Through The Sandglass

Sunday sand: another (but very different) nuptial arena

Last month, I wrote of the balmy and sandy environs that made the backdrop to the wedding of the daughter of friends – on Australia’s North Stradbroke Island. Then, later last year, there was another wedding: the daughter of Californian friends was married to her Icelandic fiancé – in, of course, Iceland. Sands once again contributed significantly to the landscape, but the contrast is dramatic. White sands versus black sands, the tropics versus the active volcanoes of the North Atlantic.

Being good friends of your humble correspondent, the entire family devoted some of their time to collecting sand and other geological bits and pieces for me. Above is Vik beach on the south coast, towering black basalt cliffs surrounding – and providing some of ingredients for - the stretch of black sand. The grains are largely volcanic glass or very fine-grained basalt – in the image on the right you can see, in the large grain, the broken-open tiny bubbles that contained volcanic gas (technically referred to as vesicles). The sand grains on this beach are quite young, geologically speaking, but their sharp edges have been knocked off and smoothed by the pounding of the North Atlantic waves.

It’s not just the cliffs that provide the sand for this beach. This part of the coast receives the cargoes of sand, gravel, and, quite frequently, much larger chunks of debris carried by the rivers pouring off the mountains and glaciers of the massif built by the volcano of Katla, one of the largest in Iceland. And when a volcano such as this one erupts beneath its thick blanket of ice, sedimentary transport chaos ensues: gigantic, uncontrollable floods of melt water and debris surge out of the mountains. This kind of flood is known as a jökulhlaup, and the results can be dramatic – when I referred larger chunks, I meant things like the boulder at right, below, carried by a jökulhlaup in 1981 (image credits below).

And, just to the east of the Katla massif is the notorious (and notoriously unpronounceable) volcano of Eyjafjallajökull, responsible last year for stranding large numbers of aspiring air travellers, myself included. The catastrophic processes of sub-glacial eruptions are, inevitably, seen there too, the flood plains below the mountain covered with the geological rubbish carried by everyday high-energy rivers and repeated jökulhlaups:

 
My friends kindly collected some sand from these flood plains. An unassuming dark brown-grey to the naked eye, under the microscope they reveal glittering shards of volcanic glass, some of the youngest sand grains on the planet:

 
The mother of the bride describes the ceremony as having been a “no-fuss wedding,” but it was followed by something of a feast. However, this being Iceland, I can’t help but wonder if the menu included one of the country’s most famous (and infamous) delicacies, the recipe for which critically involves sand. Take one Greenland or basking shark, gut it, bury it in sand for months until it putrifies, then disinter, hang up to dry, and eat it. This is hákarl, widely reputed (except among the Icelanders) to rank as one of the most repulsive gastronomic experiences in the world – vomiting is apparently the common response. Recipes warn that you must know what you’re doing (it strikes me that fermented rhymes appropriately with demented), but, if you insist, you can find the instructions here (although gravel burial is described, I would thoroughly recommend sand). 

Whether hákarl was on the menu for the matrimonial feast, I don’t know – but I do know that the happy couple are planning to move to Paris….

 

[Vik beach photo reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons; flood plains of Eyjafjallajökull image from the SwissEduc Teaching and Learning website; jökulhlaup photo by Matthew J. Roberts at http://en.vedur.is/ and boulder photo from http://notendur.hi.is/oi/iceland_excursion.htm]

Piano bar

News stories are diverse and often strange – the mysterious appearance of a grand piano on a sand bar in Miami’s Biscayne Bay has received global media attention. Reported from Montreal to Pretoria and the Netherlands to Malaysia, the coverage is perhaps a sign that anything that might relieve the gloom of world events is welcome.

