Mountain Beltway

26 January 2011

Ken Rasmussen is outstanding faculty!

This is from an e-mail I just got from Dr. Robert Templin, the President of Northern Virginia Community College, in reference to my colleague Ken Rasmussen:

Dear Colleague,

I am very pleased to share with you the news that Dr. Kenneth Rasmussen, Professor of Geology at the Annandale Campus, is a recipient of the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award for 2011. This award, sponsored by Dominion and administered by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, is the highest honor bestowed by the Commonwealth on those who serve in higher education.

Students and colleagues readily attest to the vitality and quality that Dr. Rasmussen has brought to the study of geology and oceanography at NOVA since he joined the faculty in 1992. He has always believed that the best way to develop scientifically learned citizens is to involve them in field excursions along with hands-on laboratory experiences: “It keeps the science fresh and the teaching inspired, and it pays dividends in student development.” Twice annual cruises on the Chesapeake Bay allow students to use their own field observations to document real-time patterns in the health of the estuary. Whenever possible, he has involved students in his own extensive research projects, whether nearby at the Smithsonian Institution or halfway around the world at Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan.

To support his field courses and research, Dr, Rasmussen has secured grants from the National Science Foundation and the VCCS Professional Development Program, as well as receiving a NOVA Presidential Sabbatical. He has also been recognized as Faculty of the Year by the NVCC Educational Foundation and received the John H. Moss Award for Excellence in College Teaching from the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. He frequently finds ways to share within and beyond NOVA his passion for the earth sciences—and their criticality for a habitable planet—whether by providing Honors Options for students in his classes; making presentations to school children, teachers groups, and the Lifelong Learning Institute; or serving as a lecturer at George Washington University. He takes particular pride in knowing that a number of former students who have gone to major in geology or related fields are now serving as school teachers and college faculty members.

Ken Rasmussen is now in the company of eight other NOVA colleagues who have been recipients of the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. Please join me in thanking him for his distinguished service to the college and in congratulating him for this very special recognition.

Bob

Hearty congratulations to Ken for this worthy recognition!

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The making of Baker’s Quarry

So here’s how I made that cake I showed you Monday.

Step 1: Collect the necessary ingredients:

(Nice job with the stitching, Photoshop… jeez!)

Step 2: Clear your schedule and start baking.

My first layer was to be “the basement complex” and so I wanted something marbled in appearance. Mixing chocolate-powder-stained batter with regular yellow batter was the method, and I threw chocolate chips into the mafic batter and “white baking chips” (such a descriptive name!) into the yellow batter, thinking they would be like metamorphic porphyroblasts. However, my batter was insufficiently viscous, and many of these chips sank down through the batter (approximating crystal settling perhaps?) to line the bottom of the cake. When I pulled it out of the oven, many of these chips stuck to the bottom of the baking pan:

And there were corresponding cavities in the base of my “basement” cake:

I baked a “basalt” (chocolate) cake next:

And then a yellow cake, and then a spice cake. The spice cake was where I started going crazy adding extra ingredients. I tossed in some walnuts and coconut and raisins, and then added in a series of “petrified trees” made of date logs. I just laid them down in three linear arrays atop the unbaked batter:

What happened next was interesting (to me, anyhow): the cake swelled as it baked, and the logs sank, and the top surface of the cake reached up and wrapped around the logs, sealing them inside, like the soft sediment deformation that results in ball-and-pillow structure. Here’s a view into the oven as this process was playing out:

Here’s the top of the spice cake stratum once it was done baking (the holes are me testing whether it was “done” with a chopstick). Notice the three “seams” marking where the date logs have sunk into the cake:

The bottom side of the spice cake is shown next. Note the three linear trends of the logs are visible here too, especially at the far left, where the force of the sinking log has pressed raisins and walnuts through the batter and up against the bottom of the pan:

Now it was time to start layering the cakes. Icing served to glue them together. Striving (as always) for authenticity, I added the crumbs and scrapings from the cake pan once the “basement” cake had been removed (see photo above). These represent sedimentary particles eroded off the basement, and marking the unconformity:

The basalt layer got slapped down next, but I immediately saw a problem — each cake was domed up in the middle, and stacking multiple cakes would result in them touching in the middle, but having the edges shorter than needed to reach the neighboring cake. Accordingly, I engaged in a little premeditated erosion:

With the domed top of the basalt removed, I iced it:

And added some sediment:

Likewise on up through the stack, reaching my log-bearing spice cake:

(The gird shape on top comes from me cooling it too soon upside-down on a cooling rack. It’s unintentional, though I suppose you might try to make the claim that it represents two orthogonal joint sets.)

