greengabbro | January 7, 2009 Rob R. asks:
I've been following along with the recent happenings at Yellowstone (that is, as best as I can as a layman) but haven't seen that site [data from the Yellowstone GPS network] before. Could you explain (or link to) what I'm seeing there and what a "change in surface topography" might look like? Thanks in advance.
Sure thing! What you are looking at on that page is a network of GPS receivers cemented to various points in the Yellowstone caldera and surrounding area. The USGS has written a nice overview of GPS and other geodetic volcano monitoring techniques, and I won't…
greengabbro | January 6, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: June 24, 2008
The women-in-science-osphere has been trying to figure out what to make of this Newsweek article about "Nerdettes", female engineering majors who make a point of displaying gender-normative behaviors like makeup.…
greengabbro | January 4, 2009Okay, I've slightly missed the main New Year's resolution bandwagon. But the beginning of February will mark the first anniversary of my move to ScienceBlogs, so I figure I have a whole month in which to be self-indulgent reflective and renewal-minded. And I've been thinking of starting my personal calendar year on National Pie Day, anyway.
So here are my blog-related resolutions for 2009:
Update my blog roll
Purge all my to-blog folders and half-written drafts. I think 2008 was an especially bad year for letting ideas languish - knowing that potential employers are reading, I've been turning…
greengabbro | January 2, 2009If you like apocalypse porn, you have probably been following the current earthquake swarm at Yellowstone. While there is no reason to believe that this is part of the lead-up to a giant caldera-forming eruption that will wipe out most of North America, or indeed to any eruption at all, there is also no reason to let that spoil your fun.
If you're watching the recent earthquakes page, take the reported earthquake depths with an especially big piece of salt. Earthquake depth is difficult to accurately determine, especially with real-time automated processing techniques. Think about it: You've…
greengabbro | December 31, 2008Geotripper always comes up with the best memes [Oh, wait, looks like Brian at Clastic Detritus might have priority on this one - sorry Brian!] He's made some psychic predictions for 2009. But I think his crystal ball must have some inclusions that are scattering away his mind-energy vibrational tones, because this is what I saw in the melted cheese on my pizza last night:
Episodic tremor and slip on the Cascadia subduction zone occurring early this spring will trigger the long-dreaded subduction zone megathrust event. The magnitude ~9 earthquake, and ensuing tsunami, devastate the coastal…
greengabbro | December 30, 2008Er, I mean, technically, cell phone use, car use, and a tendency to plan things at the last minute are all correlated. It's poor form to confuse correlation with causation, even if it does gratify my latent Luddite tendencies.
Or so says a survey of Norwegian families. Er, I mean, technically, the abstract to a paper about a survey of Norwegian families. I haven't read the paper; insert open access rant (and/or a lament about local university library budgets) here.
Still, it makes a nice story. You're making plans at the last minute (which only works because everyone involved has a cell…
greengabbro | December 24, 2008If the sun came out, all the trees would be twinkling with ice.
Seattle has the snow chaos. It's like one of those colds that never quite goes away, except that instead of snot, the city's nose is dripping slush and ice. My neighborhood is tucked in behind a couple of steep hills and apparently not top on the list for the city's 27 plows; bus service around here has been completely cancelled except for an occasional, limping #48. There's nothing to do but loll about, drinking mug after mug of hot cocoa and building snowpersons on the porch.
I went out yesterday for the first time since the…
greengabbro | December 18, 2008According to a study of deaths from natural hazard "events"* across the U.S., earthquakes, volcanoes, and other spectacular geophysical hazards are much less deadly than common weather events like heat waves, floods, and thunderstorms. The study was published in the open-access International Journal of Health Geographics, so you should all be able to follow the link - but if you would rather read the summary version, the Los Angeles Times noticed that California is mostly safe, and ran with that angle.
The study's authors looked at county-level data on natural fatality hazards during the…
greengabbro | December 16, 2008Baked Alaska is a highly technical dessert. Its success requires a firm and pliable meringue, a moist and springy sponge cake, deft assembly work, and the time-dependent heat equation. The final product is tasty enough, but it is usually meant primarily as a delivery vehicle for boasts about one's l33t dessert skillz - the delicious flavor is just along for the ride.
Baked Alaska is also the first thing I thought of when my old friend and Alaska resident Janessa asked for a red bean dessert as her prize for contributing to the Donors Choose fundraiser gimmickfest. I am so very free of…
greengabbro | December 15, 2008Hey, geobloggers: If you're going to AGU, will you tell us what you hear that is new and different? PLEEZ?
Emily Lackdawilla at the Planetary Society Blog can't make it to all the sessions she wants to see and is hoping to swap notes about Enceladus:
I desperately need help from someone who will be at the Enceladus sessions to jot down a few notes for me on anything that is new or changed from previous thoughts on the nature of that moon.
