As a field geologist, you sometimes have to hike through areas of no exposed rock to get to the good stuff. In Patagonia, like many places, most of the really good outcrops are along ridge lines or at the tops of hills/mountains. Today’s photo is from a hike my field partner and I did through these enchanting woods on our way up one of these mountains. We sat here and had some lunch and it was as comfortable and serene as it looks in this photo.

Happy Friday!

UPDATE [later the same day]: I totally forgot that I shot a quick video with my camera in these woods right after snapping some photos.

… a PhD is hard. It’s meant to be hard, not because inflicting pain is necessarily fun, nor because some scientists are ‘dementors’, and not because your PhD is expected to solve the mysteries of the universe. It’s hard because it is an apprenticeship in science: a frustrating, triumphant, exhausting, and ultimately Darwinian career that will require everything you can muster.

I think those words — frustrating, triumphant, and exhausting — are well chosen, but I would also add ‘rewarding’. And doing science after a PhD, regardless of the path of one’s career, is challenging. The endeavor of science is inherently challenging. This is what makes it awesome and useful.

The list of advice in Chris’ post has tons of practical stuff that I would’ve liked to have read when I started graduate school. Here’s one piece of advice that I think is very important:

Don’t expect every experiment to work, and don’t persecute yourself or others if your experiment fails. In short, figure out why, suck it up, and move forward. Nature does not reveal her secrets easily.

Very few research projects turn out exactly as they were conceived. Failures of various degrees of significance are part of the process. Finding out what doesn’t work is finding out something valuable! Over time, I’ve become more accustomed to sometimes stumbling my way through a problem. In some cases, it’s that stumbling that reveals something important. The key is to learn from the things that don’t work.

Discussions about doing a graduate degree in science inevitably lead to commentary on the ills, inequities, and absurdities of academia. And it’s healthy to continue to have that discussion, in an effort to hopefully improve things over time. The fact that I think a post like this is worthwhile information should not be confused with a blanket endorsement of the current state of academia. I simply think that having commentary out there about how things are, in addition to how things should be (or how screwed up things are), is valuable.

Lastly, there are petulant and petty people everywhere. There are nonsensical, even detrimental, processes and bureaucracy in all venues of research. Contrary to what some academics think, academia is not the only place where one has to run through a gauntlet of idiocy impeding your progress. I’ve worked for a mega-corporation and I can assure you it exists there, and I had a taste of doing research in government and, why yes, it’s there as well. Scientists in these various institutions might say ‘But where I am is the most ridiculous and the most broken!’. Okay, fine.

Again, pointing out reality isn’t an endorsement of it. If you’re a grad student, think about the battles you want to expend the effort and time fighting. Some may be important and worthy, others may not be.

The scientific objectives are explained in detail on this site, but, in short, the goal is to acquire a series of cores of deep-sea sediment that have been accumulating since as far back as the Late Cretaceous (~70 million years ago). The primary goal is to obtain a record of climatic and oceanographic conditions during the Paleogene (65-23 million years ago), including important climatic events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Deep-sea sediments can be treasure troves of information, containing microfossils from which ocean chemistry can be reconstructed over time.

Why target this particular area for this record of Earth history? The deep-sea sediments in this location aren’t the typical sediments that accumulate very slowly, known as pelagic oozes. While oozes can be great recorders of environmental conditions, they accumulate so slowly that shorter-duration episodes in Earth history aren’t captured as well. There are other areas of the deep sea, adjacent to continental margins, that accumulate sediment much faster. But, many of these submarine fan systems, fascinating and important themselves, are essentially too active and too dynamic.

Map and accompanying topographic/bathymetric profile showing general location of Exp 342 coring sites. Basemap created in GeoMapApp.org. Click on image to see larger version.

The deep-sea drift deposits that have accumulated on the submarine ridges offshore Newfoundland might be the perfect type of deposits to obtain a high-resolution record of these climatic events. Other deposits like them accumulated faster than typical deep-sea oozes and, thus, have a thicker interval of sediment for the same duration of time. (Drift deposits are also commonly referred to as contourites because the sediment is moved by currents that follow the contours of the continental slope.)

