Yep. My research has taken me to many places. The electron microprobe laboratory, the geochemistry lab, and my office. All of which reside within a massive 30 metre radius. But later today, I’m on a plane, off to Hawai’i for the Lunar and Planetary Institute Workshop on the Chronology of Meteorites and the Early Solar System (MetChron 2007), (and here’s a link to the pdf of my abstract, if you’re interested).

Since I’m getting my tickets paid to and from Hawai’i, thanks to travel grants, I’ve also decided to spend a few days bumming around on the beaches on Maui and the Big Island while I’m there. It’d frankly be a waste not to waste time on the beach. Double negatives aside, I’m quite excited I’m getting overseas again. The last time I departed the sweet shores of Aotearoa was back in 2002 on my fourth trip to the UK (a pretty sweet trip, but so many years ago).

Here’s the thing. I’m going to be living cheap. Really cheap. I’m a lowly student with little cash to spend on luxuries like accommodation or washing clothes. That combined with my OCD-like minimalist philosophy mean I’m obsessing with packing as little as possible to survive for the 12 days I’ll be away. Since I’ll be living cheap, I want to take as few valuables as I can deal with, to the extent I’m considering leaving my precious (now fixed) iPod at home and going music-free for almost 2 madness-inducing weeks. At the moment I’m taking as many hole-free pairs of boxers and socks as I can find, combined with a few t-shirts, 3 pairs of shorts and pair of jeans. I may even take a towel, but I’m still debating whether that sensible or not….

I want a single small bag to carry everything, but taking one small carry-on bag on a trip for two weeks will no doubt arouse suspicion with those overly-paranoid goombas at customs. So rather than risking the rubber glove, I’m going to “pack” all my clothes into a bigger backpack, check that through into luggage, and then discard it once I get to Hawai’i, along with my less-liked clothing once they’ve been worn to a point where they’d normally need washing. If I need more clothing I’ll just go to the “WalMart, which I believe is where all the cool kids in the America States get their clothing.

So, now I’ve no doubt set off red flags in the governmental agencies which read blogs, with my talking of buying clothes at WalMart, I’m going to get back to “packing”. I’ll try and keep updates going if I can get to the internets while on the islands.

Woo, that just gave me a huge stroke of déjà vu for some reason. I should get some sleep.

A couple of weeks back I launched goodSchist, a blog dedicated entirely to my interests in earth science. I decided I wanted to be part of the Accretionary Wedge – an earth science themed blog carnival. Rather than putting my posts here with all the other bullshit I post about, I thought that making a new site, with a layout I’ve been working on for ages (originally intended for another site I “run”), would be the way to do it.

I’ve got a podcast in the works (or, as I’m calling it, a podClast – just to stick with the geology puns). I’ve also got a few articles I’ve been working on for this site, getting closer to a state where I can post them on goodSchist.

So, if you’re interested in geology or science in general, take a look at goodSchist. It’s good shit.

Richard Dawkins’ latest Channel 4 series, and sequel to Root of all Evil? is entitled The Enemies of Reason. In it, Dawkins takes a scientific look at the enormous industries of alternative medicine, faith healing and other rubbish superstition. Channel4 in the UK has posted both episodes on Google Video, which means I can post them here. Enjoy.

Part 1 (48 Minutes from http://video.google.com/)

Part 2 (48 Minutes, from http://video.google.com/)

There are few things in this world that get me genuinely angry. Religion and anti-intellectualism are two of them and pseudo science is another. It is the latter this article concerns.

Neal Adams is a world-famous comic book artist, renowned for his work on the comic books Green Lantern and Batman. He is also a prominent supporter of the expanding earth hypothesis – a hypothesis that was superceded by the theory of plate tectonics more than 40 years ago.

Eccentric artists are fine by me, but when someone comes out and starts making claims that a large portion of science is wrong, offering nothing more than some fancy animations to support such claims, real scientists like me have to step in. Neal Adams not only thinks plate tectonics is wrong, but through our extensive discussions on YouTube (yes, I know, YouTube is the bottom of the barrel), has stated the following beliefs;

• The moon is hollow, rings like a bell
• An Elephant defines the maximum land animal size (tell that to mammoths)
• If elephants walked like other animal with bent legs their bones would snap
• Planets don’t orbit the sun because of gravity, they do so because of the sun’s magnetic field
• The moon is held in orbit by the earth’s magnetic filed
• Mountains have been growing for only the last 50 million years
• The planet increases in size exponentially
• All of Geology supports a growning Earth (none of it does)
• Geology theory says the silicates get DENSER going down (strictly speaking, no)
• A day can’t get longer without Earth getting bigger (the day length relys on the Earth-Moon gravitational system and the angular momentum thereof)
• COLD comes from deep and rises
• Heat does NOT rise
• Earth’s centre of gravity is at the planet’s core
• Magnetic fields travel faster than light
• Rocks that form the Himalayas have always been above the sea
• COMET Schumacher Levi 9 was an asteroid
• Comets don’t fracture.
• Water was and is made in the core of the Earth
• Earth and the other planets did not differentiate
• Elements heavier than iron aren’t made via fusion
• …and many other baseless, stupid claims

To put it lightly, his claims and refusal to accept he’s wrong make my blood boil. So much so that I’ve produced two video replies to him.

