As several of you have already guessed, I’ve been assimilated into the ScienceBorg.
Please update your bookmarks, links and feed subscriptions! My new URL is http://scienceblogs.com/greengabbro, and the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/GreenGabbro.
Greengabbro.net isn’t going anywhere - I like having it as a repository for personal projects, and besides, I just renewed the domain for 2 more years. I’ll keep blogging here, too, whenever inspiration strikes for a post that wouldn’t be of interest to the audience at ScienceBlogs - it won’t be often, but it’ll be more often than “never”. So if you’re interested in my intense hatred of particular food products or updates to my WordPress plugins, by all means keep checking in here now and then.
If you’re interested in my thoughts on geology, the culture of science, or pie, though, you’ll need to follow me on over to ScienceBlogs. See y’all there!
I held a small pie potluck today, in honor of National Pie Day. Everyone who brought a pie, brought a blueberry pie, so it was three blueberries against my lone durian. The durian, of course, lost by a landslide.
Below the fold: I’ve been tagged! This meme is about writing. Also, it only requires you to list three things, which I think is probably the maximum number of things that should be in a meme. Otherwise it’s almost as much work as writing something original.
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Happy National Pie Day, and welcome to the fifth edition of the Accretionary Wedge, the Internet’s premier blog carnival for the earth sciences! First, I have some news for you. Make sure you’re sitting down before you read this:
- Diamonds are not made from coal -
With either [melt catalyst belt or chemical vapor deposition], nitrogen from organic compounds in the coal would impart a yellow-green color in the diamond due to the absorption of the single N defect.
I assume this also holds for the Superman method.
- Axial tilt is the reason for the season.
- Santa Claus is, at best, a metaphor.
- Dinosaurs aren’t dead -
In fact there are some rather bewildered-looking avian dinosaurs outside my kitchen window wondering how Bubba the Fat Squirrel managed to steal the fat balls from 1.5m high up on our dispenser.
- Earth’s mantle isn’t molten. No, really, it isn’t. Mantle flow doesn’t drive plate tectonics, either. But the mantle is 3D. In fact, most things are 3D… except, of course, gorgeous illustrations by William Smith.
- Small earthquakes don’t do anything to prevent bigger earthquakes. You see, each magnitude 4 earthquake releases about 30 times as much energy as a magnitude 3… but an odd fact of seismology is that the ratio of M3:M4 earthquakes is constant over time, at about 10:1. This leaves us with a factor of 20 lurking ominously in the shadows.
- California is not going to fall into the sea. No, really, it isn’t.
- The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is neither relevant nor funny at the macro scale.
- Crustal folding doesn’t always mean a thickened crust - though the crust in that counterexample can still be fairly described as “thickening”.
- Lava is not a swimming pool. Oh, and the mantle isn’t liquid.
- The mantle is the most annoyingly least-understood part of this planet.
In other news, Mel discusses a test designed to expose students’ geological misconceptions - and why it might not always work. Saxifraga talks about what glaciers actually do - “The moraine five kilometers in front of the modern glacier margin is not a sad sign of the ice retreat, but a sign of a not climate related natural phenomenon called glacier surge and the retreat from the Little Ice Age moraine is partly an adaptation to warming over the past 100 years.”
In honor of National Pie Day, Callan Bentley shares his favorite baked-goods teaching analogies - but he hasn’t thought of any pielike concepts in geology, maybe you can help? Brian objects to the “layer cake” analogy, suggesting that perhaps we should use lentils instead. Lentils? I guess I’ve seen recipes for lentil shepherd’s pie…
Finally, Lab Lemming has a delicious rocky planet pie chart, and by “delicious” I mean “my dentist told me only to eat gas giant pie charts”.
The title says it all, really: remember to submit your posts for the next edition of the Accretionary Wedge carnival! The theme is geologic misconceptions; also, pie.
Submit posts by leaving a comment here, or email me at criminy.crickets [at] gmail.
There are a number of things a gabbro can become when it metamorphoses. Among them:
- Adding water makes serpentinite plus some other junk
- Many major metamorphic facies are conveniently named after rocks formed by sending a chunk of mafic material down to particular temperatures and pressures:
- amphibolite
- greenschist
- blueschist
- granulite
- eclogite
But I don’t know that any of these things make particularly good puns. Hmm.