A mere 200 yards from the wealthy condos of Miami Shores, the 650 lb piano resides on the highest part of the small sand bar and thus remains emergent even at high tide. Close inspection revealed that it is, however, in sad shape, missing significant bits and distinctly charred; birds nevertheless find it attractive. The Miami Herald inevitably ran a caption competition for a photo of the piano with an impressively large bird perched on it – a quick review of the couple of hundred online comments reveals references to new Florida keys, “play it again sand,” references to Handel’s Water Music, and the key of sea – but the stolen title of this post has emerged, quite justifiably, as the favourite. The mystery stimulated the punning instincts of a number of writers; for example, CNN reports that “The finding has struck a chord with residents and tourists, inspiring some to board their boats and check it out. But if they're planning to perform a concerto, their hopes will likely fall flat.” But amongst the many articles, I have yet to find a comment on the one missing from the name of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman, Jorge Pino….

The mystery only endured for a short time: The Miami Herald today carries the headline “Piano mystery solved: Movie prop burned, put in Biscayne Bay after party,” and begins “Like many grand ideas, this one started out when many were drunk.” It seems that the whole thing originated with teenagers, alcohol, and pyromaniacal tendencies. Enough said, but it’s pleasing that shifting sands can provide a stage for such dramas.

Sunday sand: lost worlds of El Dorado and Canaima

 
These are old, old sand grains.

Amongst the treasures that my friend Carla so generously provided me with, I was delighted to find sand from the River Carrao of Venezuela. The reason for my delight was that this river is part of the great Orinoco system and flows through the towering flat-topped mountains, the tepuis, of the Canaima National Park, a region that I am very familiar with (although, sadly, not directly - a destination still on my list).

The truly bizarre environments of these almost completely inaccessible plateaus were the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Lost World, the lost treasures of El Dorado – and a significant chunk of my book. To introduce the epic and multiple journeys that an individual sand grain can take, I explored the saga of what could indeed be one of the quartz grains in the images above. Here’s a sampling:

Think, for example, of a sand grain born, for at least the second time in its life, in one of the most remote and spectacular places on Earth, the Canaima National Park in southeastern Venezuela, near the borders of Guyana and Brazil. It has been resting for some hundreds of millions of years in a sandstone that is one of the oldest in the world. Two billion years ago, great rivers flowed across this part of what we now call South America, meandering, flooding, constantly changing their routes, just as the Amazon and the Orinoco do today. And, as rivers always have, they carried with them huge cargoes of sand, traveling hopefully, born from the disintegrating rocks of ancient mountains long since subdued and flattened.

These ancient South American rivers flowed, as most rivers do, over the continent to an ocean. But this early version of South America looked very different than it does today; small ancient fragments of continent had only recently been welded together to form the kernel of what would become today’s continent. Close to a couple of billion years would pass before the Andes were plastered along its western edge. The ocean to which the rivers flowed has long since been swallowed up and obliterated by the voracious churning of the Earth’s plates, today’s Atlantic being only a distant, indirect descendant.

As the rivers slowed on approaching the sea, as floods abated each year and channels changed their course, the rivers lost the energy to carry their cargo of sand and dumped it in sandbars, estuaries, deltas, beaches, and offshore banks. This process continued, year after year, over millions of years, and these abandoned layers of sand eventually covered a vast area of the fledgling continent. As the rivers roamed over the landscape, the layers built up in places to an enormous thickness, their foundation sinking to accommodate the load. Buried under this great pile, the sands were compacted and solidified into hard, rocky sandstone.

Much, much later, the continent, buffeted by colliding plates along its edges, was heaved upward again. The sandstones were back at the Earth’s surface and began their battle with the elements, a campaign that they continue to wage today, hundreds of millions of years later; these two-billion-year-old sandstones form the extraordinary landscapes of the Canaima National Park. Vertical cliffs a kilometer or more high protect vast flat-topped plateaus that look out over hundreds of kilometers of forest and savannah. The layers of sandstone once covered these areas, but they lost the battle with the elements and were stripped away. The mountains are the resistant remnants and have probably looked very much the way they do today for more than three million years.

