Sketched in Sand

I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, but saw no reaction- no retweets or favorites- so I presume most of my geo-type followers missed it. And it's much too cool for me to let that happen. A friend e-mailed me the link to this site yesterday, and the story told by this picture (and many others) is really quite amazing...

So what do *you* see in the above design? Hmm?

I'm betting "seismogram" was not the first thing to pop into your mind...

A Better Pagan Holiday than Even Christmas

Today's EPOD

I am currently wearing a pretty floral bonnet, thanks to a couple of IZ friends, one of whom actually sewed it, and the other who has applied pressure over the last couple of days, saying this is just too  good of an idea to *not* make it happen. Bill took a few photos earlier, but I have to download those to my old computer, then transfer them by thumb drive to this one- my camera and this computer aren't on speaking terms. The following are some fun bits I've come across in recent days... enjoy!

 Julia Segal

Hair-Raising Hare

Electronic Cerebrectomy- several more pics at the link.

Cake Wrecks- yes that's a cake, and there are many more at the link.

Dracula Flatt and Frankie Scruggs, from Bits and Pieces

Via @tjnance

Bizarro

Via @badbanana: "Too fun not to share. My daughter in her homemade Dr. Who TARDIS costume. The headband lights up. Also: stay away from her, nerds."

Ramblings

 Fake Science

Senor Gif

Magma Cum Laude finds a folded outcrop of evil rocks.

Dr. Skyskull explains how, when you die, a certain portion of your body will become zombie-like. And I haven't found a good sample of creepy stuff, so I recommend reading more of that blog here.

Sofa Pizza

Bits and Pieces

Pleated Jeans- this is the first of six Horror Movies for Pets, and may not even be the best by your taste. If you're a pet lover, click over for the other five.

And now is the time on Sprockets when we dance...

I don't think I'm capable of letting a Halloween pass without a version of All Soul's Night:

And I don't think I've ever actually posted this one before, though for the life of me I can't think why.

Have a fun evening, everyone!

The Little Robot That Could... Visits Miranda!

Note: This wedge has now been accreted at En Tequila Es Verdad.

This month's Accretionary Wedge (#49) theme is "Out of this World," hosted by Dana Hunter at En Tequila Es Verdad. A similar theme was done four years ago in September of 2008. We've tried to avoid repeating themes that are similar, but this one troubles me not at all, for several reasons. First, it's a little startling to realize just how much has been done and accomplished in four years- that's four extra years of Spirit and Opportunity tooling around in the Martian desert, Curiosity is getting geared up, calibrated, and checked out for its own Martian odyssey, Dawn exploring one asteroid and preparing a voyage to a second, four more years of Cassini exploring the Saturnian neighborhood and moons, and Messenger arriving, doing initial higher orbit observations of Mercury, then descending and starting higher resolution observations in a lower orbit. And THOSE are just the big name probes. Second, the geoblogosphere has seen quite a few new members (including Dana herself), so at this point, I have no problem with repeating or doing similar AW editions to earlier ones. New members, new perspectives. Third, the earth is plenty big, but the solar system is inconceivably huger. There are quite a number of bloggers out there who post almost exclusively on planetary geology (as I grew up calling it) or exogeology (as it seems to be most commonly called now). (Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blogs is my favorite.) So it's not as if one AW post on Out of This World Geology was going to put more than a scratch on the countless subjects that could be addressed.

In my post four years ago, my first participation with the AW, I addressed the broad topic of cryogeology, and the idea of how alien it is to us to think of ices as lithic material. While it is quite literally alien from our perspective to think of water and other ices as making up a large or even dominant portion of a large solid body, that is in fact exactly the composition of many bodies in the mid- to outer portion of the Solar System. I mentioned Miranda in that post, and I featured that Uranian moon in my first Moonday post (and the APOD upon which that post was based), but it's my favorite known moon, so forgive me for returning to it yet again.

