tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32601706083178875972024-02-08T03:01:47.998+01:00The Musings of a Life-Long ScholarA Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.comBlogger234125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-5677543112608336952017-10-24T12:42:00.001+02:002017-10-24T12:42:59.881+02:00A New DirectionThis blog has been rather neglected in recent years, but I am now motivated to wake it back up. I have applied for, and been accepted to, a new PhD program. My first PhD was in geology, studying the Cambrian Metamorphic History of Tasmania. My new field will be geo-archaeology, studying Viking Age steatite (soapstone) vessels. I will be analyzing examples of these objects from grave finds which display a variety of levels of status, with the hope of answering these questions:<br />
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<ol>
<li>Can I determine from the composition of the stone used for the vessels where the stone originally came from? </li>
<li>Did all the vessels in each region come from the same source, or more than one source? </li>
<li>Did people of different status get their steatite vessels from the same sources or from different ones?</li>
</ol>
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My enrollment will officially start in January, but I am so excited to be undertaking this project that I have already begun some preliminary steps (including waking this blog back up). If anyone thinks this project sounds cool and would like to know more about Viking Age soapstone, I recommend the book, <a href="https://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/16580" target="_blank">Soapstone in the North. Quarries, Products and People 7000 BC - AD 1700</a>, which just came out this year, as a wonderful source for what is already known on the topic.<br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-43909901978136632302014-12-02T11:02:00.004+01:002014-12-02T11:02:52.772+01:00what is a femtosecond, anyway?I have started a new job which will involve running a Laser-ablation ICP-MS. As a result I have been doing a fair bit of reading on the subject, and, in the process learning (and re-learning) a fair bit of stuff. Today’s reading (Li et al. 2013*) included a sentence that said “Compared to nanosecond-laser ablation systems, the femtosecond-laser ablation systems provide significantly improved analytical performance…” (and it went on to list what some of those improvements were. However, it was the first half of the sentence that caused me to come to a full stop and consult the internet for help—I didn’t have any idea what “femtosecond” means. Clearly it is a unit of time, but how big is it, and is it bigger or smaller than a nanosecond?<br />
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Luckily, these days the answer is easy to obtain, checking any list of SI units and their prefixes will reveal that femtoseconds are much shorter than nanoseconds (and therefore faster is better when it comes to analytical performance of laser-ablation ICP-MS systems). The sequence of gradually smaller and smaller divisions in the SI system is: deci, centi, mili, micro, nano, pico, femto, atto, zepto, and yocto. While I have probably seen this list many times since I was introduced to the SI system as a child, prior to today only the first five were familiar to me. I already knew that there were 10 centimetres in every decimetre, and 10 millimetres in every centimetre. I had memorized the fact that there are 1000 micrometres in a millimetre when first I started doing petrology, since it is fairly common to measure minerals in thin sections using micrometers.<br />
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However, while I knew the word “nano” meant “even smaller than micro”, that was as much as I knew—I hadn’t bothered to look up that it meant 10<sup>-9</sup>, which means that there are 1000 of them in every micrometer. The even smaller units I didn’t know at all. Femto is not just a little smaller than nano, it is two steps down the scale smaller: 10<sup>-15</sup> means that there are 1,000,000 femtometers in a nanometer. Or, if we switch back to the seconds that appeared in the sentence that triggered this diversion: <br />
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One nanosecond is to one second as one second is to 31.710 years.<br />
One femtosecond is to a second as a second is to about 31.7 million years.<br />
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So it isn’t just faster, it is really, really, really lots faster. No wonder one gets different results with femtosecond-laser ablation than one does with nanosecond-laser ablation.<br />
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<small>*Li XC, Fan HR, Santosh M, Hu FF, Yang KF, Lan TG (2013) Hydrothermal alteration associated with Mesozoic granite-hosted gold mineralization at the Sanshandao deposit, Jiaodong Gold Province, China. Ore Geology Reviews 53:403-421</small><br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-2861589811682090182013-12-28T23:53:00.003+01:002013-12-28T23:53:59.965+01:00vectors!Back when I first started my current research project one of the goals my boss mentioned was to see if we could determine "vectors of hydrothermal transport", or "what were the paths the hot water took as it dissolved some rock components and deposited others?". As of today, more than two years after starting this project, I finally have an answer for that for one of the ingredients in my rocks. Why did it take so long to get here?<br />
<br />
Well, to start with, the data set the mine gave me is rather large, and the information within it was entered into the data base at a variety of different times, and the method in which the mine recorded the position of the drill holes changed at some point, so it took months to get the data "cleaned up" to the point that I could get all of the sample locations plotting in the correct space in 3D.<br />
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Then it was necessary to use "immobile element ratios" to determine what rock type each sample is. Why? Because in an area where lots of hot water flowed through the rocks picking up some elements and carrying them away while depositing others none of the rock has the same chemical composition as when it formed. However, there are certain elements that tend to stay put in the rocks, no matter how much hot water flows through it. These are called "immobile elements". Assuming that we are correct about them neither being taken away nor added to the rocks then the ratio between them won't change. However, the actual percentage of the rock that is made up of the immobile elements changes greatly. Why? Because when the other elements are dissolved and carried off that leaves a higher percentage of the “immobile elements” in the rock than it started with (but there is less rock in total). Likewise, when other elements are deposited into the rock it becomes diluted, and there is a lower percentage of the “immobile elements” left (and there is more rock than there was to begin with). In reality, both of these processes are happening at once, sometimes a bit more of one, sometimes a bit more of the other, but either way, the end result is a rock that, at first glance, looks nothing like the original rock. <br />
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However, as I mentioned above the ratio between the “immobile elements” doesn’t change. Therefore, all the rocks of the same type should plot along a straight line in a graph which has one immobile element on one axis, and another on the other. This fact is used to recognize the various rock types in the area.<br />
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Once all of the samples (more than 3,000 in my case) have been sorted into their various rock types the next step is to decide which sample within each rock type is the “least altered” sample—which one has a chemical composition that is closest to what the rock must have been before the hot water started circulating through the area?<br />
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From there, assuming that the “least altered” samples really are pretty much the same as they were to being with, it is a reasonably straightforward calculation to determine how each of the samples has changed with respect to their least altered samples. Once this has been done for every sample one has a table showing the amount of each element that was gained or lost within each sample.<br />
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This information is then taken into <a href="http://www.leapfrog3d.com/" target="_blank">the 3D modelling program</a> I am using, which looks at the location of each sample, and for a given element it can then look at how much of that element each sample gained or lost, and then it goes a step further and makes an educated guess as to how the areas between the samples must have also changed, assuming a regular pattern.<br />
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I have been at this stage for a while now, and have created lovely figures showing which areas had the greatest gain in a given element, which adjacent areas had slightly less gain, which areas had no change, which areas had a little loss of that element, which areas had a greater loss, and so on.<br />
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But what I didn’t have was the “vectors”—the nice little arrows one can draw to say that the highs are here, and the lows are there, and this is the path from here to there. Today, at long last, I discovered a way to get that using the 3D drawing capabilities within the program. “All” one has to do is first rotate the full 3D models around on the screen, setting the various layers to various states of transparency, until one is satisfied one knows where one wants to draw the line. <br />
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Then add a “plane” to the screen that goes through the area one will want to draw the line. If it happened to appear in the correct spot in the first place, rejoice. However, it is more likely that it will need adjusting. There are several options for this—one can grab one of the “handles” provided by the program, and attempt to drag the plane up, down, left, or right, until it sits where one wants it to sit (don’t forget to rotate the image on the screen and look at it from multiple directions to be certain it really is where you think it is!). This is even harder to do than it sounds. Another option is to turn off the plane and try again from the beginning. The third option is to look at the numerical coordinates for the plane and edit them. This one can be the best option. If you happen to have a sample located near where you want the center of the plane then you can click on the sample to determine its X, Y, and Z coordinates, then type those into the location of the plane. Once it is centered where you want it you can then change the dip and the dip azimuth until it is oriented correctly. <br />