Incredibly, in spite of all the geological violence going on around them—the split from Africa, the opening of the Atlantic, the rise of the Andes, and the splintering of the Caribbean—these sandstone layers remain essentially as they were deposited two billion years ago, not tilted but horizontal. It is this that creates the great flat-topped peaks, dissected and isolated by erosion around them, but toweringly intact. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set his story The Lost World on these virtually inaccessible plateaus (tepuis, table mountains, in the local Pemon language), imagining them with dinosaurs and sandbanks “spotted with uncouth crawling forms, huge turtles, strange saurians, and one great flat creature like a writhing, palpitating mat of black greasy leather, which flopped its way slowly to the lake.” The true ecology of these plateaus is only somewhat less incredible. Long isolated from larger communities, many of the amphibians and reptiles that live here are found nowhere else in the world, including blind black frogs a couple of centimeters long. Nine hundred species of higher plants have been identified on one mountain alone, of which 10 percent are endemic. Thirty species of birds are unique to the area, and the task of describing the character and diversity of the insect life will continue to occupy entomologists for a long time. Many of the mist-shrouded summits in the park, which was awarded World Heritage status in 1994, remain completely unexplored.

There is of course, more – Jimmie Angel and the falls named after him, unique and isolated ecosystems, the hunt for gold that continues today with disastrous environmental consequences, and the epidemic of dam-building along the tributaries of the Orinoco. But enough for now – except that Carla tells me that these sands have been known to sing, or at least squeak. But that’s for another day.

 

[Carrao River image courtesy of Berrucomons at Wikimedia Commons, under the GNU Free Documentation License; the image description is “View over the Carrao river toward three small tepuys (from left to right): Kurun Tepuy (Vulture mountain), Kusari Tepuy (Deer Mountain), and Kuravaina Tepuy (Blowgun mountain)” – look closely, and you can see the sand banks along the river.]

 

 

Self-breeding solar power

  "From the viewpoints of quality, quantity and chemistry, Sahara sand is hard to beat for use as silicon for solar cells"

Last week I wrote about a stunning example of innovation through putting previously un-associated concepts together to create something entirely new. Using sand in robotics is an innovation on the macroscopic scale – here’s one on a truly heroic scale. The quotation above is from Hideomi Koinuma at the University of Tokyo who leads The Sahara Solar Breeder Project, a joint initiative by universities in Japan and Algeria that aims to build enough solar power stations by 2050 to supply 50 per cent of the energy used by humanity. It’s simple in principle, but of course a little more tricky in upscaling and execution. All you have to do is build a silicon manufacturing plant in the desert, use the silicon to construct a solar power plant and use some of the power output to manufacture more silicon – the whole system is self-replicating, essentially breeding solar power generation. The tricky bits come in actually manufacturing silicon from desert sand, efficient transmission of the electricity generated, designing facilities sufficiently robust to withstand the harsh environment of the desert, and making the whole thing commercially feasible and competitive. But it’s all essentially do-able.

Here’s a description of the project from the Discover Magazine website that includes a video link – the graphic above is a screen shot from it. There’s also a piece on the New Scientist site titled “Sun and sand breed Sahara solar power“ – my kind of headline!

The 2 Ingredients for Self-Replicating Solar Power: Sahara Sand and Sun  

It’s such a fertile time in the green technology sector, solar power plants may soon begin reproducing.

Using two resources that the Sahara has plenty of, sun and sand, the Sahara Solar Breeder Project hopes to build factories that will refine the sand’s silica into silicon. That silicon will be used to build solar panels, which will power more silica-refining and solar panel factories, which will be able to build more solar panels, and on and on and on.

The potential for exponential growth allows for some extreme optimism: The project’s leaders say they could build enough power stations to meet half of the world’s energy needs by 2050. Project leader Hideomi Koinuma believes the project is key to solving the world’s energy crisis, saying:

“If we can use desert sand to make a substance that provides energy, this will be the key to solving the energy problem. This is probably doable. Moreover, the energy we continually receive from the Sun is 10,000 times the energy currently used by mankind. So if we can utilize 0.01% of it skillfully, we won’t have a shortage of energy, but a surplus.” [DigInfo TV]

The Sahara desert is about the size of the United States, but instead of being full of people and farms and towns the Sahara is almost empty of everything. Everything except sand, that is. Three and a half million square miles of it.