Time to insert the pluton! While all this other stuff was going on, I had baked a circular (not rectangular) strawberry cake. I quartered it and stacked the quarters, producing a thick wedge with 90° of arc. Next, I would have to create some accommodation space. My way of solving “the room problem” was to cut out a corresponding sized-and-shaped piece of my stratiform composition:

The “pluton” of strawberry-flavored granite fit into this notch:

Here’s the cake, and it’s “missing piece,” chilling in the fridge while I prepared my next move:

I baked a batch of Rice Krispie treats, and carved out a meandering channel in them. I mixed up some blue Jell-O and tried at first to pour it into my channel. However, the porosity and permeability of the Rice Krispie treats would make an excellent aquifer, and the liquid Jell-O solution soaked right through. So I put it in the freezer to set up a bit more, and when it got to be a gelatinous goop, I poured it into the channel, where it stayed:

This was sealed to the top of everything else along a layer of homemade icing (basically, butter + sweet stuff), since by this time I had run out of the store-bought stuff. The finished product looked like this:

Rotated 90° counter-clockwise for another view:

Total casualties, 18 eggs:

A few hours later, we were off to friends’ house for dinner. I rode shotgun, cradling my cake in my lap:

I loved the way the upper surface looked in the sunlight. Ahh, the beauty of nature:

The final step was a big cut to reveal the cross-sectional structure…

And you know what it looked like after that…

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Got something to contribute to the Bake Sale? Remember that this Friday is the when the oven timer goes “ding!”

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25 January 2011

Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee

Over the weekend, hideously cold temperatures kept me indoors. I baked a cake, I went to see the new movie “True Grit” (excellent), and I read the 2006 compilation of John McPhee’s writing on transportation, Uncommon Carriers.

Like most everybody I know, I came to McPhee based on his geology writings — the quartet of books that were collectively republished en masse in 1998 as Annals of the Former World, an achievement which warranted a Pulitzer Prize. After that, I devoured his other books — I particularly dug Oranges (1967), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974, the year I was born!), and Coming Into the Country (1977).

But I haven’t been as enthralled with McPhee’s more recent work. He profiled my friend and mentor E-an Zen in “Travels of the Rock,” included as the final essay in the 1997 collection Irons in the Fire. That held my attention, as did the other piece in that volume about forensic geology.

But in the new millennium, McPhee went through a fish phase and then got enraptured with transportation. (All along, he’s also been into sports, and that’s still true, but it’s the area of his writing that interests me the least, so I’ll say no more of it here.) I started subscribing to the New Yorker, where McPhee serves as a staff writer, in grad school in 2002, and over the subsequent 9 years of reading that magazine, I’ve seen his essays appear perhaps twice a year. Many of them have focused on transportation of one sort or another. It sounded, frankly, like a pretty dry topic, but then again, I would have thought there couldn’t be much to oranges, either.

So while I’ve read each of the essays in Uncommon Carriers when they were published in the New Yorker, I decided to re-read them as a collection. Grouped under a single cover and read in sequence is a different experience from reading them separated by year-long intervals. So what did patterns did I pick up on?

Each essay seems to mention the terrorist attacks of September 11th at some point. This strikes me as (a) germane to the subject matter, as truckers and barges and trains and planes are all now potential targets and weapons of terrorism. It’s relevant to the life of the modern day trucker or UPS router to have a clear idea of how terrorists might use them as part of a deadly plan. But no one seems to dwell on it. It also strikes me as (b) an evolution of McPhee as a writer. McPhee has been criticized by, among others, Edward Abbey for being too apolitical. Writing about oranges and Russian art and the Greenmarket is all well and good, Abbey implied, but why not use your status as a writer to right some wrong, to address an injustice or a way forward for a sticky issue. In fact, I think Abbey’s approach is clearly alienating to some, and McPhee is seen by many as politically “safe,” interesting without indulging in the argumentation or rhetoric which permeates just about everything else we read. So I think there’s definitely a place for adamantly apolitical writers. I think it’s to McPhee’s credit that he’s willing to let himself evolve a bit by, if not exactly grappling with the issues, then at least letting them appear in his writing.