35 years ago yesterday (September 5, 1977), Voyager 1 was launched into space. Oddly, Voyager 2 had been launched on August 20- if I recall correctly, the reason they were numbered "backwards" was that Voyager 1's path would quickly put it ahead of Voyager 2, even though the latter had a 16-day head start. Voyager 1 was thus able to scout the way at Jupiter and Saturn, and give scientists a better idea of how to target their observations when Voyager 2 passed through those systems later. At launch, Voyager 2 was expected to visit Jupiter and Saturn; extending its planetary mission was contingent on further money being budgeted by Congress, always iffy. However, the budget was extended, and Voyager 2 was pushed deep into Uranus's gravity well, to give a final gravity assist "kick" to also intercept Neptune.

The dive in to Uranus meant that some of the outer moons, which initially were more interesting to planetary scientists, would not be as well observable as had been hoped. And since there was no "scouting trip" by Voyager 1, there would be one chance and one chance only to see what that planetary system had offer. Miranda was not expected to be as interesting as other targets might be, but the path of the probe, and sun/moon illumination aspects would give ample opportunity to study that object. Good thing. Here's a whole-disc image:

At some point in its past, Miranda must have been one of the most geologically active bodies in the solar system. Early speculation was that the moon had been severely impacted, perhaps a number of times, with enough force to disaggregate it, but not enough to cause the pieces to fly apart. That was the story I repeated for roughly 15 years. Then I saw somewhere a new theory that it was impacts and melting, which didn't make as much sense- complete melting would allow segregation of lithics/silicates from ices- and at a density of ~1.2 grams per cubic centimeter, Miranda looks to be a mixture of both. In reading up for this post, I find a much more appealing explanation, which is that Miranda went through a period of orbital resonance with Umbriel, which could have warmed its interior enough to trigger diapirs to develop in the equivalent of its mantle. This would involve solid ice deforming plastically, not melting to liquid. But whatever the explanation, the sense I've always had is that we're seeing enormous depth, compared to the radius of this body, turned over on its side. That fascinates me.

Central in the image above is the feature referred to as the "chevron," and on the right, structures that, as far as is known, are unique to Miranda and Venus, coronae. Looking at the heavily cratered terrain in the upper portion of the image, and down the lower left middle, one can infer you are seeing an ancient, mostly undisturbed surface- much at odds with the dynamism apparent on so much of this small moon. At less than 500 km (300 mi), Miranda would fit easily within the borders of a number of US states.

 

Above, from a NASA image gallery, shows three different terrain types, from left to right, ancient cratered terrain, linearly grooved terrain- an example of a corona- and complex terrain, in which grooves and folds abruptly terminate into each other. Speaking of abrupt, the transition from one terrain type to another is strikingly sudden. Another striking feature pointed out in the Moonday and APOD posts linked in the second paragraph above is the tallest known cliff in the solar system: Verona Rupes, a 20 km fault scarp. At more than 8% of Miranda's radius, an equivalent cliff on Earth would be over 300 miles tall: bigger than Miranda itself! I think the APOD is a zoom and crop of this image, which shows how completely disrupted the terrain is in the neighborhood of that enormous cliff.

I commented to Dana in a recent note, that in each page I had found worthwhile reading while brushing up on this topic, I was amused to see some variation of the comment, "...but, really, no one knows for sure." When I was young, in middle school, I was under the impression that essentially all the questions in science had been answered. And while I loved science, I didn't really grasp what scientists *did,* beyond just "knowing things." Without that context, I don't suppose you'd be able to grasp the childlike glee that the phrase "...but, really, no one knows for sure," gives rise to in my heart. Knowing is wonderful, but coming to know is even more wonderful. And recognizing what one does not know is the first step in that process.

New Horizons is on its way to Pluto, with passage through that system expected in 2015. Based on the Voyager missions, as well as innumerable other planetary science missions over the last few decades, I have no doubt whatsoever that there will be things there that will blow me out of the water. But I will always have a special fondness for Miranda, a tormented child of the the solar system. There are no further missions planned to Uranus, and it's unlikely any great strides in understanding exactly what caused that chaos will occur during my lifetime. I'm okay with that. I wouldn't want to live in a universe where's there's nothing to point at, and with a note of wonder and awe, say, "...but, really, no one knows for sure."