“From the viewpoints of quality, quantity and chemistry, Sahara sand is hard to beat for use as silicon for solar cells,” [Koinuma] says.

Though Koinuma is bursting with enthusiasm, desert sand has never been used to produce silicon-based solar panels before, so the team will have to perfect that technology first. Once they start building factories, they’ll have to cope with environmental hazards in the desert like sandstorms and shifting dunes.

If all of those endeavors are successful, the energy produced by the station will still need to be transferred from the desert to areas that need it, which requires superconducting power lines kept cold by liquid nitrogen–a technology which is difficult to handle in the best of circumstances, let alone in the middle of the empty desert. Koinuma believes the superconducting lines would be cost-effective, though another company called the Desertec Foundation is working on the same problem with a different approach.

“There is not really a need for superconductors. By using high-voltage direct current transmission lines it is possible to transport clean power from the deserts over long distances to centres of consumption,” says the Desertec spokesman – adding that the technology is already used in dozens of projects worldwide. “Transmission losses are fairly low – around 3 per cent per 1000 kilometres. Unlike superconductors, there is no need for cooling, while power transmission costs are just 1¢ to 2¢ per kilowatt-hour.” [New Scientist]

It will be interesting to see how the two projects play out–in the Sahara, there’s plenty of room for competition.

The Sahara Solar Breeder Project is currently supported by Japan’s International Cooperation Agency and Science and Technology Agency, universities in Algeria, and the International Research Project on Global Issues, which is providing funding for the problem-solving phase–a little over a million dollars a year for five years.

[Thanks to Brian Romans for the heads-up on the Discover Magazine link.]

Sunday break: a Through the Sandglass Milestone

On November 25, 2008, Through the Sandglass was launched on an unsuspecting world. Last week the blog recorded the 100,000th pageview and this is the 251st post.

Established to follow on from my book and use the material left on the cutting room floor, it has long since taken on a life of its own – the backlog of new topics grows daily and the cutting room floor remains littered; sometimes I even find myself surprised by the variety of stuff that has appeared on this blog. At the outset, I had only a vague (and, I will readily admit, a somewhat sceptical) awareness of the blogosphere as a whole  and certainly no idea of the extent and energy of the geoblogospheric community. I had no idea what to expect and recall fondly the excitement when a couple of people visited the blog, perhaps even leaving a comment. Today, a couple of hundred visitors a day is typical and those visits come from all over the world (upwards of 130 countries so far). I realise that, in the universe of blogging, such statistics are but motes of intergalactic dust, but to me they’re great and really rewarding. I have encountered all kinds of new virtual friends, a community that has provided immense satisfaction and that I would never have got to know without this endeavour.

So, we’ll see what tomorrow brings, but for now my sincere thanks to all who visit, read, and have helped support Through the Sandglass.

Sandbagged robotics

Fill a bag with sand and you can put it to all kinds of uses – stabilising sensitive hi-fi equipment, keeping back flood waters, rendering someone unconscious – but this is truly incredible and absolutely brilliant.

Robotic technology advances at an astonishing pace and calls on a fascinating diversity of inspiration (sandfish, for example); but the obvious use of the human hand as inspiration for robotic grip has proved far from simple – objects that a robot might be required to manipulate are complexly variable in shape, size, weight and so on, and the human hand is a very complicated mechanism. But sand comes to the rescue. Fill a bag with 100 micromere glass spheres, or coffee grounds – in other words, sand – and it will be highly malleable. Impose a vacuum on the bag and the grains will reach the point where they can no longer move past each other, seizing up or jamming in the parlance of granular materials physicists. The jamming of granular materials is essentially a phase transition, analogous to a material changing from a fluid to a solid state, and, having all kinds of interesting applications, including traffic jams, this phenomenon is intensely studied. But a team from the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and iRobot have used this transition to devise a deceptively simple but immensely powerful robotic “hand.” The Chicago part of the team is, unsurprisingly, Heinrich Jaeger, one of the ubergurus of granular materials, together with postdoc student, Eric Brown, and their colleagues.  Cornell researcher Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science, and Chris Jones at iRobot Corporation, make up the collaborative effort.

