Newt Gingrich Dumps Hayhoe's Climate Chapter

Unfortunate news today that a chapter on climate science, which was being written by Texas Tech Professor Katharine Hayhoe, is apparently not going to be included in a new book by former Speaker of the House and Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.  The new book was intended to be a collection of essays about the environment, a book that many Republicans who are concerned about the environment were looking forward to.  This action as well as others in his most recent campaign for the Republican nomination show significant movement back away from legitimate climate science.  As recently as 2007, he outlined a position on how the Republican party might offer alternative political solutions to climate change in an interview with Andrew Revkin, of the NY Times Dot Earth blog.  However, his recent comments show a new opposition to a cap & trade solution.

Hayhoe is also well known as an evangelical Christian, who has written a book on climate change with her pastor husband, A Climate for Change, a book designed to engage evangelicals in the debate on climate change.  It is high on my reading list for 2012.  Her views on climate science are summarized in this interview with blogger Jonathan Merritt.  Giver her credentials and influence among evangelical Christians, Gingrich's removal of her chapter from his book on the environment is a terribly unfortunate turn of events for the progression of understanding climate science in America.

Optical Mineralogy at Arizona Science Center

Back a couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Arizona Science Center, located in downtown Phoenix.  Much of the exhibits were for sciences other than geoscience - stuff like motion, gravity, building things, the human body, weather, and similar things.  There was one section on geology, and so, you know, at least it existed!  One exhibit was on the rock cycle, which had some interesting, amusing animations (although I wondered if they introduced some misconceptions, but that's another story).  Another, however, was on looking at rocks with a microscope, and showed images of optical mineralogy.

Yes, that's right, a science museum had an exhibit on optical mineralogy.

There were a bunch of different samples of rock types with a hand magnifier to look at them, but at the top, there were two screens that kept rotating through a series of images taken with a polarized light microscope.  There wasn't much information about the images, but they were at least pretty to look at & had names that lined up well with the hand samples below.  Some of the images were taken with the analyzer in & some with it out, but it didn't go into any details, unfortunately.  Here's a shot of the full display, with a cross-polars view of a garnet mica schist in the screen.

The Earth Rocks! exhibit at AZSC.

Here's the floor plan of the area that contains this exhibit, mouse-over the gray rectangle at center-left to find it (unfortunately not a lot of info on the website either).

So that pretty much made my day.  I enjoy teaching optical mineralogy, but it is very tough to do, even with dedicated geology majors.  Maybe if there were a few more exhibits like this in the world of science museums, my job would get a shade easier.  And of course, if more people in the world knew even a few basics about how to identify rocks, we'd all be a lot better off!

So on one final note, who can name this dark brown, wedge-shaped beauty in the center of this image?

A Growing Collection of Geology Field Photos

Today over at Georneys, Evelyn suggested, in what's sure to become a geoblogmeme, posting geology pictures.  I love it when geologists share their photographs, and since late August I've started building my collection of geology photos and posting them on Google+.  It all got started when I decided to take a leap and submit one of my photos to the NASA site Earth Science Picture of the Day, and they accepted it.  I mainly did that because I was a bit bored of all the cloud formations that tend to dominate the EPoDs (need more geologists submitting their pics to this site!).  Anyway, that experience as well as the huge amount of great photo sharing on G+ led me down this path.

Isoclinal folds in high-grade gneiss, eastern Blue Ridge, Southern Appalachians.

The pics are being collected in an PicasaWeb album.  When I post them on G+, I give a longer description & explanation so my followers can learn something cool about geoscience.  All of the photos are geotagged and their locations can be seen on the map in the PicasaWeb album (unfortunately, the same album viewed in G+ does not have the spiffy googlemaps with it), so that others can visit these locations and see for themselves.

Chilled margin in granite, St. Francois Mtns., MO

I've cross-posted the links to the G+ posts on my BookFace & Twitter accounts, but so far the blog here hasn't seen them.  I've also tagged each of these posts with the hashtag #geopic.  In this way, anyone can see the photos and search for the descriptions I wrote about them easily on G+.  I'm happy to let any geoscience instructors use them (unaltered, of course) as examples in their lecture slides.  A lot of photographers post beautiful pictures of landscapes, and I'm not a serious photographer in that way; these are meant for science, not necessarily for art.

