Through The Sandglass

In memoriam

Back in 2009, my father made several references to my “Simpsons challenge” in Through the Sandglass. Having found several tenuous connections to sand, I cannot tell you how delighted I was, years later, to finally share this clip with the Sandman:

Thankfully, my dad’s slightly obsessive arenophilia brought to light far more engaging conversations about geology than most made-for-school film reels could – I am not including the ever-frustrating “spot the fault line” game on car trips/hikes by the way.

(My dad and me on Jebel Toubkal. 1995)

Recognizing a fault line, GoogleEarth quizzes, love of a good IPA, complaining about scrums in rugby union - these are just a few things my father has left me with and I know that his passions have reached beyond his immediate family. This concept is beautifully illustrated in an extract from the final poem in Michel Faber’s Undying: A Love Story:

 

If I could scan this planet

with X-rays that detect the presence

of your timely interventions, 

I'm sure I'd find them

in places you would not expect.

You're dead. I know. And it is not for me

to show you death is not the end.

But you left lucencies of grace

secreted in the world,

still glowing.

 

My father was meant to be the keynote speaker at “The Abundance and Scarcity of Sand” symposium hosted by Atelier NL and MU as part of Dutch Design week in 2017, but died just prior to the event. I want to thank Lonny, Angelique, and Denis for honouring his dedication to sand and keeping those lucencies glowing. Below is the link to the symposium and his final talk that I extracted from his dictaphone. 

http://www.ateliernl.com/lectures/the-abundance-and-scarcity-of-sand

I will never research and write about sand like my dad, but he has left with me the habit of always carrying plastic bags in my pockets to collect and catalogue sand on my travels. And his travels continue as my mother and I take his sand (it is grain size that matters, not mineral content so some of his ashes are sand) and scatter it on our travels. Next Estonia, then the Gobi – Michael adventures on….

Catching up

Apologies for the hiatus - medical issues disrupted things a bit. I intend to get back to whatever passes for normal life in 2017, including writing here. Meanwhile, a couple of stunning videos from Slava Ivanov, perfect, I think, for a little seasonal contemplation and rumination:

And thanks to Mark Olbert for the original link to these videos.

 

Earth Science Week: "Geology helps the land tell you stories"

It's this year's Earth Science Week - see the American Geosciences Institute and Geological Society of London sites). I have periodically attempted to join the celebrations with posts on the "Nine big ideas" and the associated videos, Earth Science Literacy, and the outstanding "known unknowns" of earth science - please have a re-visit.

These were largely ruminations on what geology is about, the "philosophy" of the science, and a little advocacy for greater awareness. The question of why geology, what makes it fascinating, were subtexts, so my attention this year has been caught by a piece from September 2015 by Julia Turner, editor in chief of Slate. Titled "Your World, Rocked: A good introduction to geology course is actually a course in time," it is an eloquent (and personal) testimony to the value (sometimes not so obvious) of even a modest exposure to how our home planet works. It is, of course from the perspective of US education, but that matters not at all - its message is universal. The "rocks for jocks" amusement in the introduction is purely American - and so true. I taught Geology 101, otherwise known as "rocks for jocks" for several years, with many rewards and frustrations. Chief amongst the latter were the many kids who told me how much they enjoyed it, having had no idea at all about geology, and regretted that they were too far down their academic path (having left the science requirement until last) to pursue it further. I doubt that problem has gone away - to the loss of the science. There were many kids who were a joy to teach and interact with (although here I do not include the young woman who entered my office, closed the door, and declared that "Professor Welland, I'd do anything for an A"). But I digress....

In celebration of Earth Science Week, and in the hope that it might persuade just one young person to take a geology class, I am taking the liberty of reproducing in its entirety Julia Turner's piece from Slate:

A good introduction to geology course is actually a course in time.

