Through The Sandglass

A selection, a reflection, and a wish for 2012

It’s that time of the year when I, for one, am grateful that the endless reflections in the media on the previous twelve months must come to an end – the events and non-events, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the progress or otherwise, the marriages and divorces of mediocre “celebrities,” the genuinely positive and the utterly banal. There will be one list here, but of a different nature.

It’s impossible to avoid some form of reflection as we approach the New Year, and, out of curiosity, I have looked at the activity on this blog over the last month, the most recent few thousand visits (from, pleasingly, 117 different countries), and tried to discern why the top ten and the bottom ten posts were ranked that way. I gave up (other than appreciating that critters are always popular). But, since one of the (many) reasons that anyone tries to keep up an entertaining blog is some kind of satisfaction, I reflected on which of the top ten – and, even more interestingly – which of the bottom ten posts I would select as ones that I remain in one way or another pleased with.

Selecting from the top ten was easy – I derive considerable pleasure from the fact that the piece on Gaudi and the sandstones of Barcelona, although written nearly two years ago, seems to have an enduring popularity. As for the bottom ten, this was more of a challenge; some of them are trivial and their lowly rankings quite understandable. But I find it vaguely depressing that the post on last year’s Earth Science Week and Earth Science Literacy attracted 0.02% of the visits.  

The headline statement from the Earth Science Literacy initiative is as follows:

An Earth-science-literate public, informed by current and accurate scientific understanding of Earth, is critical to the promotion of good stewardship, sound policy, and international cooperation. Earth science education is important for individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities.

And here (now for the third time on this blog) are the “Big Ideas” from that program:

Big Idea 1. Earth scientists use repeatable observations and testable ideas to understand and explain our planet.

Big Idea 2. Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

Big Idea 3. Earth is a complex system of interacting rock, water, air, and life.

Big Idea 4. Earth is continuously changing.

Big Idea 5. Earth is the water planet.

Big Idea 6. Life evolves on a dynamic Earth and continuously modifies Earth.

Big Idea 7. Humans depend on Earth for resources.

Big Idea 8. Natural hazards pose risks to humans.

Amid all the reflections on 2012, it’s hard to find evidence for an improvement in earth science literacy – in fact, the evidence seems to argue for the reverse. Loudest among the voices shouting for our attention are those of politicians with axes to grind and elections to win and those of the information-challenged electorates to whom they pander. And it’s easy (assuming, of course, that you agree with me) to focus immediately on the U.S., where the truth seems to increasingly go missing on a daily basis. But it’s not just there – the UK Government axes libraries and science funding and encourages schools to be run by people with an overtly religious agenda; the blitz of misinformation following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was truly mind-boggling; Germany reverses its position on nuclear power overnight with no reference to science, risk assessment, or the environmental implications. And as for any international cooperation on management of our planet’s resources, well, I rest my case.

So, looking forward (as I prefer to do), here’s my fervent wish for 2012:

A YEAR FROM NOW, MAY A LARGER PROPORTION OF THE EARTH’S POPULATION SUBSCRIBE, SERIOUSLY, THOUGHTFULLY, AND ACTIVELY, TO THOSE BIG IDEAS THAN IS THE CASE TODAY.

Sandstorm

It begins with a dance. The wind playing games with the sand and the sand playing along. Ephemeral flurries, a shape-shifting fabric of turbulence, scurrying grains. It’s a compelling and alluring show, but, at the same time, as the wind gathers, the air begins to become oppressive and the brilliant blue sky takes on a threatening dullness as the cargo of dust changes the spectrum. The ephemeral flurries become continuous sheets of sand hurtling across the desert surface, assailing everything in their path. The sun is dimmed.

And then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, this streaming chaos turns into the full fury of a sandstorm, a full-blown assault, threatening everything.

Ahmed Hassanein Bey was a highly educated Egyptian, a diplomat and tutor to the king, but a man with deep Bedouin roots. He was the first to cross the Libyan Desert, from the Mediterranean to Sudan in a perilous eight-month journey by camel in 1923; in his extraordinary account of this journey, The Lost Oases, he describes the frequent sandstorms encountered:

It seems as the whole surface of the desert were rising in obedience to some upthrusting force from beneath. Larger pebbles strike against the shins, the knees, the thighs. The spray of dancing sand grains climbs the body till it strikes the face and goes over the head. The sky is shut out, all but the nearest camels fade from view, the universe is filled with hurtling, pelting, stinging, biting legions of torment...It is as though some great monster of fabled size and unearthly power were puffing out these hurtling blasts of sand upon the traveller’s head. The sound is that of a giant hand drawing rough fingers in regular rhythm across tightly stretched silk.