Deformed mudcracks, Valley & Ridge Province, east TN.

So without further ado, here's the link to the collection:

https://picasaweb.google.com/106934864033790932269/GeologyFieldPhotos

The collection so far includes 14 pictures (I post about 1 per week).  I also upload the photos to my panoramio account so they can be viewed in Google Earth & Maps.  The collection so far includes about 10 structures (3 folds, a textbook delta clast, deformed mudcracks, en echelon veins, liesegang rings, a chilled margin in granite, and GIANT-size joints & cross beds), 2 landforms, 1 fossil, and 1 mineral/crystal.  I guess that's a bit skewed toward the structures!

Delta clast in gneiss, Parry Sound Shear Zone, Ontario, CA.

Driving Forces of Plate Tectonics

Diverting attention here at the blog again away from mineral resources & environment (I seem to do that more often than not lately!), I'm writing up a post on the driving forces of plate tectonics.  No time for uber-basic stuff here; gotta get deep in a hurry.

Yesterday, a geology student at a university tweeted that his physics professor had told him that plate tectonics was driven by the gravitational force from the moon.  Wowsa, that's awful bad.  Downright ridiculous.  A number of folks in the geotwittersphere have jumped in on the conversation, pointing out how silly this is.

However, within this conversation, a common misconception has arisen that could benefit from clarification, and that is the idea that mantle convection is the main driving force of lithospheric plate motions.  That's not entirely true either.  That model was initially assumed as true when plate tectonics was proposed, but has been discarded.  This model is still sometimes shown in introductory geology textbooks, and hence it still is propagated.  For example, in the text "The Changing Earth", 4th ed., by Monroe & Wicander, published by Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2006, Figure 1.9 explicitly shows mantle convection cells that are intimately related to lithospheric spreading centers and subduction zones.  The caption to the figure states "Earth's plates are thought to move as a result of underlying mantle convection cells in which warm material from deep within Earth rises toward the surface, cools, and then, upon losing heat, descends back into the interior.  The movement of these convection cells is thought to be the mechanism responsible for the movement of Earth's plates, as shown in this diagrammatic cross section."  This image below, from a web search (http://www.yorku.ca/esse/veo/earth/image/1-3-2.JPG) demonstrates this model, and is very similar to MW Fig. 1.9 (probably from an earlier edition of the textbook):

This isn't the only introductory text that makes this error, and it certainly isn't the only error found in many introductory textbooks.  It's still a good textbook - but this figure is wrong.  In fact, if you google "mantle convection", you'll see lots of images & sites that continue this error of directly linking mantle convection with plate motion.  

To correct these issues, however, let's take a look at an extended quote from "Earth Structure", 2nd ed., written by Van der Pluijm & Marshak (W.W. Norton, 2004), from section 14.10, pp. 364-365:

"The question of what drives the plates remains controversial to this day.  In the years immediately following the proposal of plate tectonics, many geoscientists tacitly accepted a convection-cell model, which stated that convection-driven flow in the mantle drives the plates.  In this model, plates were carried along the back of flowing asthenosphere, which was thought to circulate in simple elliptical (in cross section) paths; upwelling (upward flow) of hot asthenosphere presumably occurred at mid-ocean ridges, while down-welling (downward flow) of hot asthenosphere occurred at the margins of oceans or at subduction zones.  In this model, the flowing asthenosphere exerts basal drag, a shear stress, on the base of the plate, which is sufficient to move the plate.  This image of plate motion, however, was eventually discarded for, while it is clear that the mantle does convect, it is impossible to devise a global geometry of convection cells that can explian the observed geometry of plate boundaries that now exist on Earth.  Subsequent calculations showed that two other forces, ridge push and slab pull, play a major role in driving plates."

Van der Pluijm & Marshak then go on to describe ridge-push force & slab-pull force in more detail.  This chapter is a great starting point for anyone who is interested in learning more about plate driving forces, and there are a number of references given at the end of the chapter for further reading.  Notably, Marshak has also written an introductory geology textbook "Earth: Portrait of a Planet" where this is explained correctly, but I think this might be the only introductory textbook out there to get this right!

