In my last post, I introduced the new Geoscience Community on Google+. Here, I'd like to point folks to a recent talk by Fraser Cain about Google+ at the ScienceOnline Conference. +Fraser Cain is an astronomy enthusiast, blogger, publisher of Universe Today, and almost any scientist who's been involved with Google+ over the past year & a half is probably familiar with his name. If anyone has taken science on G+ into awesome mode, it's him. He's done some really cool things with G+ and astronomy, such as hosting hangouts as Virtual Star Parties, getting people from all over to stream the views through their telescopes over the web. He & others who've joined him have given more people the opportunity to see something amazing in the night sky live through a telescope than anyone else in the world. Tens of thousands have viewed the Hangouts he's hosted. He has been so successful that Google decided a while back to make a short documentary/advertisement about what the way they use the technology. And this past year was full of fantastic events, from the transit of Venus to Curiosity landing on Mars and others.
The video for his talk includes others as well; he begins to speak about 12 minutes in, and lasts until ~33 minutes. If you are interested in science & social media, it is well worth taking a look at, especially if you've not used G+ before. What he's accomplished in the past year & a half with this new technology is pretty special.
I would love to see what could come of geosocial activity through G+. It is still very much in the beginning stages. There are a few geos who are using G+ regularly, but there's so much room for so many more, especially those who've not yet connected with fellow professionals. The Geoscience Community has drawn in some new folks this past week, which is excellent, and they've made some great contributions. One feature that geoscientists aren't using much yet are the hangouts. We've used them some in the past, driven largely by +Ron Schott 's geology office hours, but they've not yet really caught on. I'd love to see geos use them as effectively for Earth Science as Fraser has for Space. Geoscience is right at the heart of many of the major problems facing the world today; capturing people's imagination shouldn't be an issue when you've got volcanoes & earthquakes & velociraptors on your team. That could be really fun.
After posting the Curiosity Round-Up last night, it was amazing to watch the events of the landing unfold. We landed a mini-cooper sized robot on Mars by lowering it down by a rocket-propelled Sky Crane, and then it started sending back images! It was an amazing feat.
Someone posted this today on about a billion websites:
I enjoyed watching the Virtual Landing Party, a Hangout on Air, hosted by Fraser Cain of Universe Today, which featured a number of astronomers discussing the events.
This stunning image is IMO the best so far returned from Curiosity, as it shows 2 of the rover's wheels, its shadow, and Mt. Sharp, Curiosity's target area, in the background.
One of my favorites, however, is this one sent back by the Mars Reconassaince Orbiter, which has been in orbit around Mars for the past 6 years, taking images of the Martian surface. Here it captured Curiosity on the way down with the parachute deployed, as well as Curiosity's heat shield, still in descent, after it was shed from the space craft.
Tonight, we humans are attempting to land the biggest & most amazing space robot ever on Mars. If landing goes well, this will be a tremendous achievement.
For starters, Curiosity is GIANT compared to previous Mars rovers.
It was 15 years ago that the first rover, Sojourner, landed, and 8 years ago that Spirit and Opportunity landed. Opportunity has just finished up another Martian winter and is revving up for another great season of discovery. Curiosity will have more tools, cooler tech, & bigger guns. Spirit & Oppy were like geologists with hammers & hand lenses. Curiosity is more like a geochemist, a mobile analytical laboratory. More on the 3 generations of Mars rovers here.
The descent down to the surface is the part where problems might occur, which is why so many are talking about it and paying attention tonight. It should land within the next half an hour! If you haven't seen it yet, watch this NASA JPL video to see what it takes to land a robot the size of a dune buggy on another planet.
When a lot of people hear the term "animated gif" they shudder. Unless it has cats in it, then a lot of people squeal with delight. On Google+,I've seen a few people use animated gifs in some really cool ways, so I decided I'd take a crack at it with the cover photo.