Another thing that McPhee has been criticized for is his anonymity. His stories never really featured any kind of details about his own life or perspective. That changed a bit with The Founding Fish (2002), where he indulged in a lot of description of his shad fishing, and reached previously-unknown levels in Silk Parachute, a 2010 collection of essays which are united by the thread that they all invoke “McPhee the man” at some point. (It was when he was promoting Silk Parachute last April that I saw him speak at DC’s iconic bookstore Politics and Prose.) Point being: the guy is willing to change, to loosen up a bit, as he gets older and more secure in his reputation.

The other area where this manifests itself in Uncommon Carriers is in the topic of fossil fuel use and climate change. This is particularly true for “Coal Train” and “A Fleet of One, Part 2”. The first of these, “Coal Train,” is about a staggering enterprise — the world’s largest mine spawning the world’s largest train, transporting carbon captured by ancient photosynthesis halfway across America. It is the epitome of our energy infrastructure — enormous and unwieldy and impressive.

It begins with the mines themselves. McPhee focuses on Rocky Mountain coal, formed in large continental basins during the early Cenozoic. He is particularly interested in the Power River Basin of Wyoming. At the Black Thunder Mine, for instance, they are digging into Paleocene Fort Union Formation coal, with individual beds that are “eight to ten stories thick.” Current mining of these coal units fills 60 coal trains per day. Each of those 60 trains is 19,000 tons fully loaded, 133 cars full of coal. Some outliers are over two miles in length! 60 of these behemoths roll out of the Powder River Basin each day, bound for places like Georgia, where the coal is powdered and oxidized and the resulting heat is captured to heat water to turn turbines so that electrical power may be generated. It’s a long chain of events that results in Atlantans having the lights go on when they flip a switch. McPhee documents the amazing scale of the operation.

In spite of his extraordinary figures, there is probably enough coal in the Powder River Basin to last (at current rates of usage) for 250 more years.

McPhee must have had environmental sensibilities for a long time — why else would he profile David Brower (Encounters With the Archdruid, 1971) or write a book called The Control of Nature (1989)? But nowhere in these early books is any sort of judgment or political stance expressed directly by McPhee as narrator. In Uncommon Carriers, however, he states his positions a bit more baldly: Quoting economist Kenneth Boulding, he states, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

“A Fleet of One” is the title of the essays that open and close the Uncommon Carriers volume. They focus on a trucker named Don Ainsworth who lets McPhee ride shotgun for thousands of miles across North America. Ainsworth keeps McPhee’s pencil twitching over his notebook with a constant torrent of quirky witticisms and ego. It’s entertaining — Ainsworth’s style blends well with McPhee’s narration in the manner of Henri Vaillancourt’s, recorded by McPhee in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). However, McPhee displays much more tenderness towards Ainsworth as a protagonist than he did towards prickly Vaillancourt.

For instance, McPhee suggests Ainsworth is praiseworthy for sleeping in a hotel room, as opposed to in his truck with the engine idling. In the winter and summer months, most truckers in the United States catch 40 winks while their engines turn over (zero miles per gallon) to provide energy to run the heater or the air conditioners in the cab. Says McPhee (p. 248), “You have not heard the sound of creature comfort until you have heard hundreds of huddled trucks idling through the night.” He does some math: “Two million trucks [the U.S. truck population] times three hundred days amounts to six billion gallons of diesel fuel per annum burned basically to keep truck drivers cool, to keep truck drivers warm, and to keep happy presidents content.”

Whoa – that’s a clear swipe at George W. Bush, a statement unique in its political chutzpah in my reading of McPhee. He’s not hiding his environmentalism under a bushel anymore!

A final note — at several points in Uncommon Carriers, McPhee gives points out connections to early work. “Coal Train” mentions crossing Nebraska’s Platte River at a spot near where McPhee collected a handful of pebbles in his forensic geology piece many years earlier. He also mentions passing a home in Wyoming of Floyd Dominy, a dam-booster for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the man who was arch-enemy to the Archdruid. If you’ve indulged in McPhee’s complete oeuvre as I have, these little tangents ring with a deep satisfaction.

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