greengabbro
Posts by this author
So sand is just little weensy rocks, anyway. And this is a weensy volcano made of sand, in Peru. It’s about a meter (0.33% 0.9% of a football field thanks LL!) across.
Normally, layers of sand and silt underground bear the weight of whatever’s on top of them through a network of contacts between…
Today, I am excited because I get to use the word "stomping" in some of my peer-reviewed serious science business. I like the word "stomping".
I also like the word "puddle" but I haven't managed to work that one in yet. Nor "titillating" (though I am citing a paper on "vibro-agitation", hur hur).…
This is an outcrop of Bishop tuff, an ash deposit created 760,000 years ago when the Long Valley Caldera exploded - though “exploded” is, if anything, an understatement. The photo was taken 15 miles (25 of your Earth kilometers) away from the eruption; it contains no persons for scale, but the…
First, I'd like to say that these people have a point. There's a lotta white people on ScienceBlogs! More than in the science blogosphere generally? I don't know - pinning down the demographics of the blogosphere is tricky. More than in science generally? Razib has the numbers.
There are any…
It's one of those mornings where everything looks shiny and interesting - everything but the stuff I'm supposed to be working on. And wouldn't you know it, the Earth and Planetary Science Letters RSS feed just dumped a couple of issues on me. Surely I can at least blurb the interesting titles? It…
First things first: Happy birthday, PZ Myers! (MOAR LOLPZ?)
Next things next: The Borg Overlords are working on a replacement for that "most active/most emailed" thing in the sidebar - one that gives more exposure to good posts from us wee little borgians, and less to gratuitous celebrity pix. The…
Picture courtesy reader Martin. Or maybe Martin doesn't actually read this blog, and it's just Wren. Anyway, thanks, Wren and Martin!
Today's rock is a geopuzzle: What's up with these ridges? How did they get there, and what determines their size?
I don't actually know the answer, so this is the…
In light of the fact that Cal State is still committed to firing its nonviolent math teachers (the state attorney general has weighed in, supporting the dismissal, and Kearney-Brown is planning to pursue legal action), I thought I'd dredge up an old quip on the relationship between mathematical…
Avalanches on Mars Caught on Camera! -- You can see the dust cloud. If that's not enough for you, the HiRISE team has just released 75 pages of droolworthy new Mars pix. Whoever is in charge of cropping these things has a good eye for composition. This is your official time-waster for the week.…
Until I saw Ed Brayton's post about a math teacher fired from Cal State East Bay for refusing to sign a loyalty oath, I had mostly forgotten that I might be technically guilty of perjury. Y'see, as a public employee of the state of California, I was required to sign that exact same oath:
I do…
Much of scientific communication consists of throwing up a graph and then explaining it. There are some basic procedures for doing this, many of which were probably ignored by the speaker at your most recent department seminar. Don't be that mumbledy jerkface who never explains the numbers on his…
If you kick a dark pebble in the middle of the desert, you will sometimes find that it is light underneath. What this means is that you have disturbed a pebble that has been sitting there untouched for thousands of years. During that time, it accumulated a thin coating of windblown gunk - mainly…
This post from Female Science Professor, about watching a colleague with ADD work, has been stuck in my head for the past couple of days:
So now he just lives with it and, although he hates his inability to focus, if he keeps going back to his original activity, even if he can't sustain that…
I didn't manage to get myself scraped off onto this month's Accretionary Wedge - oh, noes! While I am tragically subducted into the mantle, though, the rest of you can read about the many open questions currently puzzling the geoblogosphere.
Perhaps I can make it into the volcanic arc or something…
This is a thin section from some Colorado shale. It's part of the Green River Formation, which is a series of rocks laid down about fifty million years ago when the West was wet. The shales come from a set of lakes that occupied part of what is now Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.
If you look…
Chad Orzel offers the following dorky poll:
If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money? ... For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for example, how would I spend three billion dollars on physics?
If I had three…
The buzz in the geoblogosphere this week has been about an article in Nature Geoscience on the status of women in the academic earth sciences. I meant to review it here, but haven't had the oomph. Instead, you should join the discussion at All My Faults are Stress-Related, Ten Million Years of…
I was trawling the USGS photo archive for upcoming Friday Rock Blog candidates when I came across this scanning electron micrograph of wheat. It's from a gargantuan volume published in 1981, full of initial reports about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
Why is there a picture of wheat in a book…
I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel that is grad school. I give it a 75% chance of being an oncoming train.
What this means for you, dear readers, is that in the coming weeks you'll be seeing a lot of bloggy self-plagiarism. I'll kick things off by posting a puzzle/meme I tried…
Waterfall and Columnar Basalt © Joe Decker. Used with permission.
I finally found a piece from my nature photographer friend Joe Decker that would make a suitable subject for rock blogging. Y'see, the problem with fine art photographers is that they often forget to do things like add a rock hammer…
I'm a proud member of the United Auto Workers.
The entertainment value of people's broken socioeconomic assumptions when I say this is not to be underestimated, but I don't feel that I'm personally much better off with the UAW than without. The sciences as a whole are much better funded than, say…
I am frequently earwormed by the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo's song New Madrid, in which the narrator begs an intraplate seismic zone to somehow restore his lost love:
Come on do what you did
Roll me under New Madrid
Shake my baby and please bring her back
So for Valentine's Day, I thought I'd…
Nerd Links
Igneous Sounds -- What happens if you feed mineral powder diffraction curves into a synthesizer? You get something that's too harmonic for your computer music composition professor's avant garde sensibilities. More details on the process here.
Help Save Paleontology at Dinosaur National…
You know, when you join a new organization, you don't typically scan the board of directors looking for people who have previously been publicly identified as over-the-line bigots no reasonable person should associate with ever. Or at least I don't. I certainly didn't when I signed on as a minion…
gabweb
Originally uploaded by kevinzim
I have a confession to make: I have absolutely no idea what this picture means. And most of you probably don't either, which is okay, because you're not running around the Internets pretending to be a geologist.
This is what's colloquially…
Telling Stories: February's Scientiae Carnival
Hooray, hooray, for Scientiae! This month's theme brings us lots of stories about what sexism looks like in everyday life... and some less depressing entries as well.
Stratigraphic layer-cake T-shirt
I would buy it immediately, but fortunately for my…
I'm a bit cynical about the revolutionary power of the blogosphere. I blog because it's a fun and easy way to share things that I find exciting, it makes my writing better, and it helps keep my ginormous slavering beast of an ego fed in the manner to which it has become accustomed. I don't blog…
I vaguely knew that the U.S. Geological Survey's Menlo Park office runs a series of public lectures, but I didn't realize they were all videotaped and archived online for my blogging convenience. Ace! Now we just need to chop them up into bits and put them on YouTube.
Anyway, Thursday night's…
Let's get one thing out of the way right now: The question of whether or not a new geologic epoch has "really started" is precisely as stupid as the question of whether or not Pluto is "really" a planet. The definitions of geologic eons, eras, and epochs are not objective truths about the history…
Welcome, Gentle Reader, to my new series of Internet tubes. You'll notice that I haven't completely unpacked - there's no pretty banner at the top, the blogroll is woefully incomplete (it's probably even missing your blog!), and my profile page is not nearly as verbose as it could be. It'll get…