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Once you are happy with the location of the plane then add the “slicer” to the screen, and edit the coordinates of the slicer until it is in the exact same position as the plane. Then you can rotate the screen until you are looking at the flat of the plane (and slicer). At that point it is possible to add a “poly line”, drawing it from the area with the greatest loss in that element to the area of the greatest gain in that element (note: it helps if you have first set the 3D model to have the front half removed by the slicer—that way when you look at the plane of the slicer what you are seeing is the concentric shells of the model, so that you can draw that line). Such poly lines automatically appear in the plane of the slicer, which is why those set-up steps were necessary. <br />
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Rotate the screen, did you get the line where you wanted it? Yup! Great. Go on to the next fault block and repeat the process from the beginning. Tedious? Yah. Cool to be able to add lines in 3D? Absolutely!<br />
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One more goal achieved, and the clock is ticking—the project officially ends with the end of this year…<br />
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<br />A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-58721825660370843772013-12-23T09:54:00.000+01:002013-12-23T09:54:03.989+01:00plants: cover or clue?I haven’t played along with the Accretionary Wedge game in quite a while, but when I saw this month’s topic <a href="http://plantsandrocks.blogspot.se/2013/12/berry-go-round-meets-accretionary-wedge.html" target="_blank">“rocks and plants” </a>memories of my undergraduate field lessons sprang into my mind at once, so I knew it was time to share.<br />
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There are times in every geologist’s life where we start to resent the “cover” that plants and soil represent—when important contacts are obscured. When there are no rocks to be seen for many miles around. On the other hand, sometimes plants are a useful clue. I remember when I was an undergraduate student on a field trip our teacher taught us to recognize his favourite plant, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspidotis_densa" target="_blank">Aspidotis densa</a>, a fern which likes magnesium in its diet, and so tends to grow on serpentine rich soils. He worked in southern Oregon (and northern California), an area which often has serpentine located within fault zones. In fact he said that many geologists he knows working in that area are inclined to put a fault on their map when doing field work if the only clue they see is a single outcrop of serpentine. By extension, in areas with heavy vegetation and no rock outcrop whatsoever, if they see aspidotis densa they make a note of it, because it could mean there is serpentine present, and therefore this could be a fault zone, and they look for other clues (is there a spring that comes to the surface nearby also?).<br />
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It has been many years since I was an undergrad, I haven’t done mapping in that part of the world for a very long time, yet I had never forgotten the name of that plant, and, because I learned about it when I was young and impressionable, I always remember to ask local geologists when I come to a new area if there are any important local plants I ought to be able to recognize because they only grow on a specific soil type, and thus give clues to the geology they cover.<br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-20052512137513568622013-10-08T08:00:00.001+02:002013-10-08T08:00:30.456+02:00I think I have a new favourite rock type I spent most of last week at the Metamorphic Geology Field Symposium in Halland, SW Sweden, and can enthusiastically say that this was the best field trip/short course/conference I have ever attended. The outcrops were stunning, the lectures fascinating, and the discussions engaging. All in all I am very, very inspired to pursue research in metamorphic geology once again. The project I have been working on for the better part of the past two years is tangentially related to metamorphic petrology (the rocks have undergone metamorphism, but that is not terribly relevant to the project goals), and it has been interesting, but from here on out I would like to have my research even more closely aligned with my metamorphic interests. But that is not what I am here to talk to you about.<br />
Kyanite eclogite! There is a place in the south west corner of Sweden where there are lenses and layers of kyanite-bearing eclogite within a deformation zone. The zone is, specifically, the Gällared Zone, which, they tell me, is the northeastern most part of the Ullared Deformation zone as defined by <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/11035899709546457#.UlLhClBkOnw" target="_blank">Möller et al (1997)</a>.<br />
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Due to the deformation in this area some of the eclogite has been transformed into high temperature mylonitc gneiss, but there are still a number of areas where the eclogite itself has survived. Within these areas are veins where the kyanite is so abundant that instead of being a green-red normal eclogite the rock is a striking blue-red combination that is so beautiful I thought it worth taking the time to put my fingers to keyboard and do some bloging for the first time in months.<br />
The field guide for the trip tells me that the presence of kyanite in rocks that have experienced eclogite facies metamorphism indicates that the pressures would have been greater than 15 kbar at a temperature of 700 C, and the paper by <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1525-1314.1998.00160.x/abstract" target="_blank">Möller (1998)</a> contains a great deal more information about the composition of the various minerals in these rocks and what those compositions mean in terms of the temperature and pressure at which they formed.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">REFERENCES:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Möller , C., Andersson, J., Söderlund, U., and Johansson, L., 1997: A Sveconorwgian deformation zone (system?) within the Eastern Segment, Sveconorwegian orogen of sw Sweden – a first report. GFF 119, 73-78. DOI: 10.1080/11035899709546457 </span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Möller C (1998) Decompressed eclogites in the Sveconorwegian (-Grenvillian) orogen of SW Sweden: petrology and tectonic implications. Journal of Metamorphic Geology 16 (5):641-656</span><br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-31001813505807063982013-02-26T17:01:00.001+01:002013-02-26T17:01:36.485+01:00luckily, my geo-injuries have been minor<br />
When I first saw the call for <a href="http://vatul.net/blog/index.php/7035" target="_blank">Accretionary Wedge 55</a> I couldn't think of any injuries I had gotten in the field, and closed the tab on my browser and thought nothing more of it. However, today, reading some other reports of minor injuries, I suddenly remember a rock-related owie.<br />
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I was an undergraduate geology student, living in southern Oregon. My boyfriend at the time decided that since I liked rocks and was new to that part of the country he should take me on an adventure to the Lava Beds National Monument to do some caving in the lava tubes there. As far as dates to take geologists go, this was a very good idea. <br />
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So there we were, wandering through a lava cave, the only light coming from my headlamp and his flashlight. He scampered up a small pile of lose rocks, each perhaps 10 to 20 cm in diameter, and I started to follow. However, in so doing I discovered that the density of vesicular chunks of lava is very different from the more solid rocks I had encountered elsewhere, and as a result they rocks shifted under my feet in a very unexpected manner. I lost my balance and fell forward, catching myself on my hands.<br />
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In the process the little finger of my left hand got caught between two rocks. When I called out, more in surprise than pain at that point, my boyfriend returned to my side, asked to look at my hand to see if it was ok, and, seeing that my little fingernail had split lengthwise, and that the outer portion was pointing off at a wrong angle, decided that the time to fix it was before I noticed that it hurt, so he grabbed my hand and pushed the nail back where it was meant to be. That got me to exclaim in pain!<br />
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That pretty much cut short the adventure part of the day—instead of exploring further we went back to the visitor center, cleaned the wound and got it bandaged up. Thanks to his prompt re-alignment of my finger nail the wound healed cleanly, and I never lost any nail, though it had a bit of a seam running the length of it for a few weeks.<br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-49292166827697862532013-02-18T15:59:00.001+01:002013-02-18T17:13:59.087+01:00Book Review: Metasomatism and the Chemical Transformation of Rock<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Last April I heard about a soon to be released textbook
that sounded very interesting and useful to my current research project</span>: <a href="http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-28394-9/page/1" target="_blank">Metasomatism and the Chemical Transformation of Rock, edited by Daniel E. Harlov and Håkon Austreheim</a> (published by Springer). I checked out their web page, and saw that it would be possible to obtain a copy for review, so I filled in the form and sent it in. In September I received an email letting me know how to access my copy on line, and I have been happily reading my way through the book (in between my other duties) ever since. Now that I have (mostly) completed the reading, it is time to sit down and type up the review.<br />
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First of all, I am pleased to note that sometime between when last I read a textbook and picking up this one the fashions in how they are organized seems to have changed—this book starts with a chapter that summarizes what can be found in all of the subsequent chapters. I think I like this new trend, since it makes it easier for a busy person to decide which chapters they actually need to read based on what is and is not relevant to their own research.<br />
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The introductory chapter also provides a concise, clear, definition of metasomatism and an explanation of how it is both related to and different from metamorphism. Metamorphism refers to the changes in rocks due to changes in physical conditions (primarily heat and pressure) which may or may not involve a change in composition of the rock. This is a subject I am well versed in, having done metamorphic research in one form or another for more than seven years now. Metasomatism, on the other hand, refers to changes in the composition rock due to interactions with an aqueous fluid, which picks up some elements and deposits others. This is clearly related to metamorphism, but while they overlap, they are not the same. It is also the major process affecting the rocks in my current research area, which is why I was so happy to see the book come out just now.<br />
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For the most part I have been
very happy with this book—it takes a variety of different threads and ties them
together in an easy to understand package.
