Wild Wild West

Littlest Lovliest Lab Lemming takes the American Southwest by storm. Ugly Horse, though.

Going stateless

There are a number of ways to lose one's US citizenship. These include:
-Taking up arms against the United States.
-Conviction of Treason.
-Purchasing an automobile made in France.

Mrs. Lemming likes the Peugeot's alphabet soup of safety features, while I like the fact that the fuel efficiency of this family car is similar to my first motorbike.

I took LLLL into Sydney on a cool 49 mpg the other day. Even with diesel, that ain't bad.

Silica activity and serpentinization

Serpentinites, rocks made mostly of serpentine, are formed when water reacts with the earth’s mantle at moderate to low temperatures. Serpentinites are not rare, but they have a number of unusual geochemical features. These include:

• Low oxygen activity- nickel metal allows sometimes occur in serpentinites.
  
• Magnetic susceptibility- despite the low fO2, they can contain abundant magnetite.
  
• Low S fugacity- sulphides, when formed, are generally low S minerals.
  
• Association with other strange calcic rocks, such as rodingites.
  
• Whacky hydrothermal alteration.
  

Frost and Beard show that all of these unusual features are a result of the (very low) silica activity, which is controlled by the various olivine hydration reactions, specifically those between olivine, brucite, and serpentine. Some of it is qualitative, as the necessary thermodynamic data for some of the key reactions is not currently available, but the arguments are nevertheless quite robust.

If you like phase diagrams, this paper is a must read. But even if getting lost in a maze of stability fields isn’t your cup of tea, the paper is still quite readable in figure skimming mode. The thing I like about it is that it give a method of trying to predict the weirdness that serpentinization often produces.

And there is no doubt that serpentines are strange. In fact, they are often invoked as explanations of last resort for nay number of things, from methane on Mars to VMS base metal mineralization, to the origin of life (on Earth). By changing serpentinite geology from a black box of reduced alkali joy into a silica activity problem, the authors provide a powerful tool to constrain some of the more outlandish ways in which this process is invoked.

I do have one complaint, though. I despise scientific papers that have titles that begin with a preposition. "On" tells us nothing about the study.

Also, the paper is open access, so anyone can read it.

B. Ronald Frost and James S. Beard. 2007. On Silica Activity and Serpentinization Journal of Petrology 48(7):1351-1368.

I don’t believe in Zero

For an analyst, measuring things is easy. It is the stuff that we can’t measure that keeps us up at night. For example, if we measure something- correctly- then we know how much is there. But if we don’t measure something, what does that tell us? That it isn’t there? Or that our analytical technique is not capable of detecting it?

One invention that we use to address this problem is a construct called the detection limit. This is a statistical number that represents the amount of something that we think we should be able to detect, if it is there. Thus, if we don’t detect something, we don’t say that it isn’t there, we say that it is Below Detection Limit (or BDL). In electron microprobe analyses, this limit is generally taken to be 3 times the standard error of the background*, and the same definition has lazily been co-opted into laser ICP-MS analysis. So if you want to improve your detection limit, reducing the level or the noise of your background is a good place to start.

Of course, there are some hypothesizers who sometimes want an analyst to demonstrate the absence of something. This can be frustrating, as it is statistically impossible to measure something that isn’t there. All we can do is place lower limits on something.

A well formulated hypothesis will recognize this, and ask us instead to show that something is below a specific level. But every now and then, you encounter a coward or handwaver who tries to hide beneath the detection limit, by claiming, “Well, this doesn’t support my pet theory, but it isn’t completely ruled out because my holy grail element could simply be less abundant than I predicted or than you can measure.”

If their original hypothesis was that something would be at concentration X, and the analyst failed to achieve a detection limit of X, then that is indeed the analyst’s fault. But if the theoretician arbitrarily fudges his expected concentration downwards to lie beneath any detection limit thrown his way, that ain’t cool. Unless, of course, he is prepared to put the effort in to improve the analytical technique so that it obtains the detection limit he needs.

* I should know the reference to the paper that established this- a seminal EPMA paper from the late 60’s, I believe, but I can’t for the life of me remember the reference. Anyone?

Petroleum geologists must have fun

Just look at what Microsoft Word started thinking when I tried telling it about a test commonly used by oil people...

What I do

A few months ago, I ditched my university job to become a project geologist for a small exploration company. One thing I’ve noticed from my travels is that many people don’t have a real good idea what industrial geologists do. I’m fairly new at this gig, so here’s the best description that I can think of at 1 in the morning.

Basically, I get paid to look for buried treasure. Unlike colonial Spanish contraband or grandma’s Easter eggs, the treasure we look for is natural, having formed through geological processes at some point in Earth’s history.

We use geochemistry to understand the processes that allow the mineral deposits to form, and then we use geophysics to try to detect them from the surface. Once we formulate a hypothesis for the location of an economically valuable concentration of our target mineral(s), we drill holes in the ground to test that hypothesis.

From a scientific perspective, I like the work because it is very big picture, drawing on all sorts of skillz and knowledge that I didn’t use as a lab technician. From a personal perspective, I enjoy the wide open spaces, the camaraderie of a small company, and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with a day of hard physical and intellectual work. The pay isn’t bad either.

Eating solids is tiring

Postdoc

Imagine a subtly different alternate universe. A universe where academic jobs were still cutthroat, but a universe where scientists spoke honestly about their ambitions, where scientific competition was as engrained in popular culture as romantic rivalry, and where Avril Lavigne is a promising young analyst:

---

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I don't like your postdoc!
No way No way!
Think your lab’s in gridlock
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I could be your postdoc

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I know that you cite me
No way! No way!
No it's not a secret
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I want to be your postdoc

Your gas phase, I'll compress it 'till it’s viscous
I use your theory all the time it’s so addictive
Don't you know that I can prove it- I can prove you’re right!
(you’re right you’re right...)

Don't pretend I think you know I'm damn precious
And hell yeah
I'm your sub-field's Fullbright princess
I can tell you like my work, and you know I'm right

Her blanks- so whatever
My pre-cision’s better
I think we should get together now
And that's what everyone's talking about!

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I don't like your postdoc!
No way No way!
Think your lab’s in gridlock
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I could be your postdoc

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I know that you cite me
No way! No way!
No it's not a secret
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I want to be your postdoc

I can see