Accretionary Wedge #43 is out

Go and check it out. Geologists have a knack for using some interesting diagrams. Many examples of which are provided in this month's carnival. What are you doing here? There are no pictures in this post. Go now.

AW#43: Geological Illustrations

This month's accretionary wedge is hosted by "In the company of plants and rocks," which is a great title for a blog, BTW. The theme is "favorite geological illustration" and I've been having some trouble settling on one illustration. So I'm going to provide three.


This first illustration is not so much about the actual illustration, but the ideas it conveys. One of the great aspects of plate tectonic theory is that it explains so many different geological phenomena. It explains the patterns that we can observe and it allows for very powerful predictions regarding evidence (data, outcrops, etc) that we have yet to discover, and events that have yet to occur. This simple idea that certain parts of the earth's crust can be in motion relative to other parts of the crust was wildly revolutionary - it took many separate lines of evidence to pull together our current ideas regarding plate tectonics. Some 100 years ago when Wegner suggested continents plow through the ocean crust like giant icebreakers, he was criticized for lacking a mechanism to provide the necessary forces and allow for the crust to move. But today, we take this cross-sectional view of ocean crust subducting beneath continental crust as second nature. Yet just 50 years ago it would have been considered somewhat fancy and "cutting edge."




This second illustration is from my dissertation chapter about sedimentary patterns in the upper mississippi valley. If there's something other than a cross-section to get a geologist's blood going, it's a block diagram. It's like someone used a giant pie knife to carve out a block of the earth and hold it up for all to see. This particular diagram represents a great deal of sweat and tears on my part to finish my PhD.



This last example (one of my absolute favorites) is a cartoon my dad did for me right after I started working on my PhD. I think he found the idea of "Ice Age Land Snails" amusing in general. Because who wouldn't want to see giant land snails roaming the frozen tundra, attacking cavemen? I think the comment I like most is that he had a hard time making the radula (snail's rasping mouthparts) look threatening.

The Wedge: Whaddya Wanna Know?

Anne Jefferson over at Highly Allochthonous (you know you're a geology geek if you can spell their blog correctly on the first try without checking) wants to know about geoscience education and careers. (Updated: thanks to Ron and Matt for pointing out an amusing error)

If you are a professor… what do you wish your students would ask? What do you think they should know, regardless of whether it is formally taught and assessed? Do you think we’re doing a good job preparing our students for think future jobs? What should you and I and other geosciences profs be doing better? Do you want to see more involvement from alumni or others in industry and government?

As an educator and scientist, I really can't bring myself to provide a "final" answer to that series of questions. For me, an answer to a question isn't the end - it's simply a node connected to more questions. It's like a subway. Each station might get you where you want to go, but there's always somewhere else you can go from there. You leave the subway, head up to the surface to go shopping or whatever, and you stop going places.

So my feeling is that, as college professors, we have to teach content. But it's easy to get lost in content. At my university, I don't have true "geology" majors, so I don't have students that will be taking a petrology course of some kind. The content that might be vital for giving students the necessary tools in a petrology course (like identifying a big batch of unknown minerals), isn't going to really be used by my students. But an understanding that rocks are made OF specific types of minerals (and if you really want to know more details, here's where to look) will help them appreciate the world around them and the work that geologists do.

In fact, the only details about minerals I point out as being important are:

• There are lots of different kinds of minerals and we can tell them apart by their physical and chemical characteristics


• Most minerals are "silicates" (contain the elements silicon and oxygen - the two most common elements in the earth's crust)


• Of the silicates some are typically dark in color and more dense (Mafic silicates)


• Other silicates are lighter in color and less dense - plus they are made of much more complex molecules (Felsic silicates)


• Some common minerals dissolve relatively easily in water and weak acids (like Carbonate minerals)


• Some minerals are simply Oxides (a metal like iron or aluminum combined with oxygen) "rust" is an example.


• Other minerals are made of just one element. Since we find these elements all by themselves, we call them "Native" elements (like diamond, graphite, copper, gold and sulfur).