Accretionary Wedge #37: Sexy Geology

Accretionary Wedge #37: Sexy Geology

This month's topic engaged the geoblogosphere's lascivious side, and boy, oh boy did you folks turn out for this late-summer shindig and swinger's party! As always when I host, it's a real pleasure to read through the posts when I first see them, then frustrating as I try to decide how to organize and present them in a way readers will enjoy as much as I did. Of course, when I asked myself what aspects of the earth geologists found sexy, the answer was obvious. What geologists think is sexy is exactly the same sorts of things everyone does: Lines and Forms, Bones and Structures, Tones and Colors, Vivaciousness, and Chemistry.

Lines and Forms

The first thing that often catches our attention when recognizing a natural beauty is a certain perfection of line and form.

Tannis, who likes rocks, finds herself particularly flustered in the face of ripples. "There's just something about being up on a ridge, far away from any water and even farther away from a beach, and seeing ripples."

Silver Fox swoons over the luscious curves of cross bedding in the Navajo Sandstone. She's not the only one: I've seen quite a few posts on this sexy sand over the last few weeks.

Fellow traveler Dana Hunter's post wasn't easy to pigeon-hole: she ran the gamut in Earth Erotica. "My non-geo friends don't get dry mouths and pounding hearts when passing road cuts. Sometimes, I think they're blind to beauty. Unclothed rocks are some of the most beautiful sights on earth."

Dave Bressan breaks into a sweat thinking about beaches past and present, and reminds us of the great truth that geologists are the coolest and sexiest men (and women) alive.

And for our final entrant in this category, Anne Jefferson at Highly Allochthonous shows off some seductive pahoehoe curves during a visit to the Galapagos Island earlier this summer. She also shares some sexy sand, and ends with a provocative shot of an utterly nude sunbather.

Bones and Structures

Underlying line and form, though, is structural perfection. Largely hidden from the untrained eye, practice allows us to see clues and hints to understanding the underlying bones.

Matt at Research at a Snail's Pace first shows us the beauty of Glacier National Park, then uses a pair of sketches to get a sense of the subsurface structures responsible for it.

Ian Stimpson of Hypo-theses was the first to respond to the call for posts, but apparently misunderstood the topic. He thought I was demanding, like a drunken reveler, "Show us your cleavage!"

Count on Jessica Ball of Magma Cum Laude to get us all hot and bothered with shots of a recent fissure eruption in Hawaii. No comment on what resemblance I first saw in the picture below.

Anne of Anne's Musings on Geology and Other Things gets bent out of shape by Big Bend National Park: "To me this place seems to have it all, and that is why I muse upon Big Bend being such a geologically sexy place to visit" .

And our concluding post in this category, from first-time AW participant Un Geologo En Apuros, reminds me I need to carry a spatula with me sometimes, to scrape my eyeballs off the inside of my glasses. I'm not going to copy either photo here; you really need to go see them yourselves, and you most definitely want to click them for glorious full-size. To the author: don't worry about your poor English; my Spanish is much worse, and this is sexy geology that transcends any language barriers.

Tones and Colors

For many, including myself, line, form and structure are all very nice, but what really rivets our attention is the perfect tone, a lovely exotic glow, and a mesmerizing play of color.

Darius Whiteplume is a friendly innertubz denizen I've been following for a while on various blogs and tumblrs, and more recently on Twitter. He sent this to me via the latter yesterday, and I thought it appropriate to "mistake" it for an AW submission.

Selim sends word of the lovely White Desert in his home country of Egypt. It has to be tough in that country right now, but knowing there are sites (and sights) like this gives me hope they can work through their troubles.