Irrigated land stays cooler than native desert terrain. In the late afternoon, when this temperature difference is largest, the hot air above the desert wants to rise, and cool air from the irrigation district flows outwards along the ground to replace it. When the cool, moist air from the irrigation district hits the hot desert, it rises, and eventually cools enough that its load of farm fresh water vapor condenses into the clouds seen outlining the fields in this satellite image. Furthermore, since the air near the ground in the irrigation district is leaving, a downdraft is created to replace it. This downdraft suppresses the formation of clouds immediately above the farms.
Presto climatto, sunny weather on the farm, with just enough nice puffy cumulus clouds in the sky to find animals in.
Image source: MODIS/AQUA, published as Figure 2 of Kawase, H., T. Yoshikane, M. Hara, F. Kimura, T. Sato, and S. Ohsawa (2008), Impact of extensive irrigation on the formation of cumulus clouds, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L01806, doi:10.1029/2007GL032435. Kawase et al. worked out a numerical model which reproduces this effect. Go them.
As a kid, I was fascinated by the hardware store. It had aisles and aisles full of shiny, mysterious gadgets. It also had a distinctive smell, composed primarily of grease, burnt metal, and dirty old linoleum. I hadn’t felt that particular sense of wonder at a poorly-understood sense of order and purpose and shiny in many years… and then I tried this vegetable dip. It tastes exactly like the floor of a hardware store smells.
Sometimes I just need to blog about a product to remind myself never, ever to buy it again.
Below the fold: O iTunes Oracle, will I ever forget this warning and waste another dollar on shitty generic vegetable dip?
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So 2008 is the International Year of Planet Earth (why does nobody tell me these things?). In honor of the project, this week’s issue of Nature has a free special supplement section, with some very accessible overviews of currently trendy topics. I recommend that y’all use your copious spare time to read them.
In case you’re wondering, the currently trendy subfields are climate, climate, seismology, climate, mineral physics, climate, planetary science, climate, climate climate baked beans and climate, geomorphology, climate, and climate - sorry, everyone else!
The RSS reader favored by the Machead elite is now free (as in beer). So, while I was enjoying Mr. McMoots’s exceptionally craptastic home Internets connection - the kind where you would really benefit from the ability to go to a coffeeshop, download everything, and then read it offline - I thought maybe I’d stray from my old companion Bloglines, just for kicks.
NetNewsWire is pretty slick, but it lacks one killer feature: Email subscriptions. A magic button that lets you fabricate an email address, and pretend that anything sent to it is just another blog entry. Why does this matter? The American Geophysical Union is apparently still running on FORTRAN - their journals are the only ones I read that don’t offer RSS feeds for new issues*.
Dear AGU: What is wrong with you people? You are missing out on the Internet 2.0 social blog bubble pie! Or whatever it is. Also, I like getting journal updates mixed in with my blog habit.
Fortunately, there’s Mailbucket. I just made some publicly accessible RSS feeds which, Internet volente, will provide update notifications for the following journals (links will take you right to the XML files):
Update: Mailbucket is… suboptimal. It truncates long messages (goodbye, full contents to GRL!), doesn’t convert http:// addresses to hyperlinks, and there’s something funny about the line breaks. Bah, humbug.
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Venice is sinking. It’s sinking due to tectonic forces, being on the wrong side of the plate flexure that’s lifting the Alps. It’s sinking because in the 16th century they diverted all the rivers around in an effort to avoid floods, thereby depriving the lagoon of the influx of fresh silt to which it had been accustomed. It’s sinking because that’s just what happens when you put a bunch of heavy city on top of soft sediment. It used to be sinking because people were pumping water from the aquifers beneath it, but that mostly stopped in the 70s. This has caused all the problems you might expect when an entire city sinks into the freaking ocean.
A group at the University of Padua is working on a scheme that could, if successful, raise the entire city by 25-30cm in about 10 years. The idea is to do the opposite of what mid-20th century industry and agriculture did to the city, and pump water into an aquifer underlying the city. They’ve just published their plans for a pilot project in Water Resources Research*.
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