I just want to know what you think is interesting, exciting, or trendy this year, and why. Subjective "buzz" and plain ol' irresponsible speculation are…
greengabbro | December 11, 2008Dear Science Bloggers (Self, You Too):
Stop burying your leads.
Ledes. Leads. Whatever. Your opening line - the one that draws you in to a story, that limns the scope of your writing while providing the so what. It belongs at the beginning and you are placing it two or three paragraphs deep into your entry.
I tell you this, because after a month or so of mostly ignoring the blogosphere (not for any particularly interesting reason) and buzzing through some John McPhee and Natalie Angier books instead, my expectations for writing have been reset. I also tell you this because I have just…
greengabbro | November 4, 2008 My grandmother died early this morning after a short battle with cancer. She was 85.
This is not a proper eulogy; those are hard to write.
However. Grandma voted by absentee ballot early last week, before the morphine took over. If she managed to vote, so can all y'alls (at least, assuming I finish writing this before the polls close).
I'm registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I mailed my ballot in two weeks ago. That worked out well - I was glad not to worry about it while flying back to the craton to spend this time with family. Today, though, I'm a bit sad not to be participating…
greengabbro | October 31, 2008
I'm tempted to hand out rocks to the neighborhood children tonight... but I suppose caramels are just as bad for their teeth.
greengabbro | October 27, 2008 The Where on Google Earth? competition has been going on for almost two years now, wandering the geoblogosphere from winner to winner. During that time, we've covered all 7 continents and a whole buncha islands, but we've revealed one great big bias. We're landlubbers.
I've managed to find one again - for the first time since I moved to ScienceBlogs! - and I think it's time to start correcting this historical inequity.
For new players, here's the game: Open up Google Earth and try to find the patch of Earth pictured here. Be the first to post its coordinates, and describe the geology as…
greengabbro | October 26, 2008 So far, Thomas M. is the only one to take advantage of my Donors Choose fundraising gimmicks. So, this rose quartz cobble, which I picked up while hiking in the hills near Santa Fe, shall henceforth be known as Thomas.
When you find something so well-rounded in a sedimentary deposit it's always hard to say precisely where it came from - especially when you subsequently forget where, exactly, you were hiking that day. Northern New Mexico is home to a number of pegmatites, coarse-grained igneous veins that host spectacular crystals and economically useful deposits of lithium and beryllium.…
greengabbro | October 21, 2008Someone stole 500 truckloads of sand from a beach on the north shore of Jamaica. Police are using "forensic tests" on other beaches on the island to identify the thief; I'm guessing this involves a geologist looking at sand in a microscope.
This page has better images of magnified sand grains than I was able to find on Flickr, and it's a nice overview of some of the things you can learn about a beach by examining the sand... but I wanted to do my own quiz anyway. Can you match the beaches to the sand?
The beaches:
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware
Hollywood Beach, Florida
Oneuli Beach, Hawaii…
greengabbro | October 20, 2008My coffee grinder sometimes pauses in its labors, and makes a high-pitched whining noise that is nigh unbearable to the uncaffeinated ear. The noise happens because even though there are plenty of beans in the hopper, they've managed to arrange themselves in such a way that they don't fall down. A good jostle of the grinder will set things right.
This problem is not new. Random loose particles frequently produce such quasi-stable, gravity-defying arrangements. Back in the day when I was working on well drilling projects, we worried about it happening in the gravel that surrounds the well…
greengabbro | October 15, 2008I'm saving all my brilliance for a job interview today. So here, have some slices of other people's brilliance.
Great news! Seed is raffling off prizes for the Donors Choose challenge! Donate as little as $5 for a chance to win 1 of 50 free subscriptions to Seed magazine or 1 of ~15 pieces of ScienceBlogs schwag - mugs, laptop covers, and USB drives. At the end of the month, there will be a grand prize drawing for an iPod Touch. Right now, only 160 people have donated to the ScienceBlogs challenge (and we're beating the mommy bloggers! Yeah!) so your odds of winning are high. To enter, simply…
greengabbro | October 10, 2008There is still no official word from Seed about matching funds and/or prize drawings for the Donors Choose Challenge. However, Janet has posted a list of individual ScienceBloggers' incentives here. Donating to another Scibling's challenge might not contribute to the glory of the geoblogosphere, but it will contribute to education.
If I weren't trying to win bragging rights, I would claim that the contribution to education is what matters. But really, pretending that bragging rights aren't important is just sour grapes from an ethicist whose readers do not share her commitment to charity.…
greengabbro | October 9, 2008As papers come through my RSS reader, I flag anything that looks interesting, with the vague intention of getting back to it later.
Ha, ha. Very few of the articles I flag actually make it through my periodic purging of the to-read list. Since Berkeley has finally figured out that I'm no longer a student and they should stop providing me with library access to journals, the barrier between "hm, looks interesting" and "I'm actually going to read this" has gotten even higher.
Below the fold: 5 papers that haven't quite made the hurdle.
Dating kimberlites in Kansas - Kimberlite pipes are famous…