Ron Schott posts a magnificent mineralogical mystery: it ain't lithium, it's manganese! (Oh yes, and a groaner of a pun, which, as he says, works better if you read it aloud. Just not too loud.)

My own entry is the beautiful warm glow of the Pinnacles at Crater Lake National Park. As an aside, I had intended as I started that post to get at some of the science of that spot. However, as I surveyed the debris from the landslide of innuendo and double-entendre in that post, I decided to let the science stand at a dignified distance. I'll get back to it later.

Vivaciousness

When humans convey a sense of brimming with life, we call them vivacious. When rocks convey a sense of being full of life, we call them fossiliferous. In either case, though, it's very, very sexy.

Jazinator's excitement is palpable as he recounts his first field rendezvous with Paleodictyon.

Geosciblog focuses on Echinodermata erotica, and fossil fetishists (one of which he claims he isn't) around the world are paralyzed.

Matt at Geosphere gets needled by Cnidaria... the corals, in particular.
And Callan at Mountain Beltway suggested I just link the post I used as an outstanding exemplar of Sexy Geology in the original call for posts: fossils and structures in the vicinity of Swift Dam.

Chemistry

In the end though, each person's answer to the question "What is Sexy?" is going to involve countless imponderables, a lot of je ne c'est pas, and shoulder-shrugging responses, "I dunno. I just do." In other words, the stuff we call chemistry.

Geotripper has some seriously weird rocks that likely are not unique, but I've never heard of or seen their like before.Another first-time participant, Narnian Rockhound at Earth-Like Planet, posts on a world-class mineral area, the Bancroft district in Ontario, Canada. Having visited a number of sites in the area myself, I whole-heartedly concur with this sexy nomination.

Finally, Metageologist weighs in with a dark and sultry mafic mystery: a "syntectonic gabbro."

So there you have it: The geoblogosphere's nominations for sexy geology. It occurs to me that this should have been Wedge number 34. If you're not familiar with the pop-culture rule 34, it is this: "If it exists, there is porn of it." While none of the above constitutes "porn," really, there's no doubt plenty of fodder for some very sweet dreams. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and thanks to all who particpated. If I've somehow managed to miss your submission, leave a comment and link. I'm also happy to add in late submissions, so if you've been meaning to get to this but haven't, you still have a little time.

Next month's AW will be hosted by Anne Jefferson, on the theme "Back to School." See you then!

Cracks in the Innertubz

Apparently, blooger suffered a full-fledged meltdown yesterday, and radioactive debris from various blogs is scattered along breakdown lanes throughout the intercontinental information superhighway system. Stuff exists in my RSS feed that has apparently been extirpated from the actual virtual world, if you know what I mean. For example, I went to leave a comment on a very flattering piece by fellow PNW geoblogger Dana, and whaddya know, this page doesn't exist. Anyway (*blush*), you're very welcome, Dana. (Here's her home page, and maybe that wayward post will show up again... blooger says they're working on it.)So in the spirit of demonstrating that I'm not irritated- not in the least- here's a very pretty picture of some person swimming from Europe to North America, or vice versa; I can't tell which side is which. This is Silfra rift in Iceland, from epic4chan, and it truly looks like an experience that would broaden my view of the world. Or slowly widen it, at least.

Geology News in Photos

Today's In Focus feature is on the Japan earthquake, two months later. Above, a clock submerged by the tsunami records the waterline. I found these photos pretty shocking- the events at the time were plenty shocking enough, but the sheer quantity of debris to be cleaned up and disposed of is difficult to comprehend. A couple of others, #17 and #20, inspire my sometimes warped and generally tasteless sense of humor to caption them along the line of "Silly boats! U no belong there!"

Closer to home, The Big Picture has 30-some images of the flooding along the Mississippi River.There has been a slew of bad science journalism about this event, and the go-to site for accurate information and media corrections has been Steve Gough's Riparian Rap.