It is certainly true that without a flowing, convecting asthenosphere, you cannot have a subducting lithosphere.  Hence, mantle convection is intimately tied to plate tectonic motions.  But it is overly simplistic to state that mantle convection drives plate tectonics.  The two systems, mantle convection and lithospheric plate movement, are related and connected to one another, but they are not a simple, single system.  Plate tectonic motion is really a passive system, largely driven by gravitational forces acting on materials that become unstable due to their density.  Once a lithospheric plate begins to subduct, the density of the plate pulls the plate down, exerting a pulling force on the rest of the plate at the surface, much like a table cloth hanging off one one end of a table too far and the whole thing slides off.  The effects of slab-pull & ridge-push forces can be seen in the rates of plate motions.  For example, the Pacific plate is bounded by the East Pacific rise and other ocean ridges to the east, and by a number of subduction zones on the western side.  The Pacific plate is cruising along at a quick pace of ~9 cm/year, largely due to the added force of slab pull.  Conversely, the in the Atlantic where subduction zones are very minor, the spreading rate is less than 1/3 of that, at only ~2.5 cm/year.

I'm thankful for ... minerals?

So today is Thanksgiving Day, a national holiday for those of us in the U.S.; a day to set aside time for reflection about the things we are thankful for.  I think it's a great holiday.  Officially declared during the Civil War by the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, but it has deep roots in the settling of the Americas, and most of the time people think about pilgrims & native Americans on this day.

It is easy to be thankful for food.  Especially delicious food that's easy to enjoy when surrounded by family and friends.  That roasted turkey, mashed potatoes & gravy, sweet potato casserole, pecan pie, apple pie, and all the rest are going to put a smile on everyone's face; a few naps will be taken as well!

As a geoscientist, I think there is another dimension of thankfulness that often gets overlooked - the Earth itself. It's easy to be thankful for food at a meal - is it easy to be thankful for a tank of gasoline?  for copper wiring?  for concrete sidewalks?  for an aluminum can?  All of these things are part of our daily lives and make modern society possible.  Without them, life would be downright primitive. So I think I should be thankful for them, because they make life better.

Hold up, though - these things also bring about some serious problems.  In a typical copper mine, the copper makes up less than 1% of the rock, and the other 99% is worthless rock to be dug up and stuck in a huge pile somewhere, leaving an enormous scar in the surface that's never going to get filled.  Take a look at the Bingham Canyon Copper mine, one of the largest Cu mines on Earth:


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This hole in the ground is over 2 miles across, and is never going to be filled in because no one will ever want to spend the money to do it.  And gasoline?  Remember that incredible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago?  A huge disaster, destroying life and making a mess of the whole Gulf!  If you missed it, there were some great visualizations, such as this one and this one, that allow you to see how big the spill was compared to any other place on Earth.

So how can we be thankful for things that bring such disasters to our world?

Maybe that's exactly the point.  Maybe we get these messes because we never think about the natural resources we use, where they come from, the price that must be paid to get them, and the impact they have on our environment.  Maybe, just maybe, if we were more thankful for these things, instead of just ignoring them, our change in attitude might cause a change in consumption.  If we valued these things enough to be thankful for them, then maybe we'd start to see more responsibility, and less waste.

I said at the beginning that I think Thanksgiving is a great holiday.  And the reason I think that is because it is one that deals entirely with attitude.  It is impossible to celebrate Thanksgiving with a crummy attitude.  The need to take some time to reflect on the important things in life and be thankful shoves the crummy attitudes of cynicism out of my head.  There are major environmental problems that result from the abuse of Earth's resources, but maybe a more thankful attitude would help us change some behaviors from neglect to proper care.  So I'm thankful for the Li in my cell phone battery, the Cu wires in my house, and the Pt & Hg lightbulbs I use to light my home.  And hopefully I can turn my gratitude into more responsible use of these things, and less abuse on the planet they come from.