• There are several other groups, some of these contain valuable elements - much of the stuff that makes your cell phone work the way it does depends on these rare elements

From this, my students have enough content to know a few details at the start, but - more importantly - they have a conceptual structure (the "scaffolding" in pedagogy talk) to place additional content. Like why volcanoes with mafic melt sources are fundamentally different than volcanoes with more felsic melt. Or why mafic rocks break down into oxides and simple clay minerals, while felsic rocks break down into quartz and more complex clay minerals. If students take my soils course later on, they have the most important details in-hand and we can talk about more details - like why soils that contain complex clay minerals behave differently than soils with simple clay minerals.

Ultimately, my goal is not to turn students into mini-factbooks, crammed with lots and lots of facts and details. Rather, I want students to appreciate that there are amazing and wonderful stories to be read from the earth. I want them to appreciate that there are important details, but they don't need all the details to begin reading the story. Many of us became geologists because they history of the earth itself was enthralling. We pulled together the important details later, as we dug deeper. The most important part was to be curious. To want to take the time and look in the first place. I certainly see this happening in some fields of geoscience education, but I think we could do more to engage and "hook" the non-geology majors with a desire to be curious.

I know that many undergraduates are coming in to college to learn Skill X to apply to Job Y. This is important, but only "right now." Things will change - so Skill X may be obsolete after a few years (perhaps even by the time you graduate). The Esri blog post about 5 skills every GIS specialist should have applies to many fields, not just careers in GIS.

For students, I want to say that it's okay if they forget the details after they take my course. But don't throw away that scaffolding. And don't stop trying to build onto those scaffolds in the future. To get back to the subway metaphor, you should want to keep going. You should get out at the stops and look around, maybe even buy a newspaper or nutroll or something and hang out. But get back on the train. Go somewhere else. Don't assume for a minute that once the train stops and the doors open that everything stops. Once you have an answer to a question, look at it. What other interesting questions does it generate? Keep asking questions.

Get back on the train.

AW#37: "Sexy Geology"

So the theme this month is "Sexy Geology."

For all my research in fluvial systems as a sedimentologist, stratigrapher and paleontologist, there's just something about mountains. They make me go weak in the knees.




This summer brought me to Glacier, National Park. A fitting place, because it was one of those places I remembered hearing about way back as an undergraduate (sometime in the early Holocene). Here's a scan of my class notes (yes, I still have my freshman year Intro Geology Notes - don't you?).



And because a good field geologist always sketches what is in front of their eyes, here's a new sketch. Made standing next to the campsite bathrooms at St Mary campground:

Accretionary Wedge #35: My Favorite Word

I've been racking my brain to think of my favorite geology word. Thing is, geology is a great science for people who like words. We've got all sorts of words.

But, I think I'm going to have to go with "bioturbated" for my wedge post. It's got lots of great implications. In the geologic sense, "bioturbation" occurs when living organisms burrow/crawl/move through sediments, thereby disturbing whatever primary structures were present. I mentioned it last year, too.

I particularly like reference to one particular type of bioturbation. Dinosaur footprints. These prints can sometimes be found all over in Mesozoic rocks - enough of them that it is sometimes referred to as "Dinoturbation."


Iguanodontid footprints - click to embiggen.

Of course, bioturbation need not be preserved in rock to be interesting. Gophers and moles are excellent bioturbators:


Perhaps some day in the distant future our descendants (or the sentient offspring of some surviving taxonomic group) will have their version of geologists. If the term survives, these geologists might mark the tiny sliver of geologic time that some refer to as the "Anthropocene" by noting extensive bioturbation due to activities by a particularly industrious species of ape. We may not be the most extensive agents of bioturbation in Earth history, but we're doing a pretty good job.

UPDATE: Just noticed that this was my 300th post. I don't know if there's anything special, but I kind of like the idea that this reaches the even century mark for the 3rd time.

Weird Geology?

So the topic for Accretionary Wedge #34 is "Weird Geology." So I've been thinking about what strikes me as "weird." As a budding geologist, there were odd things, but I'm wracking my brain to put details to what specific concepts really weirded me out... for now, let me share with you something I see as the "weirdest" geo-topic in my mind right now. Molten Rock.