Indeed, I have so enjoyed some of the discussions that I have taken
longer to read the full book than I might otherwise have, since I stopped so
often to look up and read references cited—something I don’t recall ever doing
when I was an undergraduate student reading textbooks because they were
required for a class. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The list of chapter authors includes names that will be familiar to anyone who has been reading papers that address aspects of metasomatism (see above link for the table of contents). My personal favourite chapters were the ones on thermodynamic modelling, the effects of metasomatism on their host rocks, and on geochronology. I found the one on thermodynamic modelling fascinating since I am already familiar with doing that for metamorphic rocks, and it was interesting to read about what needs to be considered when one assumes that the bulk rock composition DID change, as it does with metasomatism, but as it does not (necessarily) do with metamorphism. The chapter on effects is particularly useful for me because this is information I need for my current research, and I enjoyed the geochronology one because I did a fair bit of geochronology for metamorphic rocks for my PhD research, and it is interesting to see how one approaches it differently for metasomatic environments. <br />
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I did notice some minor issues with the editing on a grammatical level, which surprised me, since I would have assumed that a major publisher would have good editors on staff whose job it is to prevent such things. They were just little things that caught my eye and grated a bit on my nerves as being awkward and clunky (I think that the phrase "…presence or not of fluids" should have been written "…presence or absence of fluids”). However, such details do not actually detract from the content, which I am finding to be very useful.<br />
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I am also pleased to pass on the
news that the authors of this book have recently presented a short course at
the 2012 Goldschmidt conference. They
have shared the <a href="http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/geochemistry/metasomatism?SGWID=0-1739613-0-0-0" target="_blank">pdfs of their presentations for this course</a> on line. I would have loved to have attended the
workshop, but since I wasn’t able to make it to the conference I am delighted
that they have this handout available—it appears to compliment the book very
well.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-74798567408027004712013-02-15T08:47:00.000+01:002013-02-15T08:47:02.869+01:00Three broad roads a geologist might travel during their career<br />
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There are several different paths a geologic career might take: academia, exploration, or environmental/risk. Which one is best for you will depend on your personality type. <br />
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A geologist in academia is usually someone who studies rocks to better understand the information recorded in them—how and why did they achieve their present composition and/or configuration? They start with what they know: the rock is located here and looks like this, and extrapolate from clues within the rock to determine how it got there, and why, and when, and what happened to it along the way.<br />
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An exploration geologist, on the other hand, is looking for something (often oil or mineral resources). They don’t know where their commodity is located, so they study locations where similar such resources have already been found to look for patterns to the rock structure and/or composition that they may be able to recognize elsewhere and so find what they seek in a new location.<br />
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The third category of geologists the environmental sector and/or risk management. Their job is to understand the dangers which are present in our world, and look for ways to prevent those dangers from becoming problems. They start with the facts that are known (e.g. the presence of contaminants in the ground water at point A, zones of weakness in rock that could lead to landslides, or the location of an active fault or volcano) and play “what if” games to determine how much (or what manner of) danger these present to the people in those areas.<br />
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So, which are you? Are you more interested in asking question of “how/why/when”? Do you want to know “where”, or are you more concerned with “what if/how can I help”?<br />
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For myself I am pleased to be in the academic track—I want to better understand the world around me. I am not interested in playing games of hide and seek—I don’t even care to go shopping because I don’t enjoy trying to figure out where to find something I need is located. Often the stores don’t even carry what I want and I waste valuable time looking for it, a parallel which is probably all too familiar to exploration geologists—not every search they undertake leads them to a discovery. However, I suspect for those who do enjoy a good search there is an extra reward in terms of satisfaction when their work does lead them to what they seek. <br />
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I am also far more interested in understanding how the rocks got to where they are now than I am in understanding what dangers they present to humans. While I am very aware that it is vital that someone is working to keep contaminants out of ground water, or tracking them once they are there so that no one is using the bad water, I don’t want it to be me. While I am grateful that I know enough not to build my house right on top of a fault zone or in the path of a potential landslide, I don’t wish to be the one who has to warn others about these dangers. Adding in a human element presents all kinds of extra challenges and complications that I am happy to leave to others. But my biases are not yours, and you are likely to have different interests and different reasons to find one of these paths more or less appealing than the others.<br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-69341503671018532872013-01-17T19:15:00.000+01:002013-01-17T19:15:20.172+01:00A challenging way to write<br />
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I was inspired by<a href="http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2013/01/explaining-geoscience-using-only-the-10-hundred-most-common-words/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=explaining-geoscience-using-only-the-10-hundred-most-common-words" target="_blank"> Ann and Chris over at HighlyAllotchthonous</a> to try to write up what I study using a text editor <a href="http://splasho.nfshost.com/upgoer5/" target="_blank">which limits one to using only the 1000 most commonly used words</a>. <br />
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Here follows my attempt to describe metamorphic petrology and 3D models of hydrothermal alteration systems using none of those words:<br />
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<i>I study rocks that have changed because they got hot or because too many other rocks were on top of them. The bits that make up rocks can change quite a lot because of just how hot it is, and also because of how much stuff is on top of it. Different bits of rock like to give away some the stuff they are made of when they get hotter (and/or they go deeper under other rocks), and instead take different stuff from other rock bits. Studying which stuff appears more in one rock bit than another rock bit can tell us just how hot or how deep the rock must have been. </i><br />
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<i>Another thing which can make rocks change is water. When hot water moved through the cracks in rocks it can help carry stuff between the rock bits. My job today studies rocks that had water help them to change, and I am trying to make a drawing that shows all of the changes as they happened-a drawing that one can look at from any side: top, bottom, left, right, front or back. When the drawing is done you will be able to turn it any way you want and see how the rocks have changed.</i><br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-57733080652606851372012-12-06T11:21:00.002+01:002012-12-06T11:21:19.392+01:00New toys are inspiring<br />
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I have always been a visual person, and one of my favourite parts about being a petrologist is the pretty photos of thin sections that I have collected. I also love organizing stuff—I was one of those kids who had even more fun sorting my legos by colour, size, and type than I did actually building things out of them. However, until this week, it had never occurred to me that it would be possible to do visual organization of my photos. Oh, sure, I had some organization of my sample photos—a folder for all the thin section photos, and sub folders for each sample. Another folder for photos of drill cores, with sub folders for each drill hole, and under those more sub folders for each box of core (since when using my phone I need to take nine photos per tray of core in order to photograph every bit of it. <br />
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But that was where my organizational system stopped. If I wanted to do something like, gather together all of the rhyolite samples and look to see if they were similar or different to one another I would open the spreadsheet of samples, sort by rock type, then, one sample at a time go through the folder of photos for each sample, import it into my drawing program, add text, insert a new page for the next sample, repeat. <br />
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Then I read a <a href="http://togs-from-bogs.blogspot.se/2012/11/databases-again.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/togs-from-bogs+(a+stitch+in+time+-+togs+from+bogs" target="_blank">blog post by my favourite medieval textile scholar</a> describing the photo organizational database she uses. She mentioned that one can store photos in a folder yet, at the same time, have “albums” to organize them, and the possibility of one photo belonging to more than one album, without duplicating the photo. Her description of being able to define smart albums based on key words associated with the photos caught my attention, so I went off and got a copy of the program. <br />
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Doing this has really re-inspired me to work. My partner and I recently bought a house, and a rather large part of me had been resenting “work” as something that was interfering with important things like getting the house unpacked and organized, and exploring the forest outside of our door. But now I am keen to come into the office and play with my photos and organize them. I am actually looking forward to writing papers, because choosing the right image to show the feature I describe in the text will be so easy with this tool.<br />
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So far I have created albums for each drill hole, and sub albums within the drill holes for the individual samples. I have copied all of the notes I took for each sample into the album description, so I can see at a glance which phases are present, what rock type I assigned the sample to, where the sample comes from, and so much more. I am adding key words to my samples so that I can later ask to see all photos containing feldspar, or pyrite, or whatever, and I will get them. The program lets one select multiple photos at once and apply key words to them all at one go, which saves time.<br />
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One bit of advice if you decide to do something like this: Decide on your key word pattern as early as possible. My photos are marked with a variety of types of key words, and my first attempt I just typed in useful words like “PPl”, “XPL”, “folded” “Qtz”, “10X” etc. But then I realized that one can add key words from a drop-down menu, which is sorted alphabetically. After I made that realization I added a type code to the front of the key words, and now I can specify if the key word is a “drill hole”, the “scale”, a mineral (“min”), a phase that only shows up in this sample as inclusions within another mineral (“inc”), the rock type, structure, or any number of other categories that I will come up with later. This makes choosing the keywords much easier, as they are now grouped together, so I can click on the one I need.<br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-53806019701426497452012-09-17T14:13:00.003+02:002012-09-17T14:13:53.013+02:00Importing Air Photos into Leapfrog<br />