The principle is simply that, in its un-jammed, malleable, state, the bag can mould itself around essentially any object - small, large, light, heavy, fragile, robust - but when the air is evacuated from the bag the jammed sand grips the object firmly (but delicately); the object can then be moved and manipulated into a new position, let go of by the release of the vacuum.

 
Simple? Yes, incredibly so. Brilliant? Absolutely. Watch the videos at http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/jamming_gripper and be stunned by the precision and flexibility of this device.

  Here’s the Chicago press release:

Balloon filled with ground coffee makes ideal robotic gripper, research shows

October 25, 2010

The human hand is an amazing machine that can pick up, move and place objects easily, but for a robot, this “gripping” is a vexing challenge. Opting for simple elegance, a team of researchers from Cornell University, the University of Chicago and iRobot have created a versatile gripper that uses the jamming of particulate material inside an elastic bag to hold on to objects, bypassing traditional designs based around the human hand and fingers.

They call it a universal gripper, as it conforms to arbitrary objects it’s grabbing, rather than being designed specifically for particular objects, says Cornell researcher Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science. The research is a collaboration between the groups of Lipson, Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago and Chris Jones at iRobot Corporation. It will be published in the advanced online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Oct. 25. It also will be the cover article of the journal’s Nov. 2 print edition.

In essence, the gripper uses the same phenomenon that makes a vacuum–packed bag of ground coffee so firm; in fact, ground coffee worked very well in the device. But the researchers found a new use for this everyday phenomenon: They placed the elastic bag against a surface and then removed the air from the bag, solidifying the ground coffee inside and forming a tight grip.

Lipson noted that the universality of the gripper makes future applications seemingly limitless — including use by the military to dismantle explosive devices or to move potentially dangerous objects, industrial applications of robotic arms in factories, using the gripper on the feet of a robot that could walk on walls, or making multi–purpose prosthetic limbs.

Here’s how it works: Particulate materials are large aggregates of individually solid particles. A special feature of this class of materials, which includes many familiar commodities like sand, grain or ground coffee, is that they can undergo a so–called jamming transition, so they behave more like a solid than a fluid. This happens when particles lose their ability to move past each other.

Crossing the transition

Evacuating the air from a bag of espresso grounds, for example, will move the particles closer until the jamming transition is crossed, at which point the material becomes rigid; releasing the vacuum by unsealing the package unjams the grounds and they can flow.

In the gripper, a latex balloon filled with particulate material is attached to a robotic arm. The balloon presses down in the unjammed state, molds around the desired object and then a vacuum sucks the air out of the balloon, solidifying its grip. When the vacuum is released, the balloon becomes soft again, and the gripper lets go.

“The concept of a jamming transition was developed to provide a unified framework for understanding and predicting behavior in a wide range of disordered, amorphous materials that all can be driven into a ‘glassy’ state, where they respond like a solid yet structurally resemble a liquid. This includes many liquids, colloids, emulsions or foams, and also particulate matter consisting of macroscopic grains,” Jaeger said. “What is particularly neat with the gripper is that here we have a case where a new concept in basic science provided a fresh perspective in a very different area, robotics, and then opened the door to applications none of us had originally thought about.”

The team split the work on the project. Eric Brown, a postdoctoral researcher, and Nick Rodenberg, a physics undergraduate, worked with Jaeger on characterizing the basic mechanisms that enable the gripping action. Prototypes of the gripper were built and tested by Lipson and graduate student John Amend as well as at iRobot.

As for the right particulate material, anything that can jam will do in principle, and in early prototypes rice, couscous and even ground–up tires were tried. For the final prototypes, the team settled on coffee because it’s light but also jams well. However, there is much room for optimization. What sets the jamming–based gripper apart is that it has performed well with almost any object, including a raw egg or a coin — both notoriously difficult for traditional robotic grippers.