My wife and I took a trip to Hawai'i last year, and we got to (barely) watch the eruption. The idea that there is enough heat within the earth to melt rock - and that this melt can reach the surface still amazes me. The landscapes are also so foreign to a geologist raised on the North American Craton, what with the shallow dipping layers of sedimentary rock lying atop igneous-metamorphic crustal basement rocks.


The barren landscape inside the Haleakala crater is very alien to what I'm familiar with.


In fact, if you shift the blues in the sky towards red, you could almost imagine you were walking across the surface of Mars...

Things that Astound Me (AW #31)

So the Accretionary Wedge (vol. XXXI) is asking for surprising geological notions. Glad he clarified, because I'm learning all sorts of things about my state's government and my fellow state employees this week (some good, some sad, some stultifying).

So, in that spirit, I'm going to focus on something very, very large. And something very, very small.

Let's start with the large. In this case, it's the solar system. As a child growing up, I had all sorts of astronomy and space rocket books. The Challenger disaster still sticks in my mind as the moment where I really learned about the "costs" of space exploration. Although I didn't go on to become an astronaut (I did toy with the idea for a while, though), I still study aspects of one tiny yet important blob of silicon and metal oxide hurtling around the sun.

As an exercise in perspective, I have my students map out a scale model of the solar system on our University's campus. It's about 1,000 meters from the southernmost goalpost on our (American) football field straight north along the sidewalk to the pillar next to the Clocktower (which, amusingly, has four different times displayed on each of its faces - I don't think funds to repair it will be in the budget for a while). That gives us the bounds for our model. We'll put the sun on the north end.

At the other end, we'll place Neptune. I use Pluto's reclassification as one of those "teachable moments" that explains why scientists are very particular about words. "Planet" means something specific. If we don't call other trans-neptunian objects "planets" because they lack certain qualifications, we can't simply give Pluto a special name because we like it - if it's not a planet, then it's not a planet. Words have specific meanings - and we must try as hard as we can to say what we mean (we may or may not mean what we say, but that's an issue for the Cheshire Cat and his peers).

So, we have our solar system boundaries. Sun to Neptune = 1,000 m. We could simply divide the distance between the two and then convert all the other planetary distances the same way. Or, we could use the Astronomical Unit (AU), which is the average distance between the sun and earth (about 150,000,000 km ~93,000,000 miles). This reduces really HUGE numbers into more manageable chunks (easy to do w/o a calculator). The distance from the Sun to Neptune is about 30 AU. So, 100 m/30 AU leaves us with about 33 meters per AU. So the Sun to Earth distance is 33.3m. We can just multiply 33.3 m to each planetary distance (in AU) and place each planet on the map.


Data table for the solar system model.

We can scale the sun and planets to this model, too. The sun ends up being a little larger than a basketball. Earth is about the size of an "airsoft" BB pellet. Jupiter is a little smaller than a ping-pong ball. Now imagine holding the basketball-sun and looking down the walkway and just seeing the football field in the distance a thousand meters away. Resting on that far goal post is a marble. That marble is neptune.

Pretty cool. But it works the other way too. What if we were to take an atom of gold and scale it up so that we were holding the nucleus and the outermost electrons were on that goalpost? The nucleus would be just a little larger than a baseball. The electrons, all 79 of 'em, would be little BBs orbiting in clouds. Technically, electrons are "point" particles with no actual physical dimensions of length, width or height.

Graphical representation of object/particle sizes (distances not to scale). Click for a much larger version.

Clicking on the image will bring up an image that is about 20% larger than the model described here. That means you'll have to put Neptune about 1,200 meters away from the sun to match the size of the planet images to the distance from the sun.

And now for the mind-bending part if we tally up the mass of all the stuff in the solar system, the sun accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass in the solar system. If we tally up all the mass of the neutrons, protons (each being about the size of a marble - one inch in diameter), and electrons, the nucleus accounts for 99.98% of all this stuff. Proportionally, there's more than six times more mass outside the sun than mass outside an atomic nucleus.

There is more space in stuff than there is stuff in space^*!
^*For carefully measured amounts of "space." Every atom in our bodies has more empty space inside of it than can be found in our solar system.

I just find that incredibly cool and a remarkable demonstration of the vastness of space, and the tinyness of atomic particles. Trippy.