Some time back I received some air photos of the region I am currently working in from one of my colleagues. Last week I discovered that it is possible to easily import those photos into the program <a href="http://www.leapfrog3d.com/" target="_blank">Leapfrog</a> and thus see the lay of the land with respect to the locations of the various drill cores. However, he gave me six different photos but I only received corresponding “.tab” files for three of them. It is the data in the .tab files that tells the program how to import the photos—where are they located. Therefore I set myself a quest: work out how to create .tab files for the other photos. Having learned a number of things in the process, I thought I would share them here.<br />
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<b>Step One</b> in the process is deciding what points you want to use as markers. Choose a place on the photo that is easily recognizable (like a cross-road intersection). Then open GoogleEarth in one window and the air photo in another (using two monitors at once really helps!). Zoom in to the selected location in google earth, and click on the thumb-tack shaped icon to get a marker. Drag that marker to where you want it, and give the marker a name (such as “T-intersection, upper left corner of Airphoto_a.jpg”), and save the location. You can now look up the latitude and longitude of this point by clicking on it and selecting “properties”.<br />
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<b>Step Two</b> is to use an on-line form such as<a href="http://www.dmap.co.uk/" target="_blank"> this one</a> (option: “Transverse Mercator Calculator”) to convert the latitude and longitude into the Swedish national grid known as RT-90 (that is the format of the drill hole locations with which I am working—if you are working in a different area you will need to instead convert to the appropriate coordinates for your area). <br />
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<b>Step Three</b> is to determine the X-Y coordinates on the photo itself of the selected location. First look up the size of the photo by importing of it into Leapfrog without worrying about the fact that there is not yet a .tab file for it. Then right-click on it to open the properties dialogue box and make note of the photo size (mine happened to be 1404 wide and 940 tall). (It is a good idea to now delete the photo from Leapfrog, since it is not, yet, in the correct spot). Now that you know the photo size that Leapfrog will be using, import the photo in CorelDraw, and change the size of the photo to those values.<br />
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Now you are ready to for Step Three itself: Use the “guidelines setup” dialogue box of CorelDraw to create two guidelines, one horizontal, one vertical, both located at zero. Then turn on the “snap to guidelines” feature and set the photo so that the upper left corner of the photo is located at the newly created 0,0 intersection. At this point it is a good idea to “lock” the layer the photo is on so that you do not accidently move it during subsequent measurements. <br />
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Now that the photo is properly positioned drag new guidelines onto the photo such that they intersect at the spot you selected in Step One. Re-open the “guidelines setup” dialogue box and edit the position of those lines to the nearest whole number (e.g. 57.3456 becomes “57”) and look at the revised position to be certain you are happy with the location of the intersection of the guidelines. <br />
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<b>Step Four</b>: edit a .tab file with the numbers determined in Steps Two and Three.<br />
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The files he gave me have this format:<br />
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****************************<br />
!table<br />
!version 300<br />
!charset WindowsLatin1<br />
<br />
Definition Table<br />
File "airphoto_kriberg_a.jpg"<br />
Type "RASTER"<br />
(X,Y) (A,B) Label "Pt 1",<br />
(X,Y) (A,B) Label "Pt 2",<br />
(X,Y) (A,B) Label "Pt 3"<br />
CoordSys Earth Projection 8, 112, "m", 15.8082777778, 0, 1, 1500000, 0<br />
Units "m"<br />
****************************<br />
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Where X and Y are the east and north coordinates of each spot in the RT90 format (Step Two) and A and B are the positions on the photo itself (Step Three). Edit this to have the numbers you determined above, and repeat for two more spots on the photo. Save as a .tab file in the same folder as the photo itself.<br />
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<b>Step Five:</b> import into Leapfrog. If you edited the .tab file correctly choosing the “import image” option will open up a dialogue box that shows a circle, a square, and a triangle each superimposed over the photo on one of the three points of interest you selected. If they are in the correct spot click “ok” and your photo is imported. If you don’t get a dialogue box but only an error message one possibility is that you could have introduced a blank space after the coma and before the next number. This is easily solved by deleting that space.<br />
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There may well be a simpler way (more automated) way to create .tab files for importing air photos into Leapfrog. If anyone knows of one do please share in a comment. In the meantime writing down what I did will help me remember next time I need to do this.<br />
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A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-65295772489688536802012-07-30T19:53:00.001+02:002012-07-30T19:53:38.393+02:00Tasmanian Metemorphic Geology; It is wilder than you think.<br />
This morning I received comments from reviewers on the manuscript I recently submitted. I was delighted to see that they recommend that the article be accepted, after minor revision. Even more than that, I am very happy that one of them took the time to actually read the text closely enough to catch some important typographic errors. Of all of them that he found, my favourite is: <i>"...rocks wildly distributed throughout Tasmania". </i><br />
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While, I have, on occasion, used the term “in the wild” when referring to rock types I have personally seen on a outcrop in the field (as opposed to in a rock collection in a lab or museum), I am quite certain that what I was thinking when I typed that phrase (and must have thought I saw on every subsequent re-read of the manuscript) was “widely distributed”. My thanks to this reviewer, and to all reviewers who take the time to be certain that such errors never make it to the published version of a document.<br />
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<br /></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-37707452137867262932012-04-27T10:04:00.000+02:002012-04-27T10:19:24.759+02:00What about GeoSociety journals?<br />
There has been a fair bit of attention recently<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices"> in the media</a> and on science blogs about the evils of the academic publishing industry and how much profit the publishers get for all of the unpaid work that scientists provide in terms of writing, editing, and reviewing the content, combined with a cry for academics to consider publishing instead in open access journals. This suggested solution makes a certain amount of sense to me, but I find myself wondering about the journals which are associated with Geologic Societies (for example the<a href="http://gsa.org.au/ajes/index.html"> Australian Journal of Earth Science</a>, which is available to members of the Geological Society of Australia, or <a href="http://www.elementsmagazine.org/elementsonline.htm">Elements</a>, which is available to members of number of Mineralogical societies in a variety different countries). These journals are not open access, but the memberships base of the societies are, sometimes, very extensive, and some of these societies have reasonable membership rates. <br />
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For those of you who are actively participating in the boycott of journals which are hidden behind a pay-wall, how do you feel about journals which are associated with such societies? There is still a pay-wall, and in some (all?) cases there is a professional publisher which does the publishing on behalf of the society (<a href="http://www.tandf.co.uk/">Taylor & Francis</a> and<a href="http://www.geoscienceworld.org/"> GeoScience World </a> for the above two examples). Does the fact that the journal is one of the perks to membership in the society help alleviate the concerns about paywalls? Are these sorts of journals handled any differently than those which are only for profit of the publisher?<br />
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I am wondering about this because I am just about ready to submit an article for publication, and the most logical journal for that particular research happens to be AJES. Therefore I would appreciate hearing other people’s thoughts on this subject. <br />
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<br /></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-64589028327448304982012-03-21T11:27:00.001+01:002012-03-21T11:28:19.007+01:00yet another academic publishing blog<span >I have seen a variety of other blogs discussing the <a href="http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/">problems in the academic publishing system</a>, with many discussions as to *why* the system is continuing to thrive, depsite the presence of the internet having rendered most of the services provided by publishers obslete. However, none of the discussions which have crossed my path address what, to me, is likely the biggest reason. As scientists our publication records matter—if we don’t have “enough” first-author papers published we don’t land jobs in acaidmeia, and we don’t get grants if we have jobs. The universities for which we work are ranked, in part, by the number of publications we produce, and the quality of the journals in which we publish. The more “A” ranked journal articles produced by a given university, the better it is considered to be, and the easier time it has of getting funding. So long as funding decisions are based, in part, on our list of publications, and so long as the prestiege of the journals in which we are publishing matters, the system will continue to thrive, despite so many of us being unhappy with it. Is there hope of this changing? Perhaps, if enough people want it to change.</span>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-21464028213463200212012-03-20T20:46:00.015+01:002012-03-20T21:10:04.312+01:00Geology field trip at Arlanda airport<div style="text-align: left;"><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >The next time you have too many hours to wait for your next flight at Stockholm-Arlanda airport why not step outside and have a short geology field trip? </span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >I had a long layover on my way to France, and it was much too nice of a spring day to spend the wait inside. The first thing I noticed when I </span><span >stepped outside is that s</span><span >pring in southern Sweden is much further along than it is in the north. At home the snow was still fully covering the ground, though starting to get soft and melty. Do</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">wn here there is </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">no snow left at all, though the flattened, yellow state of the grass attests to the fact that there was snow on the ground fairly recently.ere is</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span >I set out from Terminal 5, following the bike/walking path to the</span></div><div><span > left from the building (note: use </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">the exit on the lower floo</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">r; the sidewalk on the upper level dead-ends at the top of the driving ramp to the loading zone). I found the first outcrop straight away: a tall chain-link fence protec</span><span >ts</span><span><span > unwary travelers from falling over the edge of a small, man-made cliff. </span></span></div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOmcgPoMGI1kP6D-FQWiotDKCOscXBZnUJmz7DDBxPOjEXkWGXEDiZ1nH0Ox6RTqhaxCmf_KNJr26YyiR1QH5iYTT6sjuM_p1G11dRJH4JRFw3crlPmAgiBLAzAXHBVW3tDPaiE68QGT5B/s400/DSC_0029.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722073507905701186" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><div><br /></div><div><span >Not being able to resist the allure of a fresh rock surface, I promptly left the trail to investigate. The cliff is actually a channel cut into the rock which ends at a large garage-door. </span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic19redTuk0jzAFWriuZKYDO274Lo9Cbg97UZo0RWHeQ3UbU78lgM3s0KKhoXIn-N2_H9IOoA8EnXSSapHR3lWH37bB2ewuGC2Wn5TdHRFpYgB_rZtqvbO77Jc6k5117H8FQJ5aA6L6kJ3/s400/DSC_0027.