look at what liquefaction can do

Isn't that amazing? Look at the water gooshing up, and the swaying dirt. Holy cow. I'd rather be in open space, even liquefying open space, in a big quake, than in the middle of a city, or *sigh* within the first few blocks of a Japanese coastal town, but still, that just makes the bottoms of my feet crawl to watch.

In the San Francisco bay area, we keep talking about building on marshes. Look at that ground! You are going to have a hard time convincing me to live on that.

I have a big Japanquake post in notepad on my desktop, just waiting for some more anchor tags and rounding out with citations, and I will finish it today. This doesn't really fit in there, though, so I'm sticking it here now. The baby is due this weekend (but might come a little late) so I'm a tad bit distracted.

Eyjafjallajokull volcano still erupts dramatically

My initial reaction was actually (in text, to a friend), "omg omg omg omfg geology."



Right now, several airports in Europe (specifically Norway and the UK) are closed because of ash.

Boston.com's "The Big Picture," one of the best photoblogs on the web, collected pictures of the volcano and its effects today. Some aren't the usual fare, some are especially dramatic, but I think one that most caught my eye was #11 - people in snow gear, standing on dirty snow with ski poles stuck in it, watching flowing lava from a few feet away.


(And for the sake of fun: KCBS said, on twitter: "Why we're just calling it 'a volcano in Iceland'. Try saying this: Mt. Eyjafjallajökull (ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl)" Wikipedia provides the IPA [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœkʏtl̥]) and an audio clip to unconfuse things.)

Addendum: My friend Ailbhe, in the thick of things, clarifies the current airport closure and flight diversion issues -- "UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, north Finland, Belgium, north France, the Netherlands in parts" -- and provides a link to a good reason: Volcanic ash destroys airplane engines catastrophically.

The shaping of the Great Lakes, in an hour

The History Channel's new series, "How the Earth was Made," is mostly just scientific enough for me today, as I'm fighting a low fever, and wanted to stare at something educational without spraining too many neurons. Today I sat down with Hulu and watched an episode about the creation of the Great Lakes.



I knew some of it, such as the glacial history, but hadn't known about the igneous origins of the floor beneath Superior and Ontario. The series is presented in steps, giving evidence for theories (with a bit of the History Channel's typical "but that's not all" and "there's more they didn't know," and "but still, mystery remained" drama), then before each ad, recapping the bits. I appreciated those, it helped me knit the story in stages before going on to the next chapter in the story.

As it turns out, I had no idea how fast Niagara Falls was receding. Do you know? What would you guess? Watch the show and see. I was a tad stunned.

(If the Hulu.com video expires, you can find the video for sale at the History Channel website, with a few clips and full episodes still available.)

Winter topography

The Grand Canyon from the ISS, by Soichi Noguchi

"As I mentioned, Mr.President, Grand Canyon is breathtaking!"

Soichi Niguchi is way up on my list of all time favorte astronauts, if for no reason other than his sheer delight in photographing the Earth.

Geologists rock!

Might be that a certain road crew should take geologist Vanessa Bateman out for coffee.

The video gets interesting at about 1:00ish.



I'm really not sure I wouldn't have flipped the hell out, watching this. Then I'd have asked Bateman to follow me around and be my body guard.

(via agweb, thanks to Silver Fox for the story, thanks to @caroldn for the new title)

Hi there!

The goblins of Goblin Valley are friendly. No really. You can say hi.

ocean's edge processes - I was transfixed

Typically, I don't much care for the slideshow variety of presenting this sort of information. But something about the way the titles worked in this, and the music -- I might always be a sucker for Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits -- pulled me in, and I watched it until the end.



That said, I'm not sure it helped my understanding of the ocean's edge. I had to poke around on the web afterwards to figure out what a tombolo is.

women in science - geology

Florence Bascom (1862-1945)
Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution.

This portrait of geologist Florence Bascom is part of the fabulous Women of Science set in the Smithsonian's flickr stream.

There are some photos in there with names and some description, but not enough information. The Smithsonian is requesting the help of flickr users in gathering more information about the scientists in the pictures.

Rock galleries on about.com

Serpentine boulder, Oakland, California
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

Andrew Alden of geology.about.com has been redoing his gallery of rocks, starting with igneous, but moving on to the other types eventually. You can visit his newly remodeled igneous section here, clicking down one layer will lead you to his current metamorphic and sedimentary pages, as well -- and eventually, to the redone versions.