These videos are the first of many I hope to make, time and gusto permitting. The first video is Neal’s first expanding earth film and my nit-pick on the details he presented regarding the southern hemisphere.

Neal’s Video:

My response:

There was a very flattering (to me) and damning (to Neal), post over at postpolitical entitled Mud From Space.The article also archives a long discussion series from the YouTube comment thread where I take to task a couple of Neal’s supporters. At times when I post enraged comments directed at some people, I think I’m behaving like a complete dick. But being able to read through a thread as posted previously makes me feel quite a bit better about my angry defence of science.

My second response concerns a second video of Neal’s which claims Pangea couldn’t have existed due to a straw man he built based on an appeal to personal incredulity. I’ve been working on this reply for some time, even before I posted the previous reply. A page summarising my reply can be found here: RE: Neal Adams Pangea

Neal’s Video:

My response:

My efforts will not change Neal’s mind, because from what I can tell, he is unconcerned with evidence counter to his own claims, or listening to people with any experience or expertise. My hope is my efforts will prevent people from subscribing to Neal’s baseless, ridiculous pseudo-science and help encourage scientific enquiry and skepticism in the face of loud, scientific ignorance.

Neal Adams is to geology what Kent Hovind and Ken Ham are to evolution. Completely irrelevant and a good belly laugh for anyone with a clue.

I had the dubious “honour” of coming across this video on YouTube today, watch it and keep your scientific wits about you. Actually, the slightest shred of common sense will suffice;

Let me spare you the torturous, septic YouTube comments that resulted and tackle a few points about this video (most comments were anti-muslim, or racist or outrageously retarded regarding the age of some of the commenters).

Firstly, as should be blindingly obvious, this guy doesn’t have a clue about science. There’s no magnetic “zero” zone on earth, because the Earth’s magnetic field flows in a single vector around the planet. Here’s a brief run-down on the magnetosphere from the American Geophysical Union. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, your compass needle still points to the north. The only time it’ll point to the south is during geomagnetic reversal, in which case everyone’s compasses point to the geographic south (which becomes the polar north).
Secondly, the basalts around Mecca are not the oldest rocks in the world, that honour is awarded to zircon crystals from the Jack Hills in Australia. Mecca sits on the Arabian Shield which formed during the late Archean, at ~2500 Ma (at least according to the Saudi Geological Survey). The Jack Hills zircons are ~4100 Ma, so maybe Australia should be Islam’s most holy site? I didn’t think so

The rocks from the temples around Mecca are not made from pre-solar material. The chances that the only major, preserved pre-solar material fall in the world being the material those temples are made from is, excuse the pun, astronomical. Even if it were pre-solar material, there’d be a huge amount of pre-solar material elsewhere on Earth, and I’d probably be studying it.

There is no “infinite” radiation being emitted from Mecca. Infinity doesn’t exist for one thing. Secondly, if this is radiation pointing to heaven, then heaven changes its position every second of every day of every year. We live in a heliocentric solar system, not a geocentric universe.

I have an equally low respect for Islam as I do for all other religions. But I have an even lower respect for people pretending to be scientists (I’ll be taking to Neal in a later post) and others believing the bullshit they spin.

I’m out.

via Astronomy Buzz;

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of ‘seismic’ information on a far away, Sun-like star, with unexpected accuracy.

The ESA (European Space Agency) satellite COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) is designed in part to measure the variations in light waves from stars when an exoplanet transits its stellar parent. This can be summed up simply with the following image from the ESA;

The first planet imaged is a gas giant with a radius 1.78 times that of Jupiter (or 127,255 km), which completes an orbit of its star every 36 hours.

The exceptionally cool thing about these results is the accuracy to which this luminescent variance has been measured. So accurate that imaging a planet the size of the Earth is possible. From the ESA Portal;

The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets – perhaps even as small as Earth – and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition.

Measuring the variance in the light frequencies is a good way of determining the composition of something as light passes through. This means that determining the make-up of a rocky exoplanet’s atmosphere is perhaps possible with COROT.

COROT could herald a new age of exoplanet discovery, which is awesome. We need a new home.

Ever wondered how the solar system formed and why the planets and asteroids are the way they are? I do all the time. That’s why I’m in the second year of my MSc in Geology; the research year. I thought I’d share a few shots of the meteorite samples I’m doing my research on, and a brief run-down on what I’m doing, what I’m aiming to achieve and why any of this counts as geology.

At the risk of you, my beloved reader, experiencing a fit of explosive eye-glazing, I will first present a picture of my very first mounted meteorite sample (not as dirty as it sounds);

The white bit in this picture is 4.5672 billion years old. It’s one of the oldest solids in the Solar System and dates back to a time when the Sun was just kicking off its fire-juggling party. The minute concentrations of iron in this rock and the iron in your blood are from the same star-derived reservoir. But I digress.