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722072647007201682" style="float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><br /><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >The rock here is fine grained, dark, and contains small veins, some of w</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">hi</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">ch cross-cut one another. </span><span >The weathered surface shows a bit of foliation to the rock. </span></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOYXIzDYtYVpts2lrEimg7QZD8EsGgfLg3FmcvJ-_CFSf9R3nu9MHXWW74srrdbJghJfa4j5glh07TpfwTGrE55g8Psy37_mAcB99kbjAz7DtXF3lsVWhX1O8c6672F68KRpE4W5tlc6kO/s400/DSC_0029.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722072635856377570" style="float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><br /><div><span ><br /></span></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ0c_XtnXhY4YhMoaQNFGowDl030xS7iXHKtKznHoExipsQ7UHr3YGi3fuLmozH2gdCVkUpAJN6LizKduo2v99NlK8_Ioh2FYgiJJfcdwDTx7cwFuWfX9SzB954fi5ZZpeOpqUCmW2BYum/s400/DSC_0036.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722072623196177954" style="float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 400px; " /></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >The astute observer might notice that along th</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">e fence edge there is a bu</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">nch of rubble fill which is made up of a coarser grained white rock with elongate black grains showing a foliation.</span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjICL9lDVXhxxZeFWOy0Zk8UU2KNEdCMnBpJsk_ELwWXMRCu4RJVvnZtRdCyRrt0LUw4K2ixDeTtzPW1BbjsNVFWN9PfwtIreXQyGzBr100VMC5UHBXbfGORqGsV7I-uBQkOwWjBaZwQ3aM/s400/DSC_0025.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722071779045417410" style="cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 400px; " /></div><div><br /></div><div><span >However, the wait for my flight was quite a long one, and I still wanted to stretch my legs, so I decided to continue my exploration. I continued following the path, turning left at the Statoil station and continuing along the path towards the forest in the distance.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><span >After a short walk I came to a body of water which had an earth-bridge c</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">rossing it, leading towards a small hill with rocks exposed at its peak. </span></div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlMBpy5hRin5PpKrl1_sx1x1z7sgsLWR_SgIvggqaay3CKThnYvlpvT7I_ng1UzvPL-sBh0RRyYP1q6VdUzfCfOpHQV8EYGj9Y3bEdkMVi1tPsmGesWl_FmarFD63m4TLngPOL_g0GteW3/s400/DSC_0001.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722071480469353922" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >What geologist could resist? Closer investigation revealed the source of that white and black rock that is being used as fill</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "> everywhere between here and the terminal.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMkIAFHHTJdsVE2PhGWsP_JbJ4qZiilbk8w_tQnVXxSFeive-mU4v8hQb3HVs2T4oatCQQfUcsBq-EuYHrR46LH4AkwgiEZZUugR52N_LFaMpJdFOV2x1TZ7tRJu1YcAKWT4eep-QtjvK/s400/DSC_0003.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722070987170234066" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTQVe-CIIbXNwuTw780eOEuRzKB3KogIbD25BJHO1BvautDB0OJ-TWitDIlSBXXIDY2j_NTAmAbc9eqmTXk9QmXz9k9cwQ2VAkfTXyhyrF_gwk3ccXGd9KU4pVP3myMQXJ_A3nbJx5oVb/s400/DSC_0010.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722070993144201906" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span >There are plenty of fresh surfaces to admire, sparkling in the sunlight on the s</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">ide that has served as a quarry.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><br /></span></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMmn6kYPC6a69uCnGp1MYxebVd420dLXPzHefiRJSWfpyT6iYdAlhGcv0q3Y3HqZlpwVxjQ3ElL6565YucDKffN3GgTZNbFYjtrQkvbrL3nhPI0Sf8M1pCC-R25ZcVraQ8df8B3Rq8hR_v/s400/DSC_0005.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722070115097580850" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi66aLAoHQeuthXKYU2KSQaNnyG_7LRnK3-pg0Oq7RN7T1ICR9B5anvB5lK8aVrQBZwmaK471I8xXZnMfBp9dBhn1j4a0ObeE-YB7ckkKP_ip9GLiNwuHE_pvrLmQ0E6ro8YQec4D16y_M0/s400/DSC_0006.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722070131800913842" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><br /></span></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-_gCkPvwk6x6MSGku_efjIbcXSszx9LBLlxVZOUYUSSvmKCIDcEqfDXZfJwAvhRUdTmWF4TqrahmqWLfptQp9HsT234RiuKqRxdEQwlojzLtGufvy6Kw7u2JPrcrGGjPzOGq6YEQCSAc1/s400/DSC_0004.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722070102123561954" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >There are also plenty of examples of how the rock looks 'i</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">n place' on the other side of the hill. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><br /></span></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1i70Lv66EIkqSE21A6YvW7ea6WtMNtw_BXNcIRetKdP_u5P7DFmQx687KGxo1LkIVpOCgJAp67vmuPgUMjxigtN3ZP08_ZugIN1Ry9gOKDwEJv_YJU0oRNtdKrAyb8MBy6BMYvaJfwzPH/s400/DSC_0008.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722069171776146978" style="cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 400px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU_CzqATqXjPp9xZyDisyGJZnyTJ_uXiPJJ9l-CZG-YhL4yTW7laNSs47wuagq9F3wLP8B2s0mgDeamcSnt_UDSoAsgVxmjjeaab6allhEv6kBgDpIP8xuMig2DxUdZh-MK6u_VMKxms5Q/s400/DSC_0012.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722069200671601682" style="text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF7UCSdEhKfH_DbdABn_7mACIvcG3aTZXQE-t_4u6kWO0Rn8atQ-9_UmjXH_mq3aAVCYPbHXe8J37iCQ_wAyzUiCzFMPzKTI60AkRDk2_issuWMNbTQwDNVtsbzJdelF9y3BhIrCBpHexx/s400/DSC_0009.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722069186894244978" style="text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 225px; height: 400px; " /></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >It took me only 35 minutes to walk from my gate to the quarry outcrop, and I recommend the adventure to other travellers with time to spare who would rather enjoy fresh air and investigate the local geology than explore the over-priced airport shops.</span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >And to show how far apart the two outcrops are: The view back to terminal fro</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">m the further outcrop:</span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhky1MdBuDDLQGzgcw0plmtak-rBekC7pDri6Hcv-co3eMHzEhHLihM6mZe9jbYYmCC3CAn2i2XlOIM736fFrFJDJMt0HWTtoNFUK13Lks0vPwRBoaALYZDU04mGYfWrL6H9-AEuEp-fQ9S/s400/DSC_0007.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722068403221346866" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div><span > </span></div><div><span >And how close the nearer outcrop is to the same control tower:</span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT65t4AXP4wjMn2ALPIorNzju9Ok72R971XZoRoTpu6yJB8O3DTbN4VtR6lCvWTLebuki7_6p9EfU9EyRHsu_uwIf4QHAEt6dK8SQrAOeTjnBufxOaaD5-yLWSeoI3W2wsb1SBdMtDMIXb/s400/DSC_0023.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722068379636118546" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></div><div><br /></div></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-72658918319165170042012-03-08T09:01:00.008+01:002012-03-10T19:21:38.459+01:00WoGE # 334<div style="text-align: center;"><span><br /></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: center; "><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 100%; ">I have been seeing various posts from the <a href="http://woge-felix.blogspot.com/p/rules-of-geological-whereongoogleearth.html">Where on GoogleEarth game </a>wandering hither and yon over the geoblogosphere for years now, but never really felt like I had time to play. I did once open GoogleEarth and spend something like 1 minute looking around before deciding that my time that day would be better spent actually doing the tasks for which I had turned on the computer in the first place. Yesterday, however, I decided that it was time to actually give it a go, so when I saw <a href="http://offtheshelfedge.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/where-on-google-earth-woge-333-modern-coastal-system/#comment-223">Zane’s post announcing #333</a> and noted that no one had yet posted an answer (though <a href="http://blog.effjot.net/">Florian at EffJot</a> had indicated that he was only waiting for hi</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 100%; ">s Sc</span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: center; "><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span style="font-size: 100%; ">hott rule time period to elapse before he posted his answer), I downloaded GoogleEarth (no, I hadn’t gotten to that yet—I only got this computer in November, and hadn’t yet needed it—for quick looking GoogleMaps is adequate). </span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: center; "><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">Now, I was lucky with this one—coast lines narrow the search quite a bit, and the style of agriculture and architecture looked sort of English to me, which meant I could focus my search on Britain and places colonized by them. Even so it took a while to find the location, at the mouth of the Wairoa River in New Zealand (North Island). Once I found it I refreshed the page and saw that there were no new comments, so I started a comment of my own, </div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">describing the location and geology. Now, since I am not a sediment person this means that I also spent a couple of minutes consulting with google to find a paper on the geology of the area, so that I would have something to say on the topic.</div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; "></div><div style="text-align: center; "><br /></div></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">Once I was done I hit the button to post the comment, only to discover that Florian’s answer had appeared nine minutes before mine. It was a fun game, but I lost, fair and square, and I was quite delighted to have been able to find the location on my first try of playing. However, Florian, being a generous soul argued that given the closeness of the timing of the posts the win (and obligation to host the next one) should go to me. Astute readers will </div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">note that since he had been waiting to post until his time limit was up it wasn’t, truly, that close—he knew the answer before I started looking. Be that as it may, after a bit of discussion he and Zane both agreed that I should take the next go at hosting. </div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">Therefore, without further ado, I introduce you all to Where on GoogleEarth #</div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">334:</div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div><div><div><span style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhM7PuGB1hDrcOudNPpDzlqVluNehFB3OG2YV7LaO9YR5rKqVSGLLWhGhlEWPKWsLbFO34KUz_5EpjXmfGtCNni3pl8funICRMZtmdzRmzfxh4OYh-9ccWr6yon3TbiiXh-cioAd5w1QV8/s400/WoGE334.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5717434528958418658" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 259px; " /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><span><span style="font-size: 100%;">I am looking forward to hearing what you can tell me of the geology in this area—from the little I read before selecting this spot you should be able to share some interesting tidbits. Since I directly </span>benefited<span style="font-size: 100%;"> from the Schott Rule it seems fair to not invoke it this time, so, come on you multi-winners, show us how it is done!</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span><span style="font-size: 100%;">The scale bar, which I drew onto the above image myself, is roughly 5 km long; I didn't know how to get a scale bar to appear automatically in GoogleEarth. </span>Fortunately<span style="font-size: 100%;">, it turns out that <a href="http://woge-felix.blogspot.com/p/how-to.html">there are instructions available for these things</a>. Pity I didn't think to look for them before posting this morning. Oh well, this is why it is </span>possible<span style="font-size: 100%;"> to edit posts.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div><div><span><span style="font-size: 100%;">However, when I made the above image, by using the handy "snip tool" on my computer and saving to jpg, adding a scale bar in a drawing program, and re-saving, the result turned out not to be clickable to make a larger image. Thanks to the below comment, I now know that one can save right from GoogleEarth (see, I told you I wasn't very </span>experienced<span style="font-size: 100%;"> with the program, it didn't even occur to me to try). The new, improved image is below. Hopefully this time it is possible to zoom in enough to see details.