Food Mechanics

My gastrogeological blog post for this month's wedge is about pasta. Dried spaghetti, actually.



In geology, we often like to use models to demonstrate properties of rocks and their behaviors. If you take a piece of uncooked spaghetti and bend it a little bit, you'll notice that it springs back when you let it go. This elastic property also applies to rocks. If you bend the spaghetti enough, it will break. The spaghetti can deform as an elastic material up to a certain point, then it will break (displaying brittle behavior).

BEFORE:


AFTER:


In geology, we call this deformation "strain." The amount of force applied per area is "stress." With a little bit of stress, you can observe strain - but the noodle can go back to its original shape when the stress is removed. With more stress, the spaghetti noodle breaks - and the broken pieces spring back to their original shape. It takes energy to deform the spaghetti. When the spaghetti breaks, it releases much of that stored-up energy as the pieces rebound elastically.

In many ways, this is how rocks behave - they can strain like an elastic material to a certain point - then they break as a brittle material. If we imagine that areas where rocks are under a great deal of stress, like convergent or transform tectonic plate boundaries, we can see (at least in part) why earthquakes release so much energy very quickly. Only after the strength of the rock is exceeded do they move - and all that stored energy is released as the rock rebounds from that original deformation. This is one part of how geologists can predict the possibility and potential strength of an earthquake. The strength of an earthquake is in part proportional to the amount of stress applied to rocks, the amount of strain accumulated in them, and the ability of the rocks to rebound afterwards.

If the rocks are "squishy" and deform plastically (they don't rebound after the stress is removed), they won't release a lot of energy. Cold rocks not subjected to lots of confining stress (unlike those close to the mantle), can rebound fairly easily. And in many places, the maximum earthquake possible is proportional to how much strain the rocks can accumulate before they finally break. Which is why a magnitude "10" earthquake is very unlikely - few rocks are strong enough to accumulate that much strain and then release it.



If you have tried breaking spaghetti, you may have noticed that it rarely breaks in half. Instead of two pieces, you often end up with three or even four. These pieces are often of similar size - suggesting that some characteristic behavior is at work. This phenomenon has been studied in detail - it relates to the way in which the elastic rebound properties of the material actually apply so much stress that it breaks again as it "whips" back to its original shape.

I took a few videos of this phenomenon - but it's already been analyzed and written-up by other people. Plus they have some spiffy (and better quality) slow-motion video:

http://www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti/index.html

http://www.math.psu.edu/belmonte/spaghetti.html

Update: some additional video just finished uploading:

Pasta Mechanics from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.

What's Cookin?

I'm working on something for the food related Accretionary Wedge. For now, here's a little preview of what I'm working on.

Breaking Spaghetti from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.

AW #29

AW #29 is up over at Ann's Musings. Check it out. I like her use of landforms as a way of organizing topics. Thanks Ann!

Home is...

...where you hang your hat. Or your towel. Or something



This month's Accretionary Wedge (hosted by Ann's Musings) is about your "home." What do you like - what's not so great. I put together a little GIS map showing the regional topography to give you an idea of the lay of the land. The area is dominated by bedrock-controlled ridges with Quaternary alluvium filling in the valley lowlands.

I like the challenges of piecing together the little bits of information that tell me about the evolution of this landscape. I also like that there are many scenic little rivers that are near my house.



I do wish we had some big mountains nearby...

...but I guess that's why we go on field trips.

I've blogged about western Wisconsin before:
Braided Streams of Yore
Driftless Area Origins Part One, Part Two
Fractal Landscapes

Accretionary Wedge #28: Halloweeny DeskCrops

Trick or Treat^†

It's time for another Accretionary Wedge. This month's theme is "Deskcrops," which I had intended to use as a showcase for the weird and wacky stuff that we geologists accumulate over the years. I've seen departmental collections where the strangest things were in there. "Pebbles and Mortar" from Hadrian's Wall; flesh, bone, and adiposere (fat) from a dead rhino; 1 mL of Deuterium (heavy water); and many more strange and beautiful things.