I spent my preschool years in Gallipolis, Ohio, and some of my earliest memories are of steamboats that still served as working tugs on that stream. I was in love with a boat named the Kathy R, and could recognize its distinctive whistle from miles away. In the spring of my fourth or fifth year, there was a flood that covered our yard- the ground floor of our house was several feet higher, and was not inundated. I vividly remember feeling like the house was afloat, no longer attached to the earth. I also vividly remember catching crawdads (as I grew up calling them), and being quite amazed that they were in the yard. I'm sure it's small consolation to the family above, but one, this flood will replenish your soil with nutrients and fresh sediment. And two, crawdads are exploring your farm. How cool is that?

Stay tuned as the geology world holds its breath in anticipation for upcoming excitement at Old River Control. I hadn't realized it until yesterday, but John McPhee's New Yorker article on that mega-project, which was later adapted as a third of his book The Control of Nature, is available online. If rivers or environmental engineering hold any interest for you at all- and they both should- this is definitely a recommended read.

Moonday: Triton

From Wikipedia:

English: original NASA caption: Global color mosaic of Triton, taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby of the Neptune system. Color was synthesized by combining high-resolution images taken through orange, violet, and ultraviolet filters; these images were displayed as red, green, and blue images and combined to create this color version. With a radius of 1,350 km (839 mi), about 22% smaller than Earth's moon, Triton is by far the largest satellite of Neptune. It is one of only three objects in the Solar System known to have a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere (the others are Earth and Saturn's giant moon, Titan). Triton has the coldest surface known anywhere in the Solar System (38 K, about -391 degrees Fahrenheit); it is so cold that most of Triton's nitrogen is condensed as frost, making it the only satellite in the Solar System known to have a surface made mainly of nitrogen ice. The pinkish deposits constitute a vast south polar cap believed to contain methane ice, which would have reacted under sunlight to form pink or red compounds. The dark streaks overlying these pink ices are believed to be an icy and perhaps carbonaceous dust deposited from huge geyser-like plumes, some of which were found to be active during the Voyager 2 flyby. The bluish-green band visible in this image extends all the way around Triton near the equator; it may consist of relatively fresh nitrogen frost deposits. The greenish areas includes what is called the cantaloupe terrain, whose origin is unknown, and a set of "cryovolcanic" landscapes apparently produced by icy-cold liquids (now frozen) erupted from Triton's interior.

I find cryogeology fascinating; it's not too hard for me to wrap my head around water ice as a rock-forming material, but nitrogen?

Guess Who?

From an article at NYT; answer in the comments or click over to the article. Mind=Blown.

Adoregon

Scenes like the above are one reason (among many) that I love living here. The above is from an article at OregonLive on a proposed suction dredge gold mining operation on the Chetco River which has had its permit denied. The full-size image is beautiful.

I had the good fortune to visit a placer gold mining operation along a tributary to Quartzville Creek in the mid nineties, and was pleasantly surprised at how little material escaped into the creek, even though a very large excavator and bulldozer were in use. At the confluence of the two streams, only 20 meters or so below the work site, there was no mud outflow noticeable. It was a small operation- according to the claim holders, about 6 to 8 ounces a day came from their work. Nevertheless, the potential for messing up a gorgeous, pristine stream was very definitely there, and it was a real pleasure to see how cautious, responsible stewardship could allow a mining operation to be carried out with minimal impact.

The Chetco is a stunning river, and I'm glad its protection warrants this move. If the miner works at his impact plan more thoroughly- and implements it carefully; there have been way too many violations in the Klamath area- I don't doubt he might eventually get his permit.

