If you’re into paleontology…
…think about submitting to a new blog carnival called The Boneyard.
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Why is this lady so against conserving energy?
Click here to read a short interview on CNN.com with a woman named Trilby Lundberg. She is the publisher of the Lundberg Survey, a survey of United States gasoline prices quoted regularly by news outlets and others.
The beginning of the question-and-answer report has some interesting insight and remarks about the complexity behind what determines the actual price at the pump. And then she says a few things regarding the outlook for fuel costs in the near term future (next 5-10 years) and the role of alternative fuels.
This is all fine and good. There’s a few things I would quibble with and maybe disagree with, but no big whoop.
But then, the questioning turns to the notion of energy conservation. I’m just gonna clip the whole part here, as it is worth reading.
Q: As far as conservation, what are the trends you are seeing?
A: I’m hoping that consumers will see through the rhetoric about consuming less, demanding less, as faulty. It is not a given that consuming less will be good for our economy or for our personal freedom. It is not even established for our environment that we [should] deprive ourselves of gasoline for our personal mobility as well our commerce. And to suppose that it is good to do that, and pretend that we have consensus and put our heads together to deprive ourselves of this great product that makes the country go around, commercially and individually, I think is flawed. I’m hoping consumers and voters will see through that and be able to ignore some of the most extreme suggestions.
She then, of course, goes on a little diatribe about the great hoax of global warming. But, I don’t want to focus on that here. What really floors me is this attitude that conserving energy means depriving ourselves of it. This is so illogical and I just don’t understand it. Yes, I agree…it is a product that makes the country (and the world for that matter) go round. Shouldn’t that be reason #1 to conserve it?! Why are some people so anti-conservation? I simply do not get it. We can be a nation of economic prosperity and continued high quality of life AND be much more energy efficient. It’s not all or nothing….that’s the biggest bunch of malarkey.
Whatever happened to the idea of a “penny saved is a penny earned”? The generation of Americans who actually lived through the Great Depression and had to conserve are all but gone.
And then there’s this gem at the end.
…taking into account the many, many millions of people around the world that envy our way of life, it would seem more humanitarian to wish them the kind of plentiful petroleum products and vehicles … that we enjoy … to lift themselves out of [a] backward, poor way of life
Right.
Wake up to the 21st century, lady.
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Formation of the English Channel
If you are plugged in today, you’ve likely seen the report about a paper in this week’s Nature about a ice dam-bursting megaflood scouring event that is thought to have produced the English Channel. I simply don’t have the time at the moment to comment on this in any detail….so here’s a few blurbs from a New Scientist report.
Half a million years ago, Britain was connected to mainland Europe by a broad chalk ridge that spanned what we now call the Dover Strait (or the Pas de Calais in French). But somehow that ridge was destroyed, forever separating England and France.The cause was revealed by an ultrahigh-resolution sonar survey of a large chunk of the channel’s bedrock. It shows the Weald-Artois Ridge, as it is called, was breached and toppled by a monumental torrent that gushed from an overfilling glacial lake that the ridge had been damming on its northern side.
Not so long ago, I posted about the Channeled Scablands of the northwestern United States.
The Imperial team calculates that 1 million cubic metres of water per second flowed for several months to carve the seafloor valleys, some of which are up to 10 kilometres wide and 50 metres deep. The flow rate was 100 times the average of the Mississippi river today, and 1000 times that of the Rhine, Gupta says.
It turns out a study in 1985 hypothesized these features and inferred processes from some much lower resolution sonar data. Must be kind of cool to see your theory confirmed with higher resolution data like that.
The BBC has a good summary of the Nature paper too.
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Submitting manuscripts online
So, I submitted a paper the other day, which was all accomplished with the internets. It was through the Manuscript Central web service, which i’m sure many of you have used. Their service hosts some 1,700 books and journals, which seems fairly ubiquitous.
Anyway…my overall experience was pretty good. Online submission has improved by leaps and bounds in just the last couple of years. This service is pretty slick….it integrates your main text document and all your figures and tables into a single PDF that is ready for download by your peers for review. It would be nice to have that capability when I’m preparing drafts of papers for co-authors and such. Obviously, it’s not that difficult to prepare an integrated PDF these days, but still….to have one magical button that does it for you would provide more time for more important things.
But….I did have one problem. The figure upload feature tells you to paste your captions into a dialog box and they will automatically be associated with the figure and placed on a page preceding that figure in the final PDF. It didn’t work. So, I had to be that guy who emails the editors and tell them something went wrong and my submission is incomplete. I hate being that guy.
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Came across a new geoblogger
I came across a relatively new geology-focused blog called Growth Faults today. Not many posts up yet (it’s only a few weeks old) but already a couple of good ones (one on the blog’s namesake and another on dolomitization).
I’ve already added Growth Faults to my sidebar links and to GoogleReader… it’s nice to see our community growing. Welcome.
One FYI to the author in case you read this….I couldn’t leave a comment without a WordPress account. I have left comments on many other WordPress blogs, so i’m not sure what’s up with that.
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Americans moving to areas with greater seismic hazard
The lower map shows the population change from 1990 to 2000 for the lower 48 of the United States. The brown colors are areas of net loss and the purple areas of net gain. The upper map shows seismic hazards. Clearly, people are moving from the central United States, and area of low seismic hazard to other areas (especially in the Colorado Plateau and Basin and Range regions) that have higher seismic hazard. But why? More excitement in their life?