The cover photo is a very wide shot, 940 by 180 pixels, so landscape panoramas work well. While I was out west teaching field camp earlier this summer, I got to visit a number of cool geological sites, and I took a number of photos of places like the Black Hills, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, the Beartooth Mountains, & others. Of course, a regular camera doesn't take pictures with such wide dimensions, so at several locations, I took overlapping shots so I could stitch them together. I stitched the photos together in Photoshop to create each individual panorama image. This is fairly easy through the photomerge function.
The first one is from Badlands National Park, in an overlook area where these colored rocks are located. The Badlands are notoriously white and shades of gray and lacking in much color, but here a couple of Fe-rich layers stand out nicely as yellow & red layers.
The second is from Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone National Park, a short walk from Old Faithful. The colors here are fantastic; I didn't really capture the deep blue in the center of the pool, unfortunately.
The next is a shot of the Grand Tetons. Here I really liked the various shades of blue and green in the sagebrush and other vegetation in the foreground paired with the blues of the mountains and the sky in the distance.
The next is within Grand Teton National Park, along Cascade Canyon Trail, looking up and to the North. My goal with this one was to capture the height of the peaks in the distance in contrast to the talus pile in the foreground. Sometimes it can be tricky to keep the trees all upright in an image like this one, but a "cylindrical" stitching usually works to keep the trees upright. I've found that different stitching options in Photoshop work for different situations, so many times I'll stitch a set of photos together in a couple of different ways and choose the one I prefer.
The last is from the Beartooth Mountains, a view of an enormous glacier-carved valley. A number of glacial features, such as cirques & hanging valleys, can be seen in the image.
To overlay them and animate them, I must give credit to Scott Horwath, who has a fantastic cover photo; I modeled mine after his. Back when Google+ had "Scrapbook photos" (5 small images instead of one large one), he wrote up a great tutorial on how to created animated scrapbook photos, including a video he posted on youtube, and a .tiff template file that you can download. I originally put something together for the scrapbook photos, but those are now gone and it was time for an update. The template file Scott has created has guidelines showing what the image will look like in Google+. The panoramas that I took and stitched together were much, much larger than the size of the Google+ cover photo, so shrunk them down and imported each one into a layer. Then it was a matter of tweaking the size and position of each one to fit in the template. The simplest animation would be to simply flip through the pics, but that's a bit boring. To get this thing into awesome mode requires just a bit more in my view, so I went with a simple fade between shots. This is fairly easy to do in Photoshop. The animation consists of each photo being displayed for 3 seconds, followed by 0.1 second steps where the photo becomes more & more transparent (10% each step) until it is completely gone. As the photo becomes more and more transparent, the image below comes into view. The animation ends with the original photo showing up under the last one, and then the animation loops & repeats the sequence over again. If you haven't seen the final product, check it out on my Google+ Profile.
Beyond just showing some pretty pictures, animated photos could be used could be used to highlight one's areas of expertise, or show off places from a recent trip as mine does. But to make this a bit more scientific, an animated photo could also be used to demonstrate a process, such as the rock cycle, or the development of a structure or feature. To understand materials that form over millennia, geologists look at similar features that are in various stages of formation, and try to connect the dots between them to understand the underlying process. Also, I didn't include anything this time around of considerably smaller scale. I'm thinking the next one I create might include some thin sections images.
What say you, geos? What other kinds of photos would work well here? How could this type of thing be used to do something cool?
For the first time in this blog, I've decided to join a host of other geobloggers in the geoblog carnival, which is aptly named The Accretionary Wedge. This time around, Lockwood at Outside the Interzone has called for posts around the topic "Sexy Geology", described as geology that makes you heart race and your pupils dilate.
In thinking about what to contribute many places came to mind, but in the end so many of them are found near a magical place called Bancroft, Ontario. Bancroft is a small town that is world renowned for its mineral specimens. It is the "Mineral Capital of Canada", due to the great allure of the area to rockhounds and mineral collectors, who are drawn there not only for the vast number of minerals that can be found but also the quality of specimens in size and shape. Of the ~4000 known minerals, at least 1600 are known in the Bancroft area, some sources have said the number is even higher.