Geo-Mystery

Interzone friend Katie, who will soon be off to Connecticut for her PhD in psychology, sent me an interesting link yesterday to the Wikipedia article on The Devil's Kettle at Judge C. R. Magney State Park, Minnesota. Take a look at the picture and spot the problem:
The Brule River splits in two just above a waterfall and falls in two cascades. That's not all that unusual; in fact it's pretty common. What's odd here is that one of the streams falls into a pothole. But wait! Even though that made me do a double-take, reading the text really blew my socks off. See, no one knows where the water goes, and a number of obvious tests have been done to solve the problem without useful results:

One [theory] is that, after dropping down the pothole, the river runs along a fault underground, or as a variant, that it enters an underground channel and comes out somewhere under Lake Superior. Both of these ideas have one valid aspect in common: they recognize that water must move downhill! But the main problem is creating a channel or conduit large enough to conduct the impressive flow of half the Brule River! Faulting commonly has the effect of crushing and fracturing the rock along the fault plane. This could certainly increase the permeability of the rock - its capacity to transmit water - but the connected open spaces needed to drain half the river would be essentially impossible, especially for such a distance. Furthermore, there is no geologic evidence for such a fault at the Devil's Kettle. Large, continuous openings generally do not occur in rocks, except for caves in limestone terranes. The nearest limestone is probably in southeastern Minnesota, so that doesn't help... Maybe the Devil's Kettle bottoms out fortuitously in a great lava tube that conducts the water to the Lake... Unfortunately for this idea, they are not the right kind of volcanic rocks! Rhyolites, such as the great flow at this locality, never form lava tubes, which only develop in fluid basaltic lava. Even the basalts in this area may not be the "right kind", being flood basalts that spread laterally as a sheet from fissures, not down the slopes of a volcano. No lava tubes have been found in the hundreds of basalt flows exposed along the North Shore. Furthermore, the nearest basalt is so far below the river bed, and even if it did contain an empty lava tube (very unlikely after its long history of deep burial) the tube would have to be both oriented in the right direction (south) and blocked above this site so that it isn't already full of debris. And there are no reports of trees or other floating debris suddenly appearing at one spot offshore in Lake Superior. The mystery persists.

Wow. This is a delightfully puzzling planet.

Moonday: Miranda

I meant to kick this off last week, then got distracted by other shiny things. My intent is to post a weekly image from that under-represented group of solar system citizens, the moons. And I vow to keep doing this right up to the point that I don't anymore. This happens to be an auspicious day to start the series: tomorrow (which is already today in the Eurasian borderlands) is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight around the planet, and the dawn of manned spaceflight.

Here's my first selection: my favorite known moon, Miranda, which orbits Uranus. This was posted last week at The Astronomy Picture of the Day (a site which regularly features some out-of-this world geology- see today's pic, for example), with the title, "Verona Rupes: Tallest Known Cliff in the Solar System." The lighting angle and orientation are odd, but the cliff face is toward the lower right, and faces toward the bottom of the image. See that flat, bright surface? That is an estimated 20 kilometers of vertical. Miranda's gravity is much lower than earth's and it is thought that the 12-minute fall from the crest to the bottom might be survivable with the appropriate air bag at the bottom... presuming you could hit it. Click that last link to read more, and click the pic there for a larger field of view. Or click here to see a full-disk mosaic of Miranda. Or both, if you like.

Sheep Rock, John Day National Monument

(Screen capture of the Sheep Rock webcam from a couple minutes ago; click for full size.) @helenasrox alerted me to the webcams at the John Day National Monument a few minutes ago, and the light over there is lovely today. The lower strata, dipping somewhat to the right, are in the John Day Formation, which last I knew was interpreted as ash deposits (fluvially reworked, not ash fall) from the older Western Cascades volcanism. The Cascades are currently confined to a fairly narrow axis of active volcanism, but in earlier stages, eruptions were more widespread, frequent and voluminous. John Day fossils record a excellent record of past life and evolution; according to the Science and Nature webpage at the site, "Here, scientists have unearthed countless fossils of land plants and animals dating back 6 to 54 million years as well as evidence of the dramatic climatic changes that have occurred." For example, the webcam page linked above claims 14 genera (genera, not species) of horses alone have been found there.

