Geobiology Field School!
Greetings from scenic Timmins Ontario! I will be spending the next 9 days with a bunch of geologists, biologists, chemists, planetary scientists, and all around smart people, learning about the geology of the Abitibi Greenstone Belt near Timmins. In particular, we will be talking a lot about the origin of life, and how this chunk of ancient crust on Earth can (or cannot) be used as an analog for Mars …
15 July 2011
Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta today!
Today NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will make history by being the first probe to orbit the protoplanet Vesta! The image below is from July 9, and already Dawn has upgraded Vesta from a fuzzy disk in Hubble images to a world with visible surface features, including some strange striations. Once Dawn is in orbit, we should be getting even better views. Stay tuned!
9 July 2011
The End of an Era
Yesterday morning, the last space shuttle launched for the last time. There will never be another shuttle launch, and personally, I’m glad. But I am worried about the future.
2 July 2011
Spectacular Space Shuttle Photo Retrospective
I’ve been known in the past to be down on the Space Shuttle. After all, it is incredibly expensive, unsafe, and never lived up to the promise inherent in the name “shuttle”. But there’s no denying that it’s still a spectacular machine that, for better or worse, has been the face of human space exploration for 30 years. July 8 is set to be the final launch of the shuttle program, and the Atlantic’s photo-blog “In Focus” has a beautiful pictorial history of the shuttle that is well worth checking out.