This is a sample of a Calcium-Aluminium rich Inclusion (or CAI) from a carbonaceous chondrite (stoney-iron meteorites). These things formed in a very hot environment, and the minerals within have gone through between one and three stages of melting. The heat inherent in the environment was not due to the sun, but radioactive decay of unstable isotopes such as 26 Aluminium (Half life of ~703 Ka).

What I’m doing with these tiny inclusions (which are all less than 10mm in diameter), is determining the major mineral constituents, of each of those I’m looking at the minor or trace element concentrations and finally dating them by determining comparative ²⁶Mg deficits (if any). So what involved in each step?

Step 1: Mineralogy: Using an Electron Micro Probe, I am able to determine the major elemental weight percentages of each mineral “phase” of the targeted CAI;

Each shade of grey in the above image is a different mineral. In this case, the lightest phase (Phase 1, points of sampling are orange) is melilite, the second lightest (Phase 2, coloured blue) is pyroxene, phase 3 (in green) is anorthite, and the nearly black phase 4 (in red) is spinel. The above image is an electron back-scatter image of a Type B1 CAI from the carboneceous chondrite NWA 2364.

Step 2: Trace Elements: Using Laser Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), I am determining the concentrations of 34 chemical elements that are present to an accuracy of a few parts per million (ppm) or less. The elements I’m looking for range through Uranium, Thorium, Lead, Titanium, the Rare Earth Elements (REE) and more. By comparing the concentrations of these elements in different CAIs, whole meteorites and planets, you can get an idea of what was around when each formed and how the areas of formation differed in their respective elemental composition. Did the Earth and these CAIs form in the same place in the solar nebula? The answer at the moment is no, so why did the solar nebula cloud have differing concentrations of elements from one point to another? That’s the big questions relating to how these various bodies formed.

I like to think of this step as a real life game of Asteroids, with a scientific slant.

Step 3: Magnesium Deficits and Dating: Using another kind of ICPMS, namely a Multi-Collector, I will be determining the concentrations of the isotopes of magnesium (Mg) in each of my collected samples. As I mentioned previously, these samples were heated by the decay of ²⁶Al. This particular isotope decays to ²⁶Mg. So the more ²⁶Mg in a sample, the older it is. Any deficit in ²⁶Mg compared to that of the maximum found in CAIs can be correlated to the time between CAI formation and the formation of whatever you’re looking at. So by getting the ²⁶Mg/²⁴Mg ratio from these samples, I can determine their relative ages from oldest to youngest. This is of interest because knowing over what time span CAIs were forming can help you determine whether it all happened at once in a very short time span (and was thus stopped by some process of the sun’s formation), whether there were several exclusive periods of CAI formation (perhaps by injection of ²⁶Al from nearby supernovae), or whether it happened slowly and steadily over 6 half lives of ²⁶Al (most likely).

Why does this count as geology? By knowing what was around when the Earth formed and thus what it is made of (i.e, how the chemical composition of the solar nebula changed over time) and how old it is in comparison to other bodies in the solar system, you can build more accurate models of the chemical composition of the materials that make up the crust, mantle and the core of the Earth. This helps in the understanding of how and why things are the way they are. It also makes up the underpinning of mantle geochemistry, volcanic petrology and chemistry, and environmental and atmospheric evolution (which links to the formation of life (abiogenesis) and the like.

So that’s what I’m spending most of my time doing. Any questions, just post a comment and I’ll endeavour to answer.

This is a talk by Richard Dawkins on how bizarre the natural world appears but how it only appears weird due to our brain’s evolution. We’ve evolved to tackle the challenges of living in an Africa safari, not delving into the inner workings of the universe. Still we march on and expand our knowledge of the universe, but it all seems a bit “queer”; for lack of a more appropriate word.

My favourite quote;

We are now so used to the idea that the Earth spins rather than the Sun moves across the sky. It’s hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. After all it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun small and mobile. But it is worth recalling Wittgenstein’s remark on the subject. “Tell me”, he asked a friend, “Why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth!” Wittgenstein replied, “Well what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

From: TEDblog

I’ve just read an article on the BBC about Reading University’s plan to drop physics from its available courses. Nothing too interesting in itself, however, a particular quote jumped out at me;

At the Institute of Physics, science director Peter Main said this illustrated the flexibility of physicists.
“For example, if an archaeologist wants to date something, they get a physicist,” he told BBC News.

Not only does he have the same name as the former VP of Nintendo of America, but he also seems unaware that geologists, specifically geochemists, do a crap load of dating. I mean, the ICPMS was invented and originally built by a chemist, Harold Urey, who is also the father of geochemistry. If you want something dated, you’ll likely be doing acid chemistry. If you’re actually doing archaeological dating, you’ll likely be doing luminescence dating, something you’ll probably be doing in your local geology or archaeology department.

I’m not saying physics isn’t needed, physical chemistry and radioactivity are the cornerstone of most dating methods. Physics is cool in my opinion, but it’s not just people who are physicists by training or occupation who do it, or understand it.

And that’s it for my 2:30am rant.

In a similar vein as maps, Google has released Google Mars.

You can browse around Mars in elevation, infrared and visible light modes and see how our tiny neighbour and last of our solar system’s terrestrial planets, looks. Keep an eye out for roads, spaceports and scientific stations popping up over the next 1,000 years.