When a sandstorm comes, there is nothing to do but to push doggedly on. Around any stationary object, whether it might be a post, a camel or a man, the eager sands swiftly gather, piling up and up until there remains only a smoothly rounded heap. If it is torture to go on, it is death itself to halt.

During my expedition to the Western - or Libyan – Desert a few years ago, we were assailed by two full-blown sandstorms, the second one far worse than the first. In this age of motor travel, stopping is, unlike in the days of camel transport, the only option, unless frosted windscreens and severe testing of the seals of mechanical components are wished for. The system, well-practised by our drivers and guides, is to circle the wagons – form the vehicles into a square and lash large pieces of heavy fabric between them in an attempt to provide shelter. The attempt can only be partially successful - Hassanein Bey again:

The storm drives the sand into everything one possesses. It fills clothes, food, baggage, instruments, everything. It searches out every weak spot in one’s armour. One feels it, breathes it, eats it, drinks it – and hates it. The finest particles even penetrate the pores of the skin, setting up a distressing irritation.

Our real humdinger of a sandstorm, one that our guides ranked among the worst they had experienced, was in the White Desert, an iconic and spectacular landscape of white limestone sculptures, created by the wind with sand as its tool.

The wind had been gathering all afternoon, the air becoming oppressive, and the sky increasingly dull. As the storm gathered, I had stupidly attempted to put up a tent, but had to give up with the job only half-done. Determined to make the most of the experience, I huddled into the doorway of the semi-erected tent, wrapped a long piece of blue-dyed Moroccan cotton fabric around my head and face in an amateurish imitation of a Tuareg, and took out my notebook. The earth was on the move. As miniature sand dunes migrated past, and the hissing, spattering sound of the grains grew in volume, the burial process began. Piles of sand accumulated rapidly against my legs and began to weigh down the defenceless side of the tent. I tried to scribble down my account, but even a pencil had problems and sand accumulated in the hinge of my notebook (grains still fall out when I open it today). I watched some of my companions trying to put up their tent, and the drivers scrabbling to get some kind of shelter lashed down between the Landcruisers. There were no camels by which to judge visibility, but only during the occasional brief lull in the onslaught could this nearby scene be discerned with any clarity.

It was during one of these brief moments that, perhaps driven to dementia by the granular onslaught, I completely lost control of my senses and took out my camera.

There were two results of doing this – one photograph, and, ever after, a scratching sound when adjusting the telephoto lens.

I gave up, and battled my way to the shelter where my companions huddled, sharing the now very limited supplies of single malt whisky. Somehow, amazingly, in this mayhem, the cooks produced food; sleep that night was intermittent, but I remember being awakened at one point because the noise had stopped. And dawn was miraculous. There was no sign of the storm (other than the piles of sand marking buried tents), but rather a crystalline clarity, a sense that the desert had been cleansed.

 
And, suddenly, there was this colourful and fearless little bird strutting about in the sand – where could it possibly have sheltered overnight during the storm?

 

This was a staggeringly beautiful landscape, but one completely different from the previous day: immeasurable, unimaginable, volumes of the earth’s fabric had been moved, wholesale, from one place to another.

 

[This is my contribution to The Accretionary Wedge, December 2012, hosted by Ron Schott, with the theme “The Most Memorable Geological Event That You’ve Directly Experienced.”]

So what on earth are these people looking at?

 
A somewhat blurry photo of a beach at night, clearly some kind of alcoholic beverage in the hands of at least two of the people, one of whom seems be in a state of some excitement, the other two staring intently at – the sand. What is the story behind this strange image?

I described a while ago the wonderful pink sand beach on Komodo Island, as we experienced it during the day. Returning at night for a beach barbecue, we would find that it had another surprise in store for us. The excited person in the photo is François, a delightful Swiss fellow traveller with whom, together with his wife, Ursula, we shared many enjoyably garbled bilingual conversations during our trip (well, garbled on our part). That evening we were loitering about enjoying the place, the wine and the company, when we heard an excited exclamation from  François who seemed to be performing some kind of bizarre dance, stomping in the sand and pointing at his feet (while, of course, cleverly maintaining the stability of his beverage). Deciding to humour him, we wandered over – to find that his stomping was producing endless flashes of brilliant blue light amongst the sand grains.