My job as a participant on this expedition, along with several other sedimentologists on board, is to describe the cores as they come on deck. The measurements and sampling for fossils and chemistry need to be placed within a description of the sediment itself — grain size, sedimentary structures, bed thickness, composition, and so on. The sediments that accumulate on the Earth’s surface aren’t perfect tape recorders of conditions and events. Although these deposits might be the best choice to go after this record, there will still very likely be some surprises related to dynamics of the deposition that could influence how the archive is used to interpret past climate. Most of the detailed investigation into the processes and dynamics of these deposits will be done after the cruise by a graduate student of mine as part of his master’s thesis.

I really have no idea how much I’ll be able to post during the cruise, I don’t have a good feel for how much down time there will be. The priority for me as a participating scientist is to do my job characterizing the cores and summarizing results into technical reports. I will try my best to write some posts, not only about the science as it happens, but about life on an extended marine expedition.

I’m so busy getting other things done before being away, I’m not sure if I’ll get another post up or not before boarding the JR. Stay tuned.

Here are some web resources if you want to follow the expedition:

• IODP Expedition 342 Scientific Prospectus — This document has all the scientific and technical information about the objectives of this expedition, including many maps and figures.
• JOIDES Resolution Blog — This blog, which is named after the vessel we’ll be living and working on, will be updated by Caitlin Scully throughout the expedition.
• Expedition 342 page on JOIDES Resolution website — This page will be updated with various news and drilling updates.
• OceanLeadership YouTube Channel — Expedition 342 is going to have a talented videographer on board to document the expedition.
• Twitter feeds — @TheJR is the main feed for the vessel, but also check out @SeafloorSci and @BoreholeGroup

I feel like I’m missing some sites in this list, I’ll make sure to update as we go.

During my last trip down to Chilean Patagonia we spent a day in nearby Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, which had experienced a devastating wildfire some weeks earlier. The fire burned more than 31,000 acres and is thought to have been started by a careless tourist.

By the time we went to the park the fire had been put out for several weeks, but the evidence was obvious. It was a surreal experience to walk around on a landscape that was very recently covered in a mix of low, dense (and sometimes prickly) vegetation and dense woods. With the exception of some charred roots, most of the ground cover bushes were completely gone. Many of the trees were still standing but were blackened and crisp, their leaves stripped.

The photo above is looking north toward the iconic Cuernos del Paine through what was a dense stand of trees. Here is a collection of photos from BBC of the wildfire itself.

I would like to define the pilgrimage as a single place, which is “geologically” unique,  relatively remote, and requires some difficulty to get to. If you have already done your geological pilgrimage, please share with us your experience. If you are still planning your pilgrimage, then let us know where your sacred geological spot is and why.

Perhaps this is cheating, but instead of a geographic place, I’ve chosen a ‘place’ in Earth history — the Late Cretaceous (oh, let’s say the middle of the Campanian stage, about 75 million years ago). Like many sedimentary geologists I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this 35 million year-long (100-65 Ma) epoch. Whether its related to a class project during grad school, reading about new studies, or doing their own research, most stratigraphers end up pondering the landscapes of the Late Cretaceous at some point.

North American paleogeography 75 million years ago (from Colorado Plateau Geosystems, http://cpgeosystems.com/nam.html)

Several years ago, while working on a master’s degree in Colorado, I spent a lot of time climbing around on sediments deposited during the Late Cretaceous that are now cropping out as dusty mesas and hogbacks in Utah and Colorado. The famous Book Cliffs outcrops in central Utah is one of the best places in the world to learn about and to debate the concepts of stratigraphy.

More recently, I’ve researched and published about sedimentary deposits in the far south of Chile, also deposited during the Late Cretaceous. We can use sedimentary rocks to reconstruct ancient environments — and we can do it pretty well — but there is obviously uncertainty in these reconstructions. With this pilgrimage I’d love to fly over some of my favorite Late Cretaceous landscapes in a helicopter, just so I could see what it was really like — to see all the wonderful detail and nuance that ends up simplified and generalized.