The project was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

 

[The work published in PNAS is available online here; images, credit John Amend, http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/jamming_gripper]

Sunday sand: mysteries of Rapa Nui

 
If you ever needed a reason to ignore anything on Answers.com, here’s one. Someone posed the question “Is there anything interesting about the sand of Easter island?”. An answer was duly supplied: “the sand of easter island is not much different than the sand anywhere else” – sic in its entirety….

Avoiding any extended commentary on this moronic statement, I, as you might imagine, beg to differ. The sand this week, again generously supplied by my arenophile friend Carla, is from Easter Island, Rapa Nui, and is, I would argue, distinctive and interesting. For a start, it’s from one of only two beaches on the entire island, Arakena – the other one, Ovahe, is just around the headland, and neither is extensive. The rest of the island’s coast is made up of volcanic cliffs.

Rapa Nui is the emergent tip of a complex volcanic pile, oceanic basalts from three volcanoes probably sitting on top of a rising mantle plume and close to the very rapidly spreading East Pacific Rise, the engine of the Pacific Ocean. A small volcanic cone can be seen in the Google Earth image above, just to the east of Anakena Beach, and the surf breaking against the rugged volcanic coast is readily apparent. Except for the idyllic cove of Anakena Beach. You would expect any sand from the island to be dominated by basalt grains, since basalt is what the whole place is made of, but no. As is clear from the image at the head of this post, there is hardly a volcanic grain to be seen – the sand is almost entirely made up of a great variety of biogenic fragments – coral, bryozoans (I think), entire miniature shells, and our old friends, foraminifera. This is really quite amazing – here’s a beach along a coast of wave-pounded basalt, and yet the biological engine is the dominant process. The cove itself might be the key – a sheltered environment for corals and other critters to thrive in – and add to this the shape of the cove that, as can be seen in the image above, produces dramatic refraction of the waves that carry biological debris to the beach.

This being Rapa Nui, and a unique beach, there are, of course, moai, the iconic and mysterious island statues; there is a single one and a separate platform, ahu, with six, all with their backs staunchly to the shore. Anakena Beach is a special place in Rapa Nui folklore, for it is said to be the landing place of Hotu Matu'a, a Polynesian chief who founded the first settlement on the island. The moai at Anakena have been restored, originally by Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon-Tiki fame); they are among the best-preserved statues on the entire island – because they had been buried in the sand.

I rest my case.

 

[Photo of Anakena Beach courtesy of Rivi at Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License]

A catch-up round-up of the Geoblogosphere

  
If I were one for New Year’s resolutions, which, after decades of disappointing self-scrutiny, I’m afraid I’m not, I would probably resolve to try to manage my time better. A large part of that challenge is simply the escalating wealth of fascinating stuff that is available and addictive – it seems as if every time I check Google reader there are several hundred new items to peruse, while the stratigraphic accumulation of periodicals reaches periodic proportions, and I have to resort to used train tickets to keep the place marked in each of the components of the pile of books that I’m determined to read. If only I could focus, impose some kind of filter on my magpie mind – but then life would be that much less interesting….

I have recently added to my enjoyable burden by discovering two new Geoblogs and reminding myself of another that I had failed to catch up on. First, it was a great pleasure on my November transatlantic voyage, sermonizing periodically about arenaceous topics, to find that one of my fellow lecturers was Susan Humphris, a Senior Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Susan was a member of the 1986 Atlantis II/Alvin scientific party that made the first discovery of hydrothermal vents in the Atlantic Ocean – it was an honour to meet and talk with her and to find how well some of our topics interwove. During the trip I was contacted out of the blue by one of Susan’s graduate students who had seen my post and made the connection; she is Evelyn Mervine, “a geologist, writer, traveler, and aspiring polyglot,” who, since November last year, has her own blog, Georneys (header image shown, without explicit permission, above, left). Evelyn is working on the fascinating potential of certain rock types to soak up carbon dioxide, notably the old mantle material of ophiolite complexes: much of her work is based in Oman, site of perhaps the world’s premier ophiolite. This is doubly of interest to me since I did field work in Oman a long, long, time ago – while the amenities and infrastructure of the country, and our understanding of its geology, have changed out of all recognition, the rocks themselves have not, and I much enjoyed the audio slide show on her work that Evelyn provides a link to in one of her posts – well-worth watching. For amusement, and an illustrative break, here are some lantern slides from my time in Oman – the central image is of graded bedding – sedimentary structures – formed in a magma chamber deep in the earth’s mantle.