The result was a whole crazy group of people leaping around, stamping on the sand and shouting in delight – bioluminescence! Not the easiest phenomenon to photograph, but François just sent me this image, which I have adjusted slightly so that the sand grains are visible for scale:

My (not particularly well-informed) guess is that we were witnessing bioluminescent dinoflagellates, single-celled marine plankton whose name derives, dramatically and bilingually, from the Greek for “whirling” and the Latin for “whip,” reflecting aspects of their morphology. Many of them are – like the majority of marine organisms – capable of bioluminescence, mostly of this iridescent blue colour, and it was some of these critters whom the waves were bringing in that evening and providing our light show in the sand. Their individual displays were brief, only slightly more than a flash, and induced by the agitation of our pounding of the sand – apparently it is the deformation of the cell that triggers the chemical reaction. Bioluminescence is an extraordinary phenomenon, “generated by an enzyme-catalyzed chemoluminescence reaction, wherein the pigment luciferin is oxidised by the enzyme luciferase… Most marine light-emission belongs in the blue and green light spectrum, the wavelengths that can transmit through the seawater most easily.” (Sciencedaily). It seems likely that dinoflagellates use bioluminescence as a deterrent and warning mechanism, but the phenomonenon is not well understood and is the subject of extensive research - for a comprehensive resource, see http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/~biolum/ from the University of California, Santa Barbara. And here's a great science fair project outline on bioluminescence, with all kinds of further resources.

The illustration above is from a blog piece by Marko Manriquez, where, fascinatingly, he is proposing an art installation using bioluminescent dinoflagellates; interestingly, I found this at the same time as discovering that the Smithsonian Natural History Museum is currently holding a special exhibition inspired by bioluminescence:“The Bright Beneath: The Luminous Art of Shih Chieh Huang.” The art is inspired by our friends such as the dinoflagellates, but sadly does not feature any of the critters themselves as far as I can tell – but it makes me wish I was in Washington.

I shall end by noting that strange bioluminescent phenomena were on display in other ways that night on Komodo’s pink beach – note the dazzling effects on the head of the old guy next to François in this photograph:

 

 François, many thanks for your discovery, your dance, your photo – and your company.

Playing in the sand box – continuing connections

 
What do all these images have in common? Well, immediately, it’s quite obvious: they are all 3D models of landscapes. But the thinking, the execution, and the technology behind them is fascinatingly different. And yet all are enticing in some way or another – the still images are not sufficient, and the viewer yearns to touch, to interact, to play with them.

I will readily confess to a couple of fascinations: three-dimensional models of how our planet works, and connections, those odd intersections between the seemingly different. I wrote a little about the first fascination in celebrating the early personal influence of the models such as the one in the centre, above, for an Accretionary Wedge event a couple of years ago with the theme Inspiration - the beginnings of a geologist.

...the book which I now appreciate fired my fascination with geology was The Earth’s Crust—A New Approach to Physical Geography and Geology. Published in 1951, it was called “a new approach” because Dudley Stamp commissioned huge, detailed models of different landscapes—and what lies beneath them—to be made in exquisite detail by Tom Bayley, a lecturer in sculpture, and photographed in colour for the book.

Fascination number one in many respects lay behind my previous post on the brilliant linkage between sand box modelling and digital technology, Simtable (bottom left, above). I was delighted that Simtable’s inventor, Stephen Guerin, immediately commented, and included a link to Solid Terrain Modeling, who print high quality graphical data on to 3D landscape models (top left, above). All of this started to stimulate fascination number two, and I found myself visualising some the wonderfully dynamic stream table modelling capabilities that Steve Gough’s Little River Research and Design produces (top right, above). I enjoy following Steve’s activities, developments and applications (entertainingly chronicled on his blog), and I began to wonder if there wasn’t some interesting intersection potential between the Simtable technology and his. I dropped Steve an email and, in spite of being caught up in the challenges of exhibiting – in the end, successfully (see his blog) - at the AGU conference in San Francisco, he replied immediately and commented on the blog post. He provided a link to a description of the SandyStation, an invention by two students at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen in the Czech Republic, that cleverly combines a physical sand box and the digital technology of the Xbox Kinect (lower right, above).

And then, in browsing around for images, I happened upon this description of what seems like essentially the same conspiracy of sand and the Xbox, but invented by game developers in the Netherlands:

In a refreshingly different take, the world of the game Mimicry is the “ultimate sandbox game” – set in a literal sandbox. Participants manipulate piles of real sand, as Kinect-powered cameras track their work and project imagery onto the sand from a rendered analog version of the same world. The player mimics the virtual, the virtual mimics the player, and the stuff of each fuse in a real/virtual hybrid in sand.