Why are there so many studies on outcrops of Cretaceous rocks in the stratigraphic literature? Why do sedimentary geologists focus so much on rocks from this time period? The simplest answer is because there is a lot of preserved sedimentary material from the Cretaceous. The diagram below, from Peters (2008) [PDF], reproduced from Ronov and others (1982), shows the global volume of preserved marine sediments (the solid line) through time. As you can see, the Cretaceous, denoted by the ‘K’ along the horizontal axis, is the big winner.

The Cretaceous was the most recent time when the continents were flooded by the global ocean. Take another look at the paleogeographic map above, note the shallow sea connecting the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. In general, marine environments are great places for deposited sediment to be preserved. Combine a place to put sediment with an ample supply (from eroding mountain belts nearby) and the result is a thick pile of strata. These strata up on the continental crust can be relatively well preserved and accessible as outcrops.

As the diagram indicates, there are older time periods that had more significant continental flooding (the dashed line) than the Cretaceous. However, because they are from an even more distant geologic past, many of these areas have been subjected to tectonic reorganization. The Cretaceous is recent enough such that these longer-term cycles of super-continent construction and breakup haven’t sliced, diced, cooked, recycled, or otherwise consumed the strata. In other words, several aspects of geology have conspired to produce one the best preserved periods of Earth history.

And it’s not just stratigraphers who love the Late Cretaceous — all that preserved sedimentary rock hosts the fossils that paleobiologists use to address questions about the evolution of life. You can’t have the fossils without the rocks. I wonder how much less we would know about dinosaurs if not for the level of preservation of Cretaceous strata.

Even if we can’t literally travel back in time to visit the Late Cretaceous, we can continue to learn more about it and improve our reconstructions of this unique and remote place in Earth history.

Mark Zoback, an earthquake expert at Stanford University, published a piece in EARTH Magazine yesterday (April 17, 2012) titled Managing the seismic risk posed by wastewater disposal. This article is a breath of fresh air. Just go read it now, it will only take a few minutes.

There has been quite a bit of kvetching the past few months regarding whether or not operations related to natural gas exploration and production, and specifically hydraulic fracturing (referred to as ‘fracking’), have caused earthquakes. There are numerous articles on the topic — many asking the question and others making proclamations.

Zoback’s article is certainly not the end-all-be-all on this issue, but it stands out for being rich in facts and technical details that are skillfully communicated. The bottom line is that these operations can and do induce seismicity. But, it’s not the hydraulic fracturing that’s doing it. Rather, it’s the injection of fluid into the subsurface:

[W]e have known for more than 40 years that earthquakes can be triggered by fluid injection. The first well-studied cases were earthquakes triggered by waste disposal at the Rocky Mountain arsenal near Denver, Colo., in the early 1960s, and by water injection at the Rangely oilfield in western Colorado in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Such quakes occur when increasing pore pressure at depth caused by fluid injection reduces the effective normal stress acting perpendicular to pre-existing faults. The effective normal stress on a fault can be thought of as a force that resists shear movement — much as how putting a weight on a box makes it more difficult to slide along the floor. Increasing pore pressure reduces the effective normal stress, allowing elastic energy already stored in brittle rock formations to be released in earthquakes. These earthquakes would someday have occurred anyway as a result of slowly accumulating forces in the earth resulting from natural geologic processes — injection just speeds up the process.

And it’s not just the injection of fluid into the subsurface through a well that can increase pore pressure enough to induce seismicity. Geologists and engineers have known for decades that the accumulation of large volumes of water at the surface, behind newly constructed dams, can also create earthquakes. (Here are the results of searching ‘induced seismicity reservoir’ on GoogleScholar just to give you a flavor of that literature.)

The important conclusion at this point is that fracking is not triggering seismicity:

The concern about triggered seismicity associated with shale gas development arises after hydraulic fracturing, when wastewater that flows back out of the wells is disposed of at dedicated injection wells.