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBaAdRiAYKCYT-PGVUMwm7OczVz8M450GuQRD_6BPMTVwpoiyQyO51XPSDISiLoqvL7gW6P5jVd_GXaHBYaI_XtswfDjU3HVRG0Xa4KqE3sywqt9h3_98JouW5qxKqx8eNONOk-_DXhXOi/s400/WoGE+%2523334.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5717513050867274530" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 288px; " /></div><div><br /></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; ">Nope, not yet. Perhaps I am doing something wrong in blogger when I upload them? At least it has the scale bar, which is 7.01 km long, since I couldn't get enough accuracy with the mouse on the slide bar to get it to stop at 7.00 km. Thanks to the kind help of Florian (see comments) <a href="http://www.effjot.net/img/WoGE334.jpg">there is now a full size version available over here.</a></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-54748940011498025832012-03-06T10:09:00.001+01:002012-03-06T10:10:47.027+01:00writing grant proposals gives the writer more benefits than just the potential money they represent<div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">My focus the past few weeks has been preparing a grant proposal. This is my first attempt at a major, multi-page, grant proposal. I have done minor proposals in the past—the field work for my master’s project was funded with a small GSA grant, and I have obtained a fair few travel grants over the years. Indeed, before submitting this proposal I was in the happy place of being able to truthfully state that I have received 100% of the grants for which I have applied. Needless to say, in addition to wanting this proposal to be successful because of what it would mean to my ability to do science (many of the steps in the process are expensive), that past success rate means that I am even more keen to have this application succeed, since it would be lovely to keep the 100% successful rate for a bit longer.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><br /></span></div><div><span >What have I learned about the grant-writing process? Well, for starters it is very good that I did the initial submission of the application a full week before the deadline, even though I knew that I did not yet have all of the information from my boss that I needed. Why? Because I had forgotten, until I saw that section of the webpage, that a grant application, like job applications, require letters of reference. By doing the submission of the first draft of the paper a week early it gave me the opportunity to remember that important detail, and to contact my referees to ask if they would be able to write a letter before the deadline. How would I have looked if I had had to write to them with only a few hours to spare before the deadline? (Note: the letters of reference have the same deadline as the application itself. If they don’t get it in by then their words will not be heard by the review committee. However, the web page is kind enough to email us applicants when our letters of reference are uploaded into the system, so that we know that they are done and don’t need to worry about that part.)</span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >What else have I learned? There are three sections to the application packet. The first is where you describe the planned project: why it is scientifically interesting and why humanity will benefit from the project. The second is where you describe the scientist(s) who will do the research (that would be me, in this case) and explain why my background makes me the perfect person to do this particular research, and the third describes the institution at which the research will be conducted and why it is the perfect place to undertake such a project. Not surprisingly, I found the first two sections easier to write than the third, since I am so new to this institution. Fortunately, my boss was able to provide me with much helpful information to make the third section come together as it should. </span></div><div><span ><br /></span></div><div><span >I think that the thing which most helped me with this grant application process is all of the many job applications for academic positions I have done over the years since my PhD first started to draw to a close. The two processes are very similar. However, all in all, I think I have a preference for writing grant applications to job applications—there isn’t quite as much riding on it. If I don’t get this grant I still have a job, I still continue to eat and have a roof over my head. In this particular case I even still get to do the research I speak of in the proposal, since this grant is aimed at researchers who already have an employment contract and a project in progress, but wish additional fund so as to improve the list of what they can accomplish in the process. This level of security permits me to be happy about what I have accomplished over the last few weeks of working on the application—I now have an even better understanding of what my research will entail and how and when I will accomplish various tasks. Even if for some reason my grant is unsuccessful I still gain immense benefit from the process of writing up that work plan and the abstract saying what I will be doing. Besides, you never know—mine might be one of the applications chosen for funding. If I didn’t ask they wouldn’t be able to tell me ‘yes”.</span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><br /></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-58682002489505018412012-03-01T22:16:00.002+01:002012-03-01T22:20:15.059+01:00not late at all, measuring with a geologic time scale<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMGJ9dKxqLv8wFdczB8ZYJcm8eIsSC0yhe80Egm5hLZ2MhgX3z5NXG4JLpgWf5r5FyylzfHZUvBME18qUwP5e7E9GccJDB0J3KfVFEZmtbCtG_mj4p8bGboNyLB_rik6xVxVExY4g4KZEM/s1600/DSC_0012.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMGJ9dKxqLv8wFdczB8ZYJcm8eIsSC0yhe80Egm5hLZ2MhgX3z5NXG4JLpgWf5r5FyylzfHZUvBME18qUwP5e7E9GccJDB0J3KfVFEZmtbCtG_mj4p8bGboNyLB_rik6xVxVExY4g4KZEM/s400/DSC_0012.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715041163694346418" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; ">As the rest of the geoblog sphere is busy offering up their entries to this month's Accretionary Wedge, I am finally able to offer my entry for <a href="http://volcanoclast.com/call-for-posts-accretionary-wedge-42-countertop-geology/">last month's call</a>. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span ><u><br /></u></span></div><div><span >Why a month behind? Because the call went out while I was in Scotland, and the counter top, ok, floor, I wanted to photograph was in Sweden. So I had to wait till I got home, and then I had to wait another couple of weeks before I found time to head to the city center to get the photos, and then I had to wait till I had time to actually upload them. However, I think you will agree that this particular building stone was worth the wait.</span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "></span></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span ><u><br /></u></span></div><div><span >This is the floor at my eye doctor's office, and what a lovely floor it is. Look at the garnets! Look at the banding! I would love to know the location of the quarry that produced this rock.</span></div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 100%; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; "><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclSPhKqxtvWbVq5QIR0xTWpRrpPDSVToT0MXKuZ0Nr3ZC11HG-JtmUD4D-kr7ohXuS6BARCFDDjZKjqFWevKyYnvXEhabEXUx3VincaXCppBphmoMzJYCerTsJ8acOw2nIvWTq1CAG_iE/s400/DSC_0013.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715041152423780162" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-decoration: underline; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px; " /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><br /></span></div></div></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-29279310645940231992012-01-25T21:13:00.001+01:002012-01-25T21:14:55.900+01:00a new (to me) sort of sample collecting<p class="MsoNormal">Sample collecting. It is something that we geologists have all done. It isn't enough to look at rocks in the field, we need to bring them home too, if we want to answer the questions that come up in the field. My current job, however, doesn't yet have field work in the traditional sense. Instead my “field” is the collection of drill cores which have been amassed over years of exploration and mining in this district. I have just completed my first two “field” trips to look at this core, which is to say I have been introduced to the core storage shed at the mine headquarters. Last week and the week before I worked with one of the geologists in the exploration division of the mine office. We looked at four different drill cores to select representative samples at roughly 50 meter intervals to be sent away for geochemical analysis. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This is an interesting task—my project will involve 3D geochemical modelling with the aim of understanding the alteration that has happened to the rock in the region during the process of the formation of the ore deposit. Therefore we need to be certain the samples we choose have been altered, but that the alteration that has taken place in these rocks is related to the main alteration event of interest. Therefore we want to avoid the sections of drill core which contain small veins which cut across the fabric of the rock (which means that they formed well after the deformation that caused the main rock fabric, and so are younger, and so probably aren’t related to the question I am trying to investigate). Because my project will be on the kilometer scale we don’t want to take the samples too close together (hence the 50-meter interval rule of thumb), but then again there is value in making certain that we have a good representative collection of samples that actually show what rock types are present in each drill hole. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This is easier to do for some drill holes than others. You see, drill core comes in different diameters, based on a variety of factors when they do the drilling, but the boxes into which they store the core are fairly uniform in size. This means that one box will hold more meters of narrow core than it will wide core. We sampled 4 different drill holes over the two weeks I was there—the narrowest core tended to be 10 or 11 meters of core per box, but the widest one was less than 5 meters of core per box (the other two were about 7 meters each). The tables upon which we spread the boxes hold 10 boxes at a time, which means we could view 50, 70, or 100 meters of core at a time. Needless to say, it is much easier to decide what rock types are “typical” for a given stretch when we can see more of the core at once.<o:p></o:p></span></p>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-19959189115192770712011-12-30T13:11:00.005+01:002011-12-30T13:45:33.087+01:00"Directly" experiencing Subduction-Zone processes<div><p class="MsoNormal">I haven’t made time to participate in an Accretionary Wedge for a long time, so when Ron Schott called for the<a href="http://ron.outcrop.org/blog/?p=1432"> "Most Memorable/Significant Geologic Event That You’ve Directly Experienced"</a>, I thought it was about time to come out and play this game again.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">In his call he gives some examples of a few processes that take place in human observable time frames and at surface pressures and temperatures (e.g. earthquake, landslide, flood…) and he repeats the part of his challenge about our being able to directly observe and experience the process we write about. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">However, the sorts of geologic processes which most fascinate me are not those which create sediment at the surface of the earth, nor yet processes which produce fine-grained igneous rocks. To my eyes the most significant geologic processes are those which are responsible for creating the pretty rocks that drew me into geology in the first place—the ones with beautiful large crystals. Metamorphic processes, and also igneous processes when they take place deeply enough to permit significant crystal growth, are my favourite of all of the many geologic processes. However, the pressures and temperatures which are responsible for making particularly pretty rocks are well in excess of what our frail bodies can tolerate, which means that the process isn’t something I can ever "directly experience". </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Or is it? How can we ever know what is happening within a subduction zone?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">This question was not only of interest to me, but also to the international research team I joined when I began my last post-doc position. While none of us could go down the subduction zone ourselves to find out what was happening there, we were able to bring a tiny bit of the subduction zone setting into our lab.