Seeing that it's Halloween (and also my Birthday), I thought it might be neat to go Trick-Or-Treating in the geobloggers to see what I get. When I was a kid, I would split my loot into different piles. From stuff I liked, to things, like "Bit-O-Honey" that weren't really very good. Fortunately for me, all the stuff I got was great - and roughly fits into categories related to the rock cycle.

This was my costume:


I'm going to give pride of place to my contribution: a few chunks of Trinitite: the glass made out of fused sand and rock and bits of equipment (casing, wire, etc) that formed in the explosion from the first atomic bomb.


It doesn't look like much - just some greenish, glassy stuff - several vesicles, and "blobs" of melted, spherical droplets. It has a little radioactivity above background. But I did notice some interesting bits. It does have parts that fluoresce in long and short-wave UV light:

There are a few flecks of orangy things. The chunk of rock they're sitting on is also showing off some nice fluorescence. I blogged about this chunk last week.

It's under short-wave UV that the Trinitite really shines (pun intended):

I don't know what's causing the red, orange, yellow, and white colors. It's probably a fascinating melange of stuff incorporated into, altered, or formed during the explosion.

So, let's see what else I got...

Igneous Rocks

First off, we'll go with igneous rocks. These are rocks formed by the "freezing" of molten rock. These rocks may form deep below the surface as an "intrusive," or erupted onto the surface as an "extrusive" rock (often in a dramatic volcanic eruption).

Philip at Geology Blues provided some "Lavasicles." And tells a tale of finding neat rocks hiding within an existing collection. No need to traipse around the world, just capitalize on what's at hand. Kind of like MacGyver...

Jess at Magma Cum Laude (she's probably still unpacking at her new blog-home) tricks us with an interesting scorch pattern on some pumice from the Sufriere Hills.

Garry, the Geotripper, shows off some lovely peridotite xenoliths. And provides a keen quote to boot!

Ian from Hypo-theses, continues to blog about a rock each day. Quite a challenge. You know the post is going to be interesting when the exposition begins with a story about sitting around a bedouin campfire on the edge of the Sahara. We're treated to many photos of some kind of long-named, Norwegian pegmatite. Check out those phenocrysts!

Lockwood's blog, Outside the Interzone, gave us a neat hunk of pillow basalt. It includes the classic field photo (hammer for scale) to show its provenance. Also, not the only blog to photograph the rock with a cat for scale - there might be a theme here...

Sedimentary Rocks

Sedimentary rocks are either "clastic," which are made of broken fragments of pre-existing material compacted, cemented, and turned to stone. Or, they are "non-clastic" - I've never been a fan of classifying something by what it's not - so I prefer the term "chemical" for the other group of sedimentary rocks that are formed by precipitation out of solution.

Anne, over at Highly Allocthonous shows off some nifty cubes of rock she uses to teach about porosity and permeability. Incidentally, my house lies about 20 feet above the Eau Claire Formation in the stratigraphic sense. There's a slice of the Wonewoc and some unlithified sand/gravel outwash between us, but some of my drinking water comes from this aquifer. Many of our local springs form as a result of the interbedded shales that form local aquicludes (even perched water tables in the hills nearby).

Silver Fox, who is still Looking for Detachment, shows off a very Halloween-y hunk of dolomite breccia that looks like a Jack-O-Lantern. These kinds of rocks show that the distinction of "clastic" or "chemical" are not always useful. The big pieces of gray dolomite are clasts, but the whole thing is made of and cemented by the precipitation of minerals from solution.

Having been properly tricked, David at History of Geology provenance, shows off some lovely fossils from the eponymous "Dolomites." Incidentally, carbonate rocks are relatively susceptible to chemical weathering, but often resistant to physical weathering - especially in arid regions where they slowly weather into sharp little points and edges, that give rise to the term "tear-pants" topography. Those of you who have sat on these rocks have probably noticed how quickly this texture can slice open clothing, boots, and hands.

Metamorphic Rocks

A metamorphic rock is what happens to rock subjected to increased heat and/or pressures. These produce new textures and minerals as the rock deforms in response to these changes.

The Musings of a Life-long Scholar shows off a "deskcrop" that doesn't take up much space - a backscatter electron image of a monzonite grain. Photographs often contain a lot of data, and they take up much less space than the actual material.