Second, early last month I did a Sunday Sand post on Australia’s North Stradbroke Island; it’s considered to be the world’s second largest sand island, and I posed the question of which is the largest. Just today came a comment with the correct answer – Fraser Island, not far away from North Stradbroke. I apologised for there being no prize, but, as I always do when a new reader of this blog posts a comment, I followed up on the url provided and found that Malcolm is a “geography undergraduate in an underfunded and unappreciated Canadian university” and has today begun his own geoblog, the gloriously named “Pawn of the Pumice Castle.”  The header image from Malcolm’s blog is, again without permission, on the right at the head of this post.

And Chris Rowan, over at Highly Allochthonous has announced a great new idea - a place for folk who don't want to set up their own blog but nevertheless would like somewhere to write stuff periodically. The site is aptly named Earth Science Erratics and explains that:

Earth Science Erratics is conceived as a place for geoscientists or geosciences enthusiasts to be able to write one or a few blog posts, on any earth science topic of their choice, without the necessity of establishing their own blog. Think of this space as a field of erratics…

…We’d like to host an assortment of posts here – from the consulting geologist sharing tales of a field project in an exotic locale, to the grad student anxious to practice his science writing skills explaining a part of their discipline…from the amateur earth scientist who wants to write about the geology in her neighborhood to the researcher who wants to share her newly published results with an audience broader than journal readers.

So, there we are, three new sources of fascinating stuff to keep track of. And, if this weren’t challenging enough, I recalled that Brian Romans at Clastic Detritus, having not long ago migrated to the Wired Science blog community, had also begun a blog for for the Quest Northern California multimedia site. Having overlooked this, I have now begun catching up with this, and, of course, found that this is another non-trivial task. The wondrous geo-turmoil that comprises California’s landscapes, above and below sea-level, makes for literally endless fascination, and Brian’s enjoyment of this is obvious. I was also delighted to see that several of the topics, such as the legacy of the Gold Rush, detail topics that I have occasionally rambled on about.

The joys of Northern California’s geology have been highlighted recently as a result of the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union being held in San Francisco. I am conscious of the need to avoid undertones of envy as I write – reports from the meeting only emphasise the excitement of actually being there. And there have been many such reports around the Geoblogosphere, too many to link individually, but I should express my appreciation of at least vicariously knowing what was going on and being pointed to projects of interest. And, having been in the Bay Area myself earlier this year (and wiring about, for example, Marshall Beach and the sands of the Exploratorium), the descriptions of field trips and other extra-curricular activities have been most enjoyable – if bad for the envy-control challenge. Callan Bentley's series has been typically entertaining.

One item from the AGU meeting that I have missed details on was the session on geoblogging – can anyone point me in the direction of a summary or whatever?

So, time-management, an ever-increasing problem, but an enjoyable one at the end of the day (that arrives, always, too soon). I shall instead devote my attention to a couple of trivial New Year’s resolutions: finding a job and writing another book.

The first Sunday Sand of 2011 - a happy conspiracy

I poured out a sample of sand and put it under the microscope. Immediately, as if prepared for exhibit, there was this selection of grains set in a tiny shell - it needed no re-arrangement. It just struck me as satisfying, and a happy conspiracy. The sand was collected by friends from the beach at Comporta, south of Lisbon - it's not a sand distinguished by strange minerals or exotic biological components, but it sure knows how to present itself at its best.

I hope that 2011 will be filled with happy conspiracies for all of you.