17 March 2016
3D virtual sample of a deep sea pillow basalt
Posted by Callan Bentley
Our local NSF geoscience education guru, Jill Karsten, is retiring. She and her husband, Rodey Batiza, are packing up their lives and moving back home, vacating the Beltway for good. This might be viewed as a shame as far as geoscience education funding is concerned: Jill has made her mark acting as an advocate of diversifying the geoscience workforce. I hope they get someone similarly awesome to replace her at NSF. But it’s not a shame as far as NOVA’s rock collection is concerned…
When geologists retire, they get rid of their rocks! And since our campus is just down the road from them, Jill dropped off a box full of goodies for us a few weeks ago. I decided to use one of the pillow basalts therein as the subject of my first Agisoft Photoscan 3D digital model. (Previously I showed one that my colleague Alan Pitts made.)
Here it is:
Note that unlike the previously-featured sample, this one has simple point annotations on it – a boon to those interested in teaching or outreach.
Thoughts? Comments? Enjoy spinning it around and zooming in and out!
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.
Two things I found most interesting:
1. The ‘rust’ one sees along the line of radial fractures. I’m tempted to assume it’s simply iron oxide, but I’ll guess that it’s more complex chemically than that.
2. The 1 cm vesicle horizon got me thinking for the longest amount of time. Why would the gas bubbles expand the most right along the inner edge of the flash quenched shell? That has to be the zone of lowest pressure, but why? Possibly the quenching produces a contraction of the shell volume which creates a momentary zone of lower pressure along the outer edge of the still molten interior, and into that zone the gas bubbles expand.
BTW, that is a very cool and useful image technology. What amazing tools we have now.