Dana Hunter over at En Tequila Es Verdad, provides a few images. The first is a Schist, followed by a meteorite, and then the "peacock" ore, bornite. Also with cat-for-scale photograph.

Misc

Then there were some treats that didn't fit into a nice category. Like the multi-treat packs, they had a little bit of everything, or their post had some other geologically related theme.

Callan Bently and his Mountain Beltway, also unpacking into a shiny new home, shows off a bunch of samples. Does a vodcast count for a blog carnival? Seems kind of "fancy" for this show since everything else looks monodimensional by comparison. Kind of like being the following act after the talking pig at the county fair.

Helena Heliotrope from Liberty, Equality, and Geology shows off a spikey dogtooth spar and a hunk of orpiment. Orpiment is a pretty (if toxic) mineral with a chemical formula that's easy to remember As₂S₃. Just omit the subscripts. This works even better for Realgar.

Julia over at Stages of Succession shows off some "Labcrops" of biological specimens, including multicolored mammalian crania, critters in jars, and a few colorful remarks. I'm rather partial to the red maxillae and yellow frontals on the skulls.

John - from Karmasotra - shows off some clamshells. I believe they're all Mercenaria sp., showing various growth and bioerosion development stages. Plus a creepy comment about preserving beauty through death. What was that quote about "leaving a beautiful corpse..."?

Finally, one more trick: Ron Schott's Geology Home Companion, blogfather to many, and inspriation for this theme said he was working on a post. I'll link to it when it appears.

^†The "tricked" blogs are all there, you just have to figure out how to see them... (hint: try selecting text).

I think I've gotten everyone - please alert me to any errors or omissions.

UPDATE: Ann,who muses on geology and other things, has a post. It got lost in the shuffle and I wasn't able to find a link to the post until today. She writes a few musings about a piece of amber. As you may know, amber is the fossilized sap of trees. It has the interesting property of being slightly less dense than salt water, so sometimes chunks of amber erode out of the rock where they are preserved and wash up somewhere down the shore.

UPDATE 2: Jazzinator (aka Dino Jim) has a post to add. It includes a nice spooky story of a scary mineral. No trick, I guess. I figure being at the bottom of the post is tricksy enough...

Reminder: Accretionary Wedge!

Call for Posts!

Just a reminder - the October "Accretionary Wedge" is being hosted here at RAASP. We may be small, but we've cleared a whole blog entry just for this.

You can leave a comment on this thread, the original post on this blog, or the Accretionary Wedge site.

If you don't have a blog, but still want to participate - send an email to me (find it via the profile page). Include your name, a brief description, plus a photo (keep the file size reasonable, please). I'll add it to the mix.

Here's a preview:

Many geologists have access to a rock saw now and then. The desire to cut rocks into useful/interesting shapes can have quite a pull. I have no idea where the rock came from (save for the UW Geology Museum Giftshop, or exactly what it is - it's mass is 776.9 g. An estimate for volume put it at 283.1 cm³, which gives a specific gravity of about 2.74. It scratches glass, but not quartz.

I think it has some quartz mixed in, but I'm not sure about the green stuff. It kind of matches some of the descriptions of Scapolite group minerals, but the color seems a little weird a few flecks do fluoresce a pale yellow-white. It's got a generally metamorphic vibe/fabric, which is probably why it's causing me trouble. And yes, "vibe" should be a diagnostic category for rocks and minerals - we can put that into the next edition of Hurlbut & Klein.

Accretionary Wedge #27

So the Accretionary Wedge theme is "Important Geological Experience." I thought I'd post a picture from my first major geological field trip (in "deskcrop" format as per next month's AW).



It's a fault-polished piece of the Bighorn Dolomite. I collected it in March, 1996 as part of a spring break trip to Wyoming. It was one of the first times I realized that I could "do" field geology. And, most importantly, to look at the rocks. It was one of those moments where the instructors had just taken us through the stratigraphic section of central Wyoming, pausing at the preCambrian igneous/metamorphic rocks. Just a few yards away was this highway road cut through Ordovician dolomite.