A great mapping website, called the National Atlas (nationalatlas.gov), allows you to make outrageous and spurious claims like this with very little effort. It’s great fun.
For example you could see if there’s a spatial correlation between mudpuppy distribution and number of aggravated assaults. Or, maybe the range of the Greater Bonneted Bat has a relationship with impact crater distribution!
Seriously though….this is pretty dang cool that the feds put this together. They have so many categories of information. And to be able to interactive show them on a map is just fantastic.
Here is just a sampling of what you can map:
- Agriculture
- crop type
- land usage
- livestock
- Biology
- amphibians (that’s what a mudpuppy is, apparently)
- bat ranges
- butterflies
- invasive species
- ecoregions
- Climate
- average precipitation
- tornadoes
- sea-surface temperature
- Environment
- superfund sites (that one’s a little scary)
- toxic release inventory
- water discharge permits
- GEOLOGY
- People
- crime
- unemployment
- population density
- median age
- energy consumption
- Transportation
- railways
- airports
- interstates
and so on….
Really an incredible resource. Have fun!
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Phytoplankton bloom in North Atlantic
All I really got goin’ on today is a pretty picture.
This is an image from a few weeks ago of the North Atlantic (note Iceland in upper right) showing fantastic swirling clouds of phytoplankton. To check out the original image and more information click on photo to go to the Earth Observatory website.
via Geology.com
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Another disappearing lake
Last month, news about the disappearance of a glacial lake in Chilean Patagonia spread around the media outlets and geoblogosphere. A lot of the discussion since has been focused on whether or not this event is indeed just the latest example of anthropogenic global warming.
This reminded me of a story of a disappearing lake that is without a doubt the result of human intervention. This is crazy…check it out. In 1980, Lake Peigneur in Louisiana catastrophically drained into the ground creating a swirling vortex that sucked barges and other boats into it.
The short version is: they drilled an oil well into an active salt mine. When the drill hole met the subsurface cavity….well, watch this History Channel footage (~6 min) below. They go into much more detail and have some incredible footage.
If the embedded link is broken, go here
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The final stretch
The end of my PhD journey seems to be racing towards me rather quickly. I have a very loose, informal, “theoretical” defense date of December. My committee thinks this is reasonable but when I look at my calendar, I start to get a little nervous about it happening. What I learned from doing a master’s, however, was that if you mark a date on a calendar months in advance the value comes in the motivation to make that date. Even if things get pushed back slightly, the idea is that if you hadn’t marked that date in the first place, then you wouldn’t have made as much progress. But….now that i’m already slightly waffling and rationalizing about making that date, can I say that the motivation is there? Ummm…..what?
Anyway, my particular program has, in the last 10 years or so, gone to a more “modular” dissertation. That is, instead of writing one, ridiculously long tome about a single project we have multiple projects that fit within a “theme”, for lack of a better word. There are perhaps some disadvantages to the modular style that one could think of, but I think the advantages far outweigh them. Firstly, the separate projects or sub-projects are summarized in chapters that are meant to be stand-alone papers. This has been valuable to me because then the papers are already in a format suitable for a journal. Why write a 500 page monstrosity nobody is gonna read anyway and then have to transform it into a journal manuscript later?
If you read this blog semi-regularly, you can probably guess what my “theme” is. All of my chapters deal with deep-marine sedimentary sytsems in one form or another. Some aspects deal with fundamental processes more, whereas others are utilizing attributes of the system (distribution, composition, timing, etc.) to address geologic questions of the specific region.
I’m writing this post because the first major paper of this work is about to be submitted (finally). I remember saying I wanted to submit this back in April! The paper went a couple rounds with co-authors and advisor and is now ready. Today, I have to do some of the remaining annoying little tasks (e.g., tracking down the volume number for that one pesky reference). It feels good to have this chunk (nearly) done. In terms of finishing the PhD and getting through the defense, the more of my chapters that are already submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, the better. Having all of your work submitted by defense date is not necessarily required here, but things go much, much smoother if they are. Realistically, I’ll have 2/3 of my work submitted by December with the remaining very close.
So, that calendar seems to be marked with bigger font and in bold now. It is no longer an “idea” or “something to shoot for”, but is transforming into a real day. A day that will be here a lot closer than I think.
As for my post-PhD plans….I will post about that another time. Several months of individual soul-searching combined with discussions with my girlfriend about what she wants to do next, where would we want to live (or definitely not live), and so on. As you know, it gets compli-ma-cated. That deserves its own post.
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A wildlife documentary right outside our window
Our apartment is on the 3rd floor of a corner building and we have two big, beautiful trees just outside our windows. In fact, the branches are so close they very nearly touch the windows when the wind blows hard enough. Last weekend we noticed (to be fair, our cat gets credit for first noticing) a hummingbird nest on one of these branches.
It’s kind of difficult to see in the photo above but there are two little hummingbirds in there. The nest itself is shaped like and about as big as a teacup. We aren’t sure how long this nest had been there, but once we saw it we watched the mother come back from time to time and feed her offspring.
The photo above is a close-up of the little guys waiting impatiently for mom to return with some eats. This was last weekend. They are now gone…over the course of the last two days they each went out on a limb (literally) and then eventually flew away.
I kind of miss them….so does our cat.
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Clastic Detritus 