Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Science! She wrote her thesis on hydrogeolotectohydrgehooseismohydrololololol ground water in tectonically active settings, and is currently looking for work in the Seattle area. She has previous professional experience in hydrogeology and knows how to rock a GIS analysis; her resume is available here.
Looking for a quick sample of posts? Need a good sense of my writing style? Try these:
Two spectacularly awful events occurred in the ocean. Ocean anoxic event 1 (120mya) and 2 (93 mya). Rather unshockingly, the complete lack of oxygen in the oceans led to major extinctions. But what caused the OAE? New evidence strengthens the link between OAE2 and volcanism (but not Vulcans whose large brains are also known to cause major oxygen depletion).
[...]
[V]olcanoes are evil and an enemy of our salty friends.
Evil? Just because Earth life is too weak to handle the occasional flood basalt without losing half its species? Why, without volcanoes, there wouldn't be any life on Earth at all! Let me remind you of just a few of the things volcanoes do for this planet:
Volcanoes bring water from the Earth's interior to its exterior. What do you think your salty friends are swimming in - space unicorn pee?
Volcanoes also flux out CO2, which keeps us warm and cozy. Without volcanoes, we never would have escaped from Snowball Earth.
Ditto other volatiles. Do you want to try life without volcanic sulfur? I don't either.
Volcanoes created the continents (and islands). Without continents, there would be no primeval life-cradling tide pools. Also, we would be mermaids.
Submarine volcanoes provide a source of energy for all manner of exotic salty friends.
Volcanoes were here before we snotty, ungrateful hydrocarbons metamorphosed from the goo, and volcanoes will be here after we're gone. They're not always perfect, but they work their calderas off to provide us with a hospitable surface environment. Punk metazoans oughta show a little more respect.
The chip in my head (the nice doctors at Seed installed one when I signed up for this blog) is all a-twitter. That means it's almost time to make my way, slack-jawed and drooling with my arms groping vaguely about the space in front of me, all the way across the continent to Seed's aboveground urban lair.
Dear readers, I know that Seed didn't implant chips in your brains (probably), but you're still invited to join the shambling hordes. And I, for one, welcome the opportunity to meet each and every one of you in the spicy flesh.
Saturday, August 9, at an as-yet unspecified time in the mid-afternoon and an as-yet unspecified location in Manhattan, there will be a ScienceBlogs reader shindig. To organize the as-yet unspecified snacks, activities, and swag, though, the overlords need a rough estimate of potential attendance.
So. East Coast Megalopoloids, are you interested? If you think you might make it, please comment here (or email me at the address in the left sidebar) with an estimate of the probability that you'll actually show up.
Gentle Reader, help me out here: Did I accidentally write Tuesday's post in crazy moon-language? The response to that coordinated swarm of movie reviews - from people who are affiliated with Sizzle, as well as people like Chris Mooney, who just plain liked it - appears to be that those of us who hated the movie are just powerpoint-obsessed scientists who don't understand. It makes me wonder if anyone actually read my review. The Sizzle team sent out an email:
The bottom line is that we see two groups of viewers. One group who are interested in the facts and accuracy, and they want to know what is real in a movie and what isn't. The other group really isn't that concerned about the fact/fiction divide and mostly just want to enjoy a fun story, AND prefer there not be too much information (these people love Marion because he interrupts the scientists interviews and stops the flow of information).
I am accustomed to people thinking that I carry around some kind of political correctness billy-club in an uncomfortable locale, and that the only reason I don't laugh at their stilted caricatures is that I have sublimated my natural sense of humor into a twisted joy in gratuitously taking offense. I was expecting that one; I'm actually surprised it got so little play. The idea that I've got a stick up my butt about wanting to see movies that more closely resemble scientific conference presentations, though, is delightfully novel. Of course, now that I think about it, a secret desire for bland facial expressions and uninflected speech might just explain why I ever bother to see stuff starring Keanu Reeves...
And I definitely don't want to see AGU attendees adopt conventional cinematic storytelling techniques. I mean, really, what would happen?
Its orbit is not particularly strange, but it is big. Probably about 2/3 the size of Pluto. And it is bright. It is the brightest object in the Kuiper belt other than Pluto itself. Unlike, say 2003 EL61, which has so many interesting characteristics that it was hard choosing from so many different appropriate name (more on this later), Easterbunny has no obvious hook. Its surface is covered with large amounts of almost pure methane ice, which is scientifically fascinating, but really not easily relatable to terrestrial mythology. (For a while I was working on coming up with a name related to the oracles at Delphi: some people interpret the reported trance-like state of the oracles to be related to natural gas [methane] seeping out of the earth there. After some thought I decided this theme was just dumb.) Strike one.
More fanciful planetary science, a call for shoe-puking, and blog carnivals below the fold.
Before I give you my review of Randy Olson's new mockumentary about the global warming debate, I'd like to apologize for being such a terrible liberal documentary-goer. I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, or Olson's previous movie, Flock of Dodos, or any of Michael Moore's work since "TV Nation". I keep meaning to, and then I forget, or I decide that I'd rather use those two hours of my life for an escapist Pixar fantasy or save the $9 for beer. I am totally going to fail at providing a compare'n'contrast with the relevant touchstones of the genre that will assist you in deciding whether or not you want to see this movie.
So I'll just make it simple: You don't want to see this movie.
There's an article in last Friday's issue of Nature describing some changes in the rocks near the San Andreas Fault that occurred in the hours before two small earthquakes. Here's the BBC's writeup; for those of you who can sneak behind the Nature paywall, the original article is here.
A similar study was published sixteen years ago, not in Nature but in Science. The first author on the 1992 Science paper, Paul Silver, was also the second author on this week's Nature paper. While the recent study measured stress changes along a fault using precise instrumentation installed in a pair of very fancypants boreholes, in 1992, Silver and his coauthor Nathalie Valette-Silver exploited a natural system that is also very sensitive to changes in the squeezing of surrounding rocks: California's Old Faithful, in the wine country town of Calistoga.
So before considering the evidence presented in Nature this week, I'd like to bring you all up to speed on the latest developments in geyser-based earthquake prediction. It'll be a short post.
Well, technically this is Friday tsunami blogging, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the 1958 Southeast Alaska earthquake and ensuing Lituya Bay megatsunami, a half-kilometer high wave which killed only a handful of people.
Should I blog about this? It's got some gender in it.
Yeah, it's got a lot of gender. It's kind of awful.
Attention, Southern California! On November 13 you will have the exciting honor of hosting the world's largest-ever earthquake drill, and there is a blog devoted to the preparations. Readers not in Southern California can play along by working on your own emergency kits.
One hundred years ago today, a meteor exploded above Siberia, flattening trees over an area of a couple thousand square kilometers (one-tenth of Wales). This video shows the mostly recovered forest, and a view of the lake that might or might not be an impact crater:
The narration overstates the "mystery" about the cause of the explosion. We might not have any of the traditional tell-tale signs of an impact, like a crater or even a bit of leftover meteorite, but we've observed smaller atmospheric meteor explosions. People are still floating alternative hypotheses, but there's little reason to think that this wasn't a case of smashing-from-space. Scientific attention has turned towards the details of the impact: Was Lake Cheko a result of the event? Where did the meteor come from, how big was it, and are we more doomed than we thought?
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Science! She wrote her thesis on 