I chose serpentine for this photo, because
1) it's in Oakland, and Andrew also does an Oakland Geology blog, which is fascinating if you're someone like me and
2) it's my all-time favorite rock. I've got a long and fancy serpentine post sitting there in notepad waiting patiently for me to finish it for this blog.

Something called "volcano monitoring"

HDR After
Originally uploaded by linuxjunkiedotcom.

From Governor Bobby Jindal's response to President Obama's speech tonight:

That is why Republicans put forward plans to create jobs by lowering income tax rates for working families...cutting taxes for small businesses ...strengthening incentives for businesses to invest in new equipment and hire new workers...and stabilizing home values by creating a new tax credit for home-buyers. These plans would cost less and create more jobs.

But Democratic leaders in Congress rejected this approach. Instead of trusting us to make wise decisions with our own money, they passed the largest government spending bill in history - with a price tag of more than $1 trillion with interest. While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a 'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

(emphasis mine)

My guess is that cost him the vote, should he decide to seek the Republican presidential nomination for the 2012 elections, of much of southern Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, and perhaps Hawaii too.

The towns southeast of Tacoma and Seattle, in Washington, are immediately downflow of Mount Ranier, and would receive the brunt of its mud, at the very least. Many towns in that area lie on existing mudflow. Monitoring the Cascades and other American volcanos protects western American cities as much as monitoring Atlantic weather protects southern and eastern cities.

Science really is important, and it worries me when it's brushed off as "something called 'volcano monitoring'," when it's treated like an elitist hobby. Americans can do it -- but not without good hard science.


(edited to add: Geologist Maria Brumm added the fiscal element: "I wish I'd thought of that.")

650 Million Years in 1 Minute and 20 Seconds

This is cool, and a bit dizzying, but I'm missing one thing: I thought the East African Rift would be pulling that continent apart along the rift zone. That's not illustrated here. What am I not understanding?


650 Million Years in 1 Min. and 20 Sec.

(Found on Matt's Geography Blog.)

Yosemite

Yosemite Valley
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

Lynn Kendall says, about Ansel Adams' photos of Yosemite, and Yosemite itself:

Powerful as [the photos] are, they can't evoke the sublimity of the place. I'm damned sure that I can't, either. That's why I've taken more than a month to even begin to fumble my way toward a post about Yosemite.

I grew up in California, and always thought that Yosemite was an overpriced, overblown, overrated, crowded, hard-to-reach tourist attraction, not much else. I couldn't imagine what drew everyone there. I was sure Galen Rowell and Ansel Adams had photographed all there was to see, with skill that made it seem more than it was.

One morning in about 1993, my partner at the time and I woke up early for no real reason, a bit before dawn. There we lay, wide awake, and one of us -- I don't remember which -- said, "Hey, let's go to Yosemite!" So we jumped in the car and drove for a handful of hours, first on straight freeway, then on the winding "north entrance" highway up through Groveland, and we were there. It was February, and a warm day for the month. The air at Yosemite was perhaps in the 50s, with snow on the ground, but clear dry roads. The sky was bright blue. We got there at 8 am, and were among very few people in the park.

As you come in from the north, the initial view is almost startling. "Oh. This is what they mean." I was entranced. It was as if I was in a display, a dictionary definition of natural beauty. This is all real, these immense mile-high rocks, this exposed granite batholith. And that was the macro-park. I was also captivated by the tiny, the deep chocolate color and fuzzy caps of the goldcup oak trees, and the black oak leaf that lay on top of the snow and was warmed by the sun, sinking as the snow under it was melted, and sitting (when I found it) in the bottom of a six-inch-deep hole shaped exactly like a black oak leaf. But then the rocks, so big! They are there always. In the spring, some of the highest waterfalls in the world plunge down their faces. (At the top are emphatic warnings: If you go in the creek there, You Will Die.)



That day -- a pleasant weekday in February, few people, perfect weather -- was the best possible day for a visit to Yosemite. I've been there a handful of times since, sometimes with more people, sometimes fewer. I'm never let down. It is always amazing. It always makes me marvel at geology and geography, and the power of water (which, as ice, carved Yosemite into its present shape). It always makes me grateful for John Muir and his attempts to preserve it. I am always glad to live near enough to visit with relative ease.

You should go read Lynn's post about Yosemite, though. She says a lot more, and offers a lot more photos. :D

There are more great photos out there, including from Joe Decker, Buck Forester, David Morgan-Mar, pete@eastbaywilds, Denise Cicuto, and Sister Coyote. And I have a few more of my own.