By Julia Turner

Let me start by defending geology’s honor. Is there any other discipline that a rhyme so easily reduces to ridicule? Nearly every campus has some version of “rocks for jocks,” the intro geology course touted as the easiest way for granite-brained humanities majors to fulfill their science requirements without significant intrusion on their time or erosion of their GPAs.

But you shouldn’t take geology because it’s easy. (It isn’t necessarily easy—the geology class I took, from a bright-eyed elfin woman with the pleasing, rocklike name of Jan Tullis, certainly wasn’t.) You should take geology because it will fundamentally transform the way you see the world.

I mean this literally. Understanding geology gives you a new way to interpret the visual data of the planet. Sometimes this can feel like X-ray vision or a sixth sense. The color of the soil can tell you what it’s made of. The lightning bolts of white across that cliff the highway blasted through? Quartz veins, a sign of metamorphic activity, way back, when fissures opened up in bending, cracking stone, and mineral-laden water coursed through. Looking out of a plane window at the contours of a mountain range, you can tell from shape alone whether the peaks are old or new—or rather, which are very very old and which are just old. (It’s the opposite of human aging: cragginess is a sign of relative youth, and smoothness comes only with time.) And the words! Schist. Nickeliferous. Gneiss. Each one with its own dense poetry.

Geology helps the land tell you stories. I remember flying once and noticing funny little slab-like mountains, each one distinct from the next, lying in parallel rows. Where once I would have seen only mystery, now I could imagine how those mountains came to be—a sedimentary bed, layer upon flat layer of different types of rock, broken and thrust upward by the movement of the plates, revealing a cross section in which the softer rocks had eventually eroded away, leaving only these orderly little slabs.

Geology is a gorgeous way to contemplate the abyss.

But geology does more than give you something to think about when you examine pebbles on a beach or go swimming in a quarry. You should also take geology because there is no better way to gain perspective on the fleetingness of life. Any good intro geology course is actually a course in time. You’ve heard the statistic: If the whole planet has been around for a single 24-hour day, the dinosaurs showed up at 10:56 p.m. and we just before 11:59. But imagine spending hours holding that thought in your mind, learning what happened during all the time that preceded us. Understanding, in a real way, how long the planet has been around; how slow, patient, and indifferent the movement of the rocks beneath us has been; how insignificant in the scheme of things our fervid civilizations and wars and inventions really are—this is a head trip better than any you’ll experience during the concert at Spring Fling..

Taking geology actually had a funny side effect for me. I came into the class an avid environmentalist. I was a child of the ’90s. I cared about whales. I recycled. I spent a semester on a farm. I wanted to keep humans from changing and destroying the planet. But geology complicated my understanding of this desire. The planet has been changing for millennia. It’s been destroyed and remade again and again. The temperature used to be different. The continents were in different places. Different creatures roamed the land. The environmentalist instinct to preserve the planet exactly as it is began to seem not altruistic, but selfish. The planet is a tough cookie. This pile of rocks doesn’t need saving. What we were trying to save, it seemed, was the version of the planet that works best for ourselves. And, sure, future generations and all the other species that currently live here. Still a worthy goal, of course. Perhaps an even worthier one, when you consider how unusual and unlikely Earth’s menagerie is. But geology made me think about it in a new way.

College students often enter university with an outsized view of their own significance. It’s good to study things that make you realize how unimportant you are. As a history major, I took a lot of classes that helped me understand how small my life is in the span of human existence. But there are a few courses—geology, astronomy, perhaps particle physics—that force students to confront true vastness, that make you consider the insignificance not just of your life, but of your entire species. Geology is a gorgeous way to contemplate the abyss.

This is valuable, in the end, because it both helps you care less and makes you care more. What’s a bad day in the scheme of things? But then again, why not make each one count? Something to consider, next time you contemplate the contours of the land.

Indeed.

 

re the stunning image at the head of this post: 

Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation). Data and technical support: MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team; MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean Group Additional data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights)

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public.

Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’sModerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day. Two different types of ocean data were used in these images: shallow water true color data, and global ocean color (or chlorophyll) data. Topographic shading is based on the GTOPO 30 elevation dataset compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey’s EROS Data Center. MODIS observations of polar sea ice were combined with observations of Antarctica made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s AVHRR sensor—the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer. The cloud image is a composite of two days of imagery collected in visible light wavelengths and a third day of thermal infra-red imagery over the poles.

 

Sandscapes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

I have just returned from an utterly memorable two weeks in the stunning, extraordinary, landscapes of Iceland. I have never seen anything quite like it. Iceland is, quite simply, unique - and wonderful. There will undoubtedly be further bulletins, but for a start, a modest gallery.

(this, by the way, is the end of the lava flows from the 2014/2015 eruption of Bárðarbunga and Holuhraun in the central highlands)

and, after two weeks of daily practice and testing with a variety of patient Icelanders, I can now pronounce Eyjafjallajökull more or less correctly - if slowly.

Please read this

Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Ohio's Denison University and he writes Eruptions, a blog about all things volcanic for Wired. A few days ago, he put up the following which I sincerely hope will be taken to heart by untold numbers of students around the world.

Dear College Students: You Should Take Geology

GEOLOGY (OR, MORE properly these days, geosciences) is a field that most incoming first-year students have little experience with. Maybe they had a rock collection, maybe they took AP Environmental Science. Maybe, if they were lucky, they had a high school teacher with some training in the field. However, most of the time, geology is faaaaardown the list of disciplines that any first-year might think to study … and the field doesn’t even cross their mind before they graduate.

That, my friends, is a mistake. Few disciplines in today’s world play such a significant role in how society operates and what we can do to protect our future. Few fields of study can play such a profound role in protecting people’s lives on a daily basis, whether you realize it or not. And few can bring together so many disparate ideas, from sciences to social sciences to humanities to the arts, like the study of the Earth can.

And no, it isn’t “Rocks for Jocks.”

I’m looking specifically at you, Mr./Ms./Mx. “I don’t like science.” Science is all around you, and understanding how the planet on which you will (likely) spend the rest of your life is pretty important. You make decisions every day in which geology was a factor somewhere along the line, so if you are ignorant of those ideas, you might not be making the right decision.

So, what do I mean? Here are some of the ways that taking a course in the geology will impact your life for the rest of it.

Time: Humans tend to not be great about thinking on long timescales—that is, anything longer than maybe their own lifespan. In geology, that is a merely a flash compared to deep time. Deep time is the timescale that takes us back over 4.5 billion years to the formation of the planet. So, while 100 years might seem like a long time now, take a geology class and you’ll be thinking about events that happened 10,000 or 100,000 or 100,000,000 years ago … and that gives you perspective about events happening on our planet today.

Space: Geology is also a discipline that gets you to think about many scales of space. Need to understand the evolution of a continent? We got that. Need to think about how isotopes of an element go into a crystal when it forms? We got that too. Best part: You likely need both ends of the size spectrum to solve problems.

Observation: Many science fields are very theoretical (I’m looking at you, physics … with apologies to the astronomers). That’s great and all, but if all the equations aren’t your bag,* geology is chock full o’ observing. It is these observations that are the backbone of the field, both in looking at a static landscape like the folds in a mountain belt and at active processes, like a landslide or an eruption. Satellites have opened up a whole new world of observations that unlock geologic problems … and offer us tantalizing new ones to examine. The field is a visual one!

*author’s note: contrary to popular belief (at college), geology is not an “easy” science. We do math! We do chemistry! We do biology! We do physics! We do archeology! But if you’re in college to do stuff that’s easy, you’re doing it the wrong way.