The small triangular facet at the top of the peak is Columbia River Basalt, I believe of the Picture Gorge member. Picture Gorge is just a mile or so south of Sheep Rock. In the picture below (from here, again, click for full size), the view is looking north into the gorge, and I'm pretty sure that's Sheep Rock poking up in the middle background.
As you can see, even though it may look in the webcam as if the CRB is flat-lying, it is gently folded in the area, but not as much as the John Day deposits, so this represents an angular unconformity. Incidentally, all too often, when a road goes right through some spectacular geology, as this one does, there's no convenient place to get off the pavement and look at it. I'm pleased to report there is a pullout- at least one- in the gorge. Terrific and enormous columns, though I can't remember if we found the petroglyphs that gave the canyon its name.

Another thing to notice is that even though Oregon has a reputation for being wet, that's really only the western third of the state. Most of the state lies east of the Cascades, in the range's rain shadow, and is fairly dry (though there's plenty of water at higher elevations).

Beautiful!

Christchurch Earthquake

I haven't said anything about this yet. There are so many geobloggers that know much more about the details of this event than I, and more about seismology generally, and who have been doing an excellent job of informing me and others of what happened and continues to unfold in the aftermath, that I haven't felt I had anything to add. However, while I have seen The Big Picture's photo spread linked in a number of places, I don't think I've seen anyone else link to Alan Taylor's new project, In Focus. There are two sets of photos from the quake there, Monday's Earthquake in New Zealand, and yesterday's New Zealand Earthquake: Search, Rescue and Repair.

Taylor created and edited the Boston Globe's Big Picture feature for about two years before leaving for this new project for The Atlantic about the end of last year. The Globe has decided to continue the Big Picture with its own photo editors, and I have been quite pleased to see no noticeable loss of quality without Taylor's leadership. However, I don't have the feeling that others have realized that In Focus has arrived as another regular source of extraordinarily fine photography- and Taylor has a track record of following breaking news in the earth sciences very well, and of recognizing the beauty of photos of the natural world when there is no other pressing news to cover. So if you're a fan of The Big Picture, consider this an alert for another site that you will almost certainly enjoy.

As I mentioned, there have been many, many posts in the geoblogosphere on this topic; not only would it be pretty dull for me to list all of them (both for me and for readers), but futile as well: more posts have been going up daily. I think the single best piece I've read- for me at least- was Dave Petley's "On the causes of the high levels of loss in the Christchurch earthquake." Last September's quake was significantly stronger than the recent one. Why, then, was the destruction and death toll so much higher for the weaker of the two quakes?

Finally, while I have no interest in trivializing this terrible disaster, I have seen this picture in a number of places. Yes, in a way, it's pretty funny. But in a deeper sense, I think it's a wonderful illustration of human resilience. It's an ill wind indeed that blows nobody some good. (Bits and Pieces)Best wishes to our Kiwi friends.

Frostnarok

Yes, it looks like a promo poster for some post-apocalyptic disaster/action movie. But, no, it's not; it's Chicago this morning.

E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune, February 2, 2011: Abandoned vehicles litter northbound Lake Shore Drive on Wednesday morning.

CJSD yesterday offered the top ten nicknames for this storm. The title of this post was lifted from number four.

Life on Palette Earth

Dark Roasted Blend has a gorgeous gallery of art on a planetary scale. At one level, I find this disturbing and silly- a similar act to the one above in Oregon's Alvord desert a decade or so ago was treated like environmental vandalism. At another level, though, I have to say it's kind of impressive.

Oh My.

Via Swans on Tea, I found this Flickr collection of sand photos (two pages) by "Mouser NerdBot". Oh my. I need to catch my breath. Now here's the thing I really appreciate: the photographer has done an excellent job of labeling the location and composition of the samples, even, for example, explaining how the garnets below were concentrated from an "ant sand." Check out the enormous original size photos too!

These garnets were extracted from ant sand. Garnet is paramagnetic and can be separated from its surroundings in sand with a strong magnet. These garnets range in size from 1mm to 5mm in diameter. There are presumably larger garnets in the soil in this area, but with ant sand you are limited to things ants can lift and carry.