Sand Dunes at White Sands Natl. Monument

So apparently the geoblogosphere has gone "yeah sand dunes!!" in the last week (check them out here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here!).  I'll contribute a brief introduction to White Sands National Monument, located just west of Alamogordo, NM.  White Sands contains numerous sand dunes, and as you can see in the pics below, they are quite tall and excellent for jumping off of!  Geologically these are interesting because they aren't made of quartz, but rather are made of gypsum (CaSO4 * 2H2O).  Therefore, the sand is soft, not abrasive, and cool to the feet even when the sun has been beating down on it all summer long.  It is located in a restricted basin, and there is very little annual rainfall, which would serve to slowly dissolve the gypsum.  This location is at: 32° 49.225' N, 106° 16.404' W.  Take a look in google maps - there are hundreds of dunes of all shapes & sizes.  The area totals about 20 miles wide!  

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International Development & Geoscience

At last month's Geological Society of America meeting, there were a number of talks on the role that the geosciences can play in international development.  The presentations were fantastic and challenging, and I think you'll agree.

First off, the Darcy lecture was given this year by Stephen Silliman, a professor of hydrogeology at the University of Notre Dame University.  He spoke about the work they have been doing in Benin, west Africa, where they are working to obtain reliable, long term hydrologic data on the quality of the water.  He spoke of the conditions of the country, where many lack access to clean drinking water, and sewage is often not treated appropriately.  Consequently, many of the problems related to water quality are in fact caused by contamination of wells and streams by human and animal waste.  He spoke about the need to work with the local people in a long term relationship, where the local people come to an ownership of the changes that are needed.  But cultural norms are difficult to change.  I was deeply impressive with his passion to help the people of Benin; it was clear that he was not only interested in scientific data on water, but also he struck me as being very missional about helping these people by using his professional abilities.  It is wholly appropriate for Stephen to be selected as the 2011 Lecturer for the National Groundwater Association's Darcy Lecture Series.  In my opinion this reflects very well on the leadership who selected him for this prestigious appointment.

Additionally, there was an entire session on the subject that took place on Tuesday morning during the meeting.  The session was very well attended with about ~50 people in the audience on average.  I won't attempt to summarize all of the talks here, but the abstracts are all well worth reading.  Jeffrey Greenberg, presiding over the session, began with a discussion of the critical importance of geoscience in issues of resource development, economics, politics, natural disasters, sustainability, and even "the destiny of nations".  Paradoxically, however, he also stated that geoscientists appear to lag behind people in other disciplines in serving in these roles, and instead these roles are filled by engineers, social scientists, and biologists.  As I listened to the talks, some very common themes emerged: 1) professionals will only succeed through working with local people; 2) professionals will only succeed through long term relationships; 3) many of the obstacles are simply needing to properly deal with waste (both solid and wastewater); 4) people are working on these issues all over the world; 5) expertise in hydrogeology is necessary; and 6) behavioral change is difficult but absolutely necessary.  Fortunately, a new NGO has recently been developed, Hydrogeologists without Borders, to help centralize information & resources.  There were talks about Guatemala, Nigeria, Kosova, Dakar, Costa Rica, and Arabia.  One of the more fascinating talks was by James Clark, professor at Wheaton College, who described his work to create inexpensive geophysical equipment to be used for groundwater exploration.  I was amazed at how cheaply he was able to purchase the necessary parts and construct equipment for resistivity and seismic refraction measurements, for less than about $250 each.  He showed data comparing his equipment to more expensive (~$5000-20,000) equipment, and the results brought a smile to every face in the crowd.  He also wrote the software that can be run on an inexpensive laptop computer.  Imagine how many of these sets of geophysical equipment could be purchased & put to use in the developing world for only a few tens of thousands of dollars.  The potential here is staggering.  Another talk was given by a senior geology major in my department here at Olivet Nazarene University, Sam Smidt, who spoke about his work to test the ability of a small-scale version of a biosand filter to remove E. coli from water.  He gave a great presentation and I doubt anyone was able to tell that he's an undergrad!  Few undergrads give talks at GSA, so we're very proud of him and the work he did with my colleague Dr. Kevin Brewer.

The session proposal was written up last December by Jeffery Greenberg, my friend and colleague at Wheaton College, and first sponsored by the Affiliation of Christian Geologists.  As current President of the organization, I couldn't be more proud of Jeff's work to make this session happen.  I hope he'll go for it again this coming year, and that more geoscientists will get involved in presenting and attending.  International development is a place where the abilities of many geoscientists meet with the world's deep needs.