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Using a piston cylinder apparatus I regularly performed experiments which match the sorts of pressures and temperatures one would find if one could enter a subduction zone. While real rocks can spend millions of years working their way down a subduction zone and then back up again, I only held my samples at high pressure and temperature for two to four weeks at a time. As a result the crystals I grew from my powdered starting material did not achieve the large, stunningly pretty, sizes one can find in metamorphic rocks, but they did grow up to 100 µm in length (remember that there are 1000 microns in every millimetre), and many were lovely to look upon in the BSE images.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Having had the opportunity to perform such experiments I confirmed for myself that yes, pressure and temperature do matter to the minerals in a rock. If one takes the exact same starting material and "cooks" it at different settings one will get a different assemblage of minerals for each combination tried.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The below images show some of the results for one of the compositions I tested, at three different pressures (2.65, 2.8, and 3.0 GPa), and three different temperatures (600, 625, and 650° C). As you can see, the sets of phases present are very different for each experiment. Even the phases which are present in all experiments are present in different abundances when the pressure, temperature, or both are changed.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">The few photos I have shared with you today are just a glimpse some of the experiments I have done. All of them together have transported my imagination to the depths of a subduction zone, and brought the merest hint of a subduction into my lab. This is "directly experienced"enough for me.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5RyH9mcjK9U5htRb7THlEMUcAJTdYqUFHgxWhAUVg29taK57FOEmAB-SHkxq5ZktlLUyXHwRk9WS0OD7RsjP6d7D3FxBHru_tFmt5RWwo27Gxa8jFJZacuP_AHTf2MWbS7ylOqoJFOaDI/s1600/3GPa650C.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 168px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5RyH9mcjK9U5htRb7THlEMUcAJTdYqUFHgxWhAUVg29taK57FOEmAB-SHkxq5ZktlLUyXHwRk9WS0OD7RsjP6d7D3FxBHru_tFmt5RWwo27Gxa8jFJZacuP_AHTf2MWbS7ylOqoJFOaDI/s200/3GPa650C.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5691893598634497698" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPAN4hXzOF_SYK51etOyjuPoc9snpC0zp3uGv343JSenb0cpLm4j8G_RlFChgdTT6XKTQCNyLokbFolH5Bp-TtPALAWqt0amMAKfnZFZcmw3Gx3rsN4-MqXDVcicGprNxp6Q5BU6RLthMD/s1600/2.8GPa600C.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 165px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPAN4hXzOF_SYK51etOyjuPoc9snpC0zp3uGv343JSenb0cpLm4j8G_RlFChgdTT6XKTQCNyLokbFolH5Bp-TtPALAWqt0amMAKfnZFZcmw3Gx3rsN4-MqXDVcicGprNxp6Q5BU6RLthMD/s200/2.8GPa600C.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5691893395096540770" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNSj_jQuzN0Uj0yxTMqDcKUrjDPW3P-Ky385KPFEWhxqKfmcpHOA-c_BxA2jajLSTislDN_x7fL5xC9h8X-XHuyH_udbYKf-6MnmKMOF3jomCop60-Kqfmmtx0geFghgn3l7hpXGLUq56F/s320/2.65GPa625n650C.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5691893214973937794" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); text-decoration: underline; float: right; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 133px; " /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">List of abbreviations:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">grt = garnet</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">mu = muscovite (or other white mica)</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">qtz = quartz or coesite*<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">ctd = chloritoid<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">anth = anthophyllite<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">tlc = talc<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">*In all cases the SiO<sub>2</sub> phase is labelled "qtz", even when it is at pressure high enough for that phase to probably be coesite—the microprobe does not differ between those two phases, and I did not check it with another technique (such as Raman) because the difference between quartz and coesite wasn’t relevant to my work, which was focused on questions related to the stability fields of talc, biotite, and garnet.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-42726395577119372272011-12-29T12:59:00.001+01:002011-12-29T13:01:07.902+01:00Wish I had seen this one years ago<div>Earlier this month I discovered that it is possible for me to download entire textbooks from the internet. Now, it may be that the reason I can do this is because I am on a university computer and they have an account with the publisher which makes it possible, but since a high percentage of readers who might be interested in the book I am about to talk to you about are likely to associated with a university in some capacity, there is a reasonable chance that you will have access to it as well, if not as a download, perhaps in paper at your uni library. </div><div><br /></div><div>The book which I am enjoying reading just now is <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-64154-4/">Phase Equilibria in Metamorphic Rocks, Thermodynamic Background and Petrological Applications</a>, written by Thomas M. Will, published in 1998 by Springer, DOI: 10.1007/BFb0117723. This is volume #71 of a Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences series.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I first started my PhD project in the field of metamorphic petrology I was coming into the field cold—it had been years since my last geology course of any sort, and I had had no background courses on topics like thermodynamics or the many calculations associated with phase equilibria. Consequently, when I started reading papers which included formulas that explained how the authors had arrived at their estimates for the pressure and temperatures at which their minerals formed I found myself skipping over the equations and looking for the sentences that explained what was done. Over time and after reading many papers which did this sort of thing I started to gain a partial understanding of the topic. Enough to apply the tools to my own samples and arrive at numbers that, hopefully, actually reflect the history of the samples. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, while I could follow a recipe for calculating pressure and temperature of formation for metamorphic minerals, I choose which recipe to apply based on the fact that my samples were similar to those in the published papers, not because I had any real understanding of the models which underpinned the calculations. Terms like “ideal” vs “non-ideal” mixing painted pictures in my mind because I know what those words mean grammatically, not because I actually knew the difference between them as applied to the crystal structure of a mineral. </div><div><br /></div><div>If you are in a similar boat, and would like to actually see good definitions of those terms, along with others like “entropy of mixing”, “activity-composition (or a - x)”, this may be the book for you. So far I have only managed to read the first 40 pages, but already I have a *much* better understanding of why it is that one gets such hugely different results in terms of pressure/temperature estimates depending on which model one uses for a given mineral, and a much better understanding why programs like<a href="http://www.perplex.ethz.ch"> Perple_X</a> have so many models available to choose from. The author is kind enough to work through example calculations in a step-by-step basis, so that the reader can learn how it is done. Sure, when actually doing the geology you aren't going to do these calculations by hand—at the very least you will have a template full of formulas set up in a spread sheet, if not using a more complicated program to do the work for you, but it is always nice to understand *how* the program does the calculations—this makes it much easier to spot if a typo in the data-entry stage resulted in a geologically implausible answer being spit out by the program. </div><div><br /></div>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-90735377429772026562011-12-15T12:42:00.003+01:002011-12-15T12:50:55.386+01:00Science is the ultimate game for adults<p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">I have just come from listening to a lecture by Dan Shechtman, this year’s Nobel Laureate in chemistry. The topic of his speech was his 1982 discovery of quasi crystals which has led, all these years later, to his achieving a Nobel Prize for his work.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">He began his talk with an introduction to the science of Crystallography, which was founded in 1912 when Sir William Lawrence Bragg and his father Sir William Henry Bragg first starting using X-rays to study the diffraction pattern caused by crystals.<i> (Prior to that breakthrough people studying crystals measured the angles between the faces of crystals, which had been done at least as far back as the 1600’s—Johannes Kepler published studies of snowflake crystals in 1611, and in 1669 Nicolaus Steno reported consistent sets of characteristic angles for quartz crystals, no matter where the crystals came from.)</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">During the next 70 years crystallographers studied 1000’s of crystals using X-ray diffraction, and they all conformed to a set of rules which became accepted as the definition of a crystal:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">*They all had a periodicity; if you measure from the center of the diffraction pattern to the first spot, and then move out again that distance in the same direction you will encounter another spot, and another again each time you repeat the pattern.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">*they all had a rotation of symmetry; this means that if you rotate a crystal around an axis you will get a repeat of the same pattern every certain number of degrees. The possible amounts of rotation were 2, 3, 4, and 6.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">This means that a crystal with a 2-fold rotational symmetry can be rotated half way around (180 degrees) and will look exactly the same as before it was rotated. A crystal with a 3-fold rotational symmetry can be rotated to three different positions (each 120 degrees apart) which have the exact same pattern. 4-fold means that each rotation is 90 degrees apart, and 6 fold is 60 degrees apart. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">As Professor Shechtman emphasized in the early portion of his talk, this list was it—crystallographers knew that no other rotation symmetry pattern was possible. There was no such thing as a 5-fold rotational symmetry, nor were there any crystals with rotational symmetry greater than 6. This was so well accepted that when he was a student he once had an exam question requiring that he prove that 5-fold rotational symmetry was impossible.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">He shared with us his answer on the projector screen. It works better with images, but I will try it with words alone (see<a href="http://gruze.org/tilings/nfold"> this page</a> for more details). Start with a dot on the center of your page, then put five dots around it in a ring, each 66 degrees apart, all the same distance from the center dot and from one another. If 5-fold rotational symmetry is possible one could then take any pair of those encircling dots, rotate around them in five steps, plotting a new circle of dots around each, and the new dots around one would line up with the new dots around the other. However, as he showed us on the screen, this does not happen—if you colour one set in blue and the other in red they clearly fall near, but not upon, one another.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Therefore when he noticed a crystal which showed a 10-fold axis of rotation on a transmission electron microscope on the afternoon of 8 April 1982 is was more than a bit surprised, as one can see with the triple question marks he wrote in<a href="http://www.quasi.iastate.edu/discovery.html"> his notebook</a>. His first thought was that it must be the result of crystal twinning, which had been known to cause the appearance of five-fold rotational symmetry but was really the result of having more than one crystal contributing to the diffraction pattern. So he zoomed in to the limits of the machine and took the diffraction pattern again, several more times, and each time he received the same result—a 10-fold rotational pattern, and from areas so tiny that the possibility of there being more than one crystal contributing to the pattern had been eliminated.