Thinking globally: You can’t really avoid thinking about the planet when you study geology. Now, it might not be the surface of the planet—lots of geologists study parts of the Earth deep beneath our feet (I’m talking thousands of kilometers down)—but that’s OK. You’re still thinking on a global scale. Ocean circulation, volcanic ash in the air, plates colliding, earthquakes rattling the planet. All these things (and more) are processes that geologists contemplate on a global scale.

Getting outside: Best thing about thinking globally and wanting to observe the world? It gets you outside. Most geologists covet their time doing “field work” and if you are a geology major, you’re likely going to head off at some point to do “field camp” (where you learn the secrets of mapping the Earth) or “field research,” where you can make observations, collect samples, and think about geologic processes all while hiking some of the most spectacular landscapes. Places I’ve gone as a geologist include the high Andes of Chile, New Zealand, the Cascades in western North America, Hawaii, the coast of Maine, the deserts of California and much, much more.

Climate: Now, so far I’ve talked about all the fun parts of geology. However, if you’re looking for work that is important to you, your family and society across the planet, geology is the place to be. First off, geology is ground zero for understanding climate change across the history of Earth. We’ve been studying the variation in the planet’s ecosystems for two centuries now (heck, paleontology helped start the discipline) and can look back billions of years to see how the climate has varied. This gives us that evidence to show how much our current climate is likely in a state of distress. Geology is also how we can understand what the impact of climate change will be on our planet, both in the short- and long-term.

Hazards: If you take geology, you’ll find out about all the ways the planet might be trying to take you out: eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, floods, sinkholes, tsunamis, and more. You’ll also learn how geologists are trying to protect people from perishing in such disasters by better understanding their impacts and assessment of their risk to lives and property. More importantly, you’ll realize how to protect yourself. Buying a house? Maybe you should check to see if you’re on a floodplain. Is the house in an earthquake-prone area? Is the hillslope stable behind the place? Geologic hazards will impact you at some point, so understanding them puts you ahead of the curve.

Resources: Take a look around you right now. I’d venture to say that much of what you see came from a geologic deposit at some point. Copper wires? Maybe from the copper deposits of the Andes. Steel for your car’s frame? Maybe Minnesota. Your iPhone is chock full of rare earth elements that likely came from Chinese carbonatite deposits. The power for your house may be coming from a range of geologic resources: coal (yes, sadly) or uranium (better) or hydro-power. If you study geology, you’ll start to realize the impact that extracting these resources has on the planet (and people) so you can make more sustainable decisions. You might even get a job in geologic resources (and trust me, it is profitable—a practical reason to take geology: to get one of the many high-paying entry level jobs out there).

Synthesis: However, to me, one of the key reasons to take geology is to start thinking about lots of ideas all at once and begin to synthesize the information. If you really want to understand the hazards posed by a volcano, you’ll need to understand magmatic processes that form the magma and allow it to erupt, how that stuff that erupts moves across the Earth’s surface, what people might be living near the volcano, and how it might be best to communicate the hazard to them. Geology has so many intersections across so many disciplines that a background in geology will allow you to intelligently speak about everything from the age of the planet to the potential of an earthquake in your hometown to how animal life has changed in Ohio for the last billion years.

Geology is so central to the lives of so many people. If the goal of college is to create an informed citizenry that can then navigate their lives, a background in geology (even if it might be a single class) might be one of the most important disciplines you could choose. So, if you’re never considered taking that geology class offered on your campus, now might be the time to give it a try. You’ll come out realizing our place in the planet’s long history.

I’m sure I haven’t even scraped the surface, so do you have any more great reasons to take geology?

Thanks, Erik!

The image at the head of this post, in keeping with Erik's volcanic passions, is from Iceland, 2015: the eruption of Holuhraun, courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory. This is of particular interest to me, since I'm off to Iceland tomorrow (Katla willing) and among the destinations on my itinerary is Askja volcano which, in the cloud and the snow, can be seen 19 kms directly north of the eruption in the NASA image. Exciting, huh? Just hope the weather and lithospheric turbulence don't spoil the fun...