I’m a little confused by this, but that’s not my point. It simply seems to me that here are multiple possibilities for connections, for educational and other applications that might generate examples of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. And one thing that’s compelling about much of the imagery from all of these activities? They all feature interaction, the satisfaction of being able to touch – and to play.

[Images from Simtable, Solid Terrain Modeling, SandyStation, and Little River Research and Design]

Playing with sand - and fire - and tsunamis - and who knows what else?

 
Sand boxes are for kids (of any age), and, if they are specifically for adults, particularly military ones, they are referred to officially as sand tables (but they’re still sand boxes). Military planners in any vaguely arenaceous terrain have always enjoyed the opportunity to sculpt landscapes in the sand, and those constrained by location and soils have simply resorted to sand tables.

LTC Edward Rowny (second from left) studies a sand table terrain map at X Corps headquarters in Korea with MG Edward M. Almond (with pointer), commander of X Corps, and other staff members, 2 Oct 1950.

 Pfc. Michael Sanchez of 135th Support Detachment Rear Operations Center, Kansas City, and Sgt. 1st Class Richard Rajkovick of 2175th Military Police Company, St. Clair, develop a sand table in Camp Santiago, Puerto Rico  

 But technology moves on – in impressive ways – and with it, ever-broadening applications. Recently, Time Magazine included in its annual “50 best inventions” list “holographic mapping,” both as a general concept and with specific examples. Not being a subscriber, I have not been able to access the original list, but on their Techland site, they report on an different example of the same technology, and cite their earlier article. “Here’s how it works,” they write:

A computer pipes satellite imagery through a projector onto a tabletop sandbox (no really, an actual sandbox). Color-coded areas show where to move the sand (with your hands) to quickly create hills, mountain peaks and valleys. By the time you’re finished, you have a box with astonishingly accurate contours, overlaid by a topographical digital image that makes the whole thing look almost holographic.

Digital displays and sand have conspired in various art forms, but here’s something eminently practical, as well as visually compelling (see the image at the head of this post). The toy that they are referring to is the Simtable, a high-tech sand box that is being enthusiastically used by fire-fighting teams in Arizona and elsewhere to simulate forest fire spread and actions taken in fighting it. This was described in a news piece from Colorado’s 9news – follow the link to watch this – playing with sand, but in deadly earnest. This was back in June when Arizona fires were raging and the Simtable was coming in for serious use; from the 9news article:

COLORADO SPRINGS - Firefighters are using a new tool that resembles a sandbox like children play in to learn more about what a fire can do and where it can go. Chas Curtis started working on the contraption years ago. "We were building the first of these in a garage as prototypes," Curtis said. He went to the Colorado Springs Fire Department to set up his Simtable - a 3D interactive fire simulator that literally brings a wildfire to life. In a matter of minutes, his giant sandbox and advanced computer simulations are all set up and that's when the hands-on learning begins.

"It's really a paint-by-numbers way of creating a topography map, purple is highest," Curtis said. "What it allows us to do is really understand what the terrain is doing because the terrain is so important for firefighting." Then Curtis uses satellite imaging and software his team created to show exactly what the terrain looks like.

"The coolest thing about the box is really getting people to understand fire behavior," he said. After figuring out the slope of the area, Curtis starts a fire at the exact location of where a real wildfire is burning to track its movements. He can plug in wind speeds and direction to see what the fire will do next.

"We get to look at a fire as if we were in an air attack platform, one of the airplanes circling looking down on it," Bob Harvey, the lead instructor at the Colorado Wildfire Academy, said. He uses the Simtable to train firefighters. "So now we have an air tanker drop, and we'll see if the wind and the topography will let it hold," he said using the simulator.

The Simtable helps him figure out where the need to bulldoze, and where to send fire crews. The wind is always a tough variable, but Harvey says the tool is extremely accurate. The Simtable even shows firefighters what the fuels look like in the area. "Some of these fuels will burn hotter and faster than others," Curtis said. The simulator shows neighborhoods and which areas should be evacuated. It also displays roads, allowing enforcement to know where to set up roadblocks.

It's currently being used by fire crews to help battle the massive Wallow Fire in Arizona, and so far, 30 different fire departments and training academies around the country have one of Curtis' Simtables. Each costs $20,000.

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the State of California began using the Simtable to prepare for a tsunami on the west coast.

Fire departments can also use the tool to track chemical plumes during a hazmat situation.

So, these sand boxes have all kinds of applications, some undoubtedly yet to be recognised. They are being used for community awareness and education:

Perhaps they could be used in schools for geography, geology…who knows what? Maybe (probably) these guys will have some good ideas:

 

[Images from Simtable,  US Army Corps of Engineers, and Duke University]