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">How was this possible? Well, the substance he was studying does have a rotational symmetry that had previously thought to be impossible, but it achieves it by lacking in periodicity—the pattern does not repeat if you jump a set distance in a given direction. As a result of his discovery the definition of a crystal has changed to say “any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram”. These days we call substances such as the one he discovered “quasicrystals” and it turns out that they are reasonably common. But in the early days after the publication of his discovery he met with much resistance to his ideas—one scientist was even heard to declare that there are no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists”. However, as happens with science, other laboratories repeated is results, both with the compound he first noticed the phenomena in, and then with other compounds, and gradually the acceptance spread throughout the scientific community.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">After he finished his speech there was time for a few questions from the audience. One of the University faculty members ask him a question—she pointed out that this university, like many others, has difficulties attracting students to the study of science, and she wondered if he had any advice in how we might better convince young people to study science. His reply included one of the best quotes I have heard in ages “Science is the ultimate game for adults”.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">I believe that he is, in fact, correct with that description—studying science is fun, it requires us to use both our logical and creative parts of our brains, and to push both to their limits. It provides enough challenge to prevent us from ever being bored, and it comes with possibility of making discoveries which change the way we view our world. What could be more fun than that?</span></p><p></p>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-87291427265622378952011-12-05T11:43:00.001+01:002011-12-05T11:44:14.668+01:00Can’t make it to AGU this year? Neither can I, but I will still visit the poster session<p class="MsoNormal">It is once again the time of the year for the big AGU conference in the US. I made it to the one two years ago, and found it kind of overwhelming in its hugeness, with talks and posters on any number of topics which fall into categories of which I know nothing, because geology is nothing if not a huge broad catch-all of a science. Fortunately for us that meeting, like many others these days, has a fully searchable program, permitting us to find those talks or posters we should hear/see because they relate to our own research, and those talks which are totally outside our current research but still fall into topics which are of personal interest. This year, in addition to having the computerized program, they have also made much of the poster session available on line. Therefore those of us who are staying home can still have the fun of wandering the crowed isles and looking at interesting research results. So ahead, go on over,<a href="http://eposters.agu.org/eposter-search/"> look at some posters,</a> and learn something new. Perhaps you will even find something interesting enough to send the author a note inviting conversation on the topic. </p>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-9505870082804134542011-12-02T13:51:00.001+01:002011-12-02T13:52:42.389+01:00reading for fun and education<p class="MsoNormal">Sixty days ago I received the job offer to start my new job, and was given a small pile of literature for background reading before I started. As a result I started my “1000 words a day” challenge once again, after having had nearly a year off since last I had done that. The challenge is simple: do a little reading in the geologic literature every day, and keep track of how many days in a row you manage before you miss one. If you miss one re-start and begin the count from zero once again. How much is 1000 words? Well, today’s post is 691 words long. It doesn’t take much time to read that many words, but I have found that if I read that many I often keep reading the article until I either reach a natural breaking point or finish the article. Some days I read quite a bit more, others I just barely make the goal (do I actually count the words? No, not any more. And when I did at the beginning of the first time I undertook the challenge I didn’t count all the words, just how many words were in the first line of a paragraph, and how many lines long it was to calculate a rough word count for the paragraph, and then figured out how many paragraphs of that size it would take to reach at least 1000 words. It isn’t the precision that matters, but the consistency of actually reading (and thinking about what you read!) every day.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Since I started this time I have remembered to read every day. This has been easy during the week days since my job begun—the pile of literature I need to read and understand in order to get my knowledge base to where it needs to be for my research project is quite substantial, and growing all of the time as I find references to more and more articles I wish to read. Managing it on the weekends is a bit more of a challenge, but I have managed, so far.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">So, what have I read over the past 60 days? I have completed reading six articles that relate directly to the ore deposits in the area near where my project is based (ok, one of those wasn’t a single article, but rather a PhD thesis which was comprised of five different papers, so really I have done 10 articles total on this subject), four articles on the concept of 3D modelling, and one article on geochemistry. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">That last one (MacLean 1990)* explains how one can use ratios of immobile elements to calculate what the unaltered composition of a suit of altered rocks must have been. I am gathering from my reading (many of those local papers cite this technique paper) that this is a very useful way to determine what types of rocks were present before the hydrothermal alteration associated with the formation of ore deposits. It works especially well when the precursor rocks are volcanic and changed in composition due to fractionation of the magma. When this is the case one can plot the current compositions on the same diagram as the curve which shows the expected changes in composition due to fractionation, and extrapolate from the trends in the current compositions back to the likely original compositions when the rocks cooled from their magma. The paper mentions that these sorts of calculations are easy to set up in a template in a spreadsheet, and that they will give away such templates upon request. I wonder if that offer is still open two decades after the paper was published, or if people use a different technique to accomplish the same sort of task today. I will have to do a search for papers which cite this one to work my way forward to the modern techniques, if they have changed. What did people do for research before it was possible to easily look up who had cited a particular paper?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" >*MacLean, W. H. (1990). "Mass change calculations in altered rock series." Mineralium Deposita 25(1): 44-49.</span></i><o:p></o:p></span></p>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3260170608317887597.post-85261463037824694552011-11-30T13:55:00.001+01:002011-11-30T13:56:39.636+01:00How I am spending my time<p class="MsoNormal">I have mentioned previously that I keep a log of how I spend my time. When I was doing my PhD the interesting question was what percentage of my time was spent on “uni work”, and how was I spending the rest of my time? That way I could look at the graphs and easily decide what I should change if I wasn’t happy with my progress. I have maintained those logs since finishing that degree, and even made use of the data when applying for my visa to move to Sweden—the abrupt increase in the amount of time spent doing “social” activities when I met my partner was part of the documentation that we really do have a relationship with one another.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">However, comparing “uni work” to all of the other aspects of my life is not the full story. This morning I was struck with the inspiration that I should also track what sorts of “uni work” I am doing. Since it has only been one month since I started my new job it seemed like a good time to set up the spreadsheet to calculate that, too. I have created five broad categories into which all of my “uni work” tasks fit. I then compared the data in my descriptive log of what tasks I accomplish each day (e.g. “revised figure 2.5 to show____”, or “received a copy of my hire paperwork from HR and filed in in folder ____”) with my numeric log showing how many hours in each day were spent on uni work, and have estimated the split for each day since this job began. In addition, I also calculated my time for most of October, since I did my job interview, began reading the literature my boss gave me as background reading for this project then, and attended two different short courses during that month.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">Setting up the spread sheet and doing those estimates took all morning, but since that was 58 days’ worth of data that means that I spent less than 4 minutes a day on this project. Now that the spreadsheet is set up it should be even easier to keep it up to date by entering in the new data, and I think that I can easily spare 4 minutes a day for the return of seeing the distribution of how I am spending my time. This will be particularly useful as my boss told me that the teaching component of my work should only be 10 to 20% of my time, and this way I will know if I am falling under, meeting or exceeding this target.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span>The categories I chose are:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span>* Research: which has three sub categories, the first of which is my current job (3D geochemical modelling of ore deposits in northern Scandinavia), the second and third are finishing up the papers based on my PhD and last post-doc positions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">* Learn: reading literature, attending courses, attending conferences, talks, and seminars, studying Swedish, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">* Teach: teaching classes, teaching prep, meetings about teaching, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">* Admin: administrative tasks, filing, computer maintenance issues (install programs and hardware, backup, etc.), paperwork, work-related travel, funding applications, updating logs, cleaning/organizing the office, meetings on any of these sorts of topics, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">* Netwk: networking, updating resume, updating LinkedIn and Academia.edu, interviews, public outreach, job applications (when this contract draws to a close), etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span>For the month of October I worked a total of 82.6 hours (which all counts as bonus time, as my job had not yet started). Of that time 68% was spent on “learn”-related tasks, 31% was “admin”, and 1% was “netwk”. There is still nearly half a work day left for November, but the month is close enough to done to report that my time this month has been split roughly:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">38.9% research (10.5% this job, 20.5% last job, and 7.9% PhD research)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">31.5% admin<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">12.5% learn<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">17.1% netwrk<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"> 0% teach<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span>Assuming 8 hour work days, no work on Sat or Sunday, and only 4 hours for the one Friday in November which was a half-day holiday I should have worked 172 hours on this job so far this year. However, because I started work-related tasks back in October I am already up to 233.4 hours, or 135.7% of the hours I need. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span>Combining the data for October and November gives:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">32.1% learn<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">31.4% admin<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">25.1% research (6.8% this job, 13.2% last job, and 5.1% PhD research)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU">11.3% netwrk<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"> 0% teach<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p> </o:p></span>It will be interesting to watch how the balance between the categories shifts each month.</p>A Life Long Scholarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13930670217574191380noreply@blogger.com0