Emphasis mine. So, some might say: ‘Injection, fracking, whatever … the point is that these activities are causing earthquakes!’. Yes, these activities can and do cause earthquakes. But details matter, and here’s why: If we want to establish/improve regulations for these operations in the name of public safety we need to understand the mechanism. We need to do the basic science to address the problem. (This is an issue in geothermal and CO2 projects as well.) And I don’t care if it’s advocacy for or against natural gas extraction, either loses credibility if specifics about the science are distorted, cherry-picked, or omitted. Details matter.

I realize there’s a bigger-picture debate about whether or not to extract natural gas at all. This is a good debate to have no doubt. But, let’s make sure the current state of knowledge and understanding informs that debate.

Please note that these slides were designed for a projected screen in a relatively small room; I did not take the time to modify the design to look good on small screens or mobile devices. I also did not take the time to add additional text/annotation related to what I said during the presentation.

If you’ve ever been to Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia you’ve probably seen the curious white ‘bathtub ring’ of rock rimming Lago Sarmiento. These rocks are made of calcium carbonate (limestone) that formed as a result of microbial activity. Such deposits, called microbialites (or stromatolites, thrombolites, etc. depending on their character), develop when a microbial community on the bottom of a body of water traps and binds detrital sediment, some of which becomes the nucleus for sediment that precipitates out of solution. Over time, the precipitated carbonate and trapped sediment grow into a complex of layered mats or, in this case, bulbous ‘lumps’.

The microbialites that you can see exposed around the edge of the lake are fossils, they were formed when the lake level was higher several thousand years ago. There is still microbial activity in the lake at present forming similar features on the lake bottom several meters below the water surface. Modern microbialites such as these at Lago Sarmiento are important analogs for better understanding early Earth history and for addressing questions about life in general.

There is, obviously, a lot more to know about the Lago Sarmiento microbialites. If you want to learn more about the chemistry, biology, and history of these features, check out this paper from the journal Paleogeography, Paleoclimatolgy, Paleoecology.

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of students that are doing research, whether they are undergraduate or graduate, utter these words. I can’t recall with absolute certainty, but I seem to remember saying this phrase myself several years ago during my master’s thesis work.

A few years ago the University of California Museum of Paleontology and its collaborators developed a fantastic flowchart simply called Understanding Science. Compare this updated diagram of the scientific method (at right) with the traditional version I learned in grade school (at left).

The key difference, of course, is the iterative nature of the diagram at the right. Anyone who has been involved in doing science knows that it almost never happens in the straightforward linear way depicted in the classic diagram. A researcher (or team of researchers) will constantly circle back to the motivating questions as they acquire information from the literature, conduct experiments/collect field data, and think about how their results fit into the bigger picture.

Writing is a key part of this iterative process. Assuming you can simply ‘write it up’ at the very end may end up being a disastrous assumption. The act of writing is doing science. When you have to formalize the ideas into words it forces you to really think about what you’re doing. If you wait until the end to attempt to articulate this you may find that your analysis and data could be flawed.

Most research projects involve a document in the beginning stages — a proposal of some kind, for funding and/or required as part of the degree program. This is great, but don’t leave it at that. Force yourself to put your research into words during the process, not just at the beginning and at the end. The best-case scenario is that these words will fold right into the final document, thus saving you time and effort at the end. The more typical scenario, however, is that the act of writing during the entire process leads to breakthroughs and epiphanies you might not have had otherwise. There may be milestones along the way that encourage writing — an abstract for a conference, an annual review required by the department, or from your adviser. These are fantastic motivators to get some words down on paper, but take the initiative and write without these more formal deadlines.

When you get a draft back from your adviser or collaborator that appears ‘ripped to shreds’ it’s because they are using your words to do science. It’s part of the process. It’s not simply editing, this process is as important as designing an experiment or designing a field sampling campaign. The document becomes a living entity in a way — constantly changing and giving birth to offspring documents through ‘Save As.’ (You should keep all these iterations, by the way, they may come in handy later on.)

So, my advice — and this comes from learning the hard way — is to write early and often because writing is doing science.

-

Images: Understanding Science flowchart from the University of California Museum of Paleontology