One of the instructors put me on the spot, asking me to speculate on how one might get ordovician rock sitting next to preCambrian basement rock (skipping all those cambrian rocks in-between). The outcrop was nothing special - in fact, much of it was covered by talus and vegetation. But, being a minting geologist, I thought for a moment, then looked at the rocks by my feet. There was a chunk of beautifully polished dolomite. "A fault" I said, holding up the sample. I managed to earn "field-trip-brownie-points" not only by providing a reasonable answer, but also a piece of material evidence for my idea. Even today, if the geologic story in front of me does not seem to make sense, I make sure to look down at the rocks by my feet.

Geological Heroes

This month's Accretionary Wedge is all about "Heroes."

I think I'll treat this as a sort of stream of consciousness post:

The first people who come to my mind when I try to think of the people who are my geology heroes would be my parents. It was they who bought me my first dinosaur book when I was about three or four years old. I was hooked ever since. My parents are both teachers - as were my grandparents. So teaching has always been a big part of how I interact with the world. This blog is just an extension of the idea of "teaching." When I was about five years old, I drew a picture of a dinosaur skull and a school bus. Above it, I wrote: "I want to be a scientist or a bus driver." Well, the bus driving thing didn't pan out - but here I am, some thirty years after the fact, researching, teaching, and sharing with the larger community all things geological.

I toyed with the idea of aerospace engineering for a while, because the Challenger disaster piqued my interest in rockets and airplanes. Then came "The Dinosaur Heresies" by Robert Bakker - I read that book cover to cover at least twice between the ages of 13 and 15. My high school earth science class also renewed my interest in geology. It was my high school biology teachers, however, that really motivated me. Mike and Sara Clough were quite the team. They were very good teachers - both in terms of pedagogical style, but also in terms of content. Evolution was not tip-toed around. It was in-your-face change in gene frequency. They gave me the basic framework of how evolution works - I still have some of those lessons in my head today. But it wasn't just evolution - it was science in general. The notion that "the nature of science" wasn't just some set methodology, but rather a rich and iterative process was something that I had "felt," but it wasn't until my time with Mr. and Ms. Clough that I really "got it." It was there I got my first taste of works by the late Stephen Jay Gould and Thomas Kuhn (yes, I read "The Nature of Scientific Revolutions" as a 10th grader: big geek, I know).

College was my introduction to the richness of geology - not just rocks and fossils, but volcanoes, and rivers, and glaciers and soils. My school had a small geology department - just three tenure-track faculty. But we took trips to Wyoming, Iowa, and all over Wisconsin. My advisor did not get tenure (it's a long story, don't get me started). I gained an appreciation for the politics of academia (to quote James Earl Jones: "watch your back, Jack"). But I'm glad to say the department survived the turmoil, and my former advisor is in a much better situation now.

Grad school was the usual milieu of fellow students, faculty and advisors. My own advisor was a student of S.J. Gould. The deeper I got into paleobiology and evolution, the more I learned to appreciate Gould's writing in small bits. His wasn't the only voice, nor the most accurate at times. There are too many names in the field to go through them all. Suffice to say they made me realize not only how to look at the rocks, but also to be very careful about acknowledging that which I did not know. Eschew interpretation, when observation will suffice. Interpretations are vital, but must be built on solid observations.

My dissertation project grew out of conversations I had with the director of the UW-Geology Museum. Again, his guidance and support has kept my trains of thought on schedule, and from derailing to often.

My wife has been a major source of inspiration. I owe her a great deal, since it was her patience and editorial eye that helped me finish my Ph.D. I find having another mind to bounce an idea off of, or pair of eyes to look at a sketch is wonderful. Especially if that mind is independent enough to look at me like I've gone bananas and bring me back to reality. I've been kicking around in the post-dissertation world for almost a year now. Since then I've had to revisit and teach a lot of physics. You don't realize how vital the works by Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Bohr, and others are sometimes. But every single aspect of our modern society depends on the fundamental properties of gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces. That's both the technology that we use, but also the founding theories upon which fields like climatology, remote sensing, and radiometric dating are built.

So I can't name one "hero" out of everyone who influenced me over the past few decades. But they all left me with something very important. An understanding of how the world works (idealized at times, but useful) and how to apply that knowledge to pick things apart further. Although I can't leave without another salute to my mom and dad. It's probably all their fault...