There are way too many sites around Bancroft to really give a full account; I'll highlight just a few of my very favorites:
1) Egan Chutes Provincial Park at the York River:
This locality includes several stops on both sides of the York River-
The Goulding-Keane Nepheline Pegamtite Quarry (N 45° 04.201’, W 077° 43.947’) is an abandoned small quarry with easily seen large crystals of magmatic nepheline, biotite, calcite, sodalite, and zircon. The zircons are large enough to be seen in hand specimen! This quarry is the source of the large dump of crushed rock in the center of town (N 45° 03.432’, W 077° 51.379’), where rockhounds can pick through these rocks and take what they like.
Continuing down the trail from the G-K quarry, you'll reach the main chute, where the river pinches down at a terrific waterfall (N 45° 04.473’, W 077° 44.081’). The nepheline gneisses here also contain diopside, scapolite, hornblende, plagioclase, and at one point in time contained sapphire (but the larger samples have all been removed).
Egan Chute Falls
Heading back, across the York River from the G-K quarry mentioned above lies the York River Skarn (N 45° 04.210, W 077° 43.914’). The unaltered marble can be seen in a roadcut (N 45° 04.066’, W 077° 43.874’) just before the trail to get to the skarn, which is good to visit before seeing the skarn to truly appreciate the changes that took place in these rocks as the nepheline pegmatite intruded (and it has some spectacular sigma clasts). At the skarn, about 50 minerals have been described at this single outcrop, including garnet, diopside, wollastonite, vesuvianite, forsterite, clinohumite, spinel, clintonite (a green, Ca-mica), among many others.
2) MacDonald Mine:
This is an old uranium mine in a granite pegmatite (N 45° 09.928', W 077° 49.189'), dominated by GIANT K-feldspar & quartz crystals. Some of the K-spar crystals are ~10' long, and some quartz grains are the size of beach balls. Much of the quartz is dark & smokey, due to the presence of the uranium ore mineral, uranian pyrochlore ("ellsworthite"). The pyrochlore grains themselves are typically round & ~4 inches in diameter. And they are HOT. They will send your Geiger counter into awesome mode. Also present are andradite (black Fe+3-rich garnet), sphene, and zircon. As an American, it is really surprising to be able to freely enter a place like this; in the U.S. this mine would be surrounded by 20' tall fences, barbed wire, and very large guards with very large dogs and guns; the size of the KEEP OUT signs would reach epic proportions. But here in Bancroft, you can just park at N 45° 09.846’, W 077° 49.160’ and hike in.
3) Orange Calcite Roadcut:
Along Monck Road, a cut at the top of a small hill (N 45° 00.169’, W 078° 00.360’) displays some fascinating rocks with orange calcite and large grains of white tremolite. Several grains of a highly radioactive mineral I have yet to identify are present here, which are easily found with a Geiger counter as they set it on fire.
orange calcite and large white fibers of tremolite
4) Green Mantle Farm Eco-Tour:
If you have the time, and really, you should make it, there is no substitute for taking a tour with Mark Bramham through his property and adjacent Crown land to see some truly fantastic mineral specimens in the wooded areas surrounding his home (N 45° 00.663', W 078° 14.903'). No sample collecting is allowed, but you won't regret going. Let me just say "fluororichterite stream". Richterite is an amphibole like tremolite, but substitute 2 Na+ for Ca+2, and the richterite here contains significant fluorine for the OH- group. There are very few places in the world where fluororichterite is known, so your choices for viewing it are limited.
Large dark green crystals of fluororichterite
You'll also see gorgeous GIANT euhedral hornblende, orthoclase, green apatite, and museum quality red clinohumite. The tour lasts 2.5-3 hours, and their playful dogs add to the charm of this wooded walk. Although he's sitting on a mineralogical gold mine, Mark's passion for conservation is inspiring. Besides the material found on his own property, He has used the mining law to stake a claim on the adjacent Crown land so that he could protect the minerals and keep them in their natural place for future generations to see.
Euhedral hornblende crystals
Euhedral orthoclase crystals
So there you have it, my take on Sexy Geology, with a virtual visit to Bancroft, Ontario. And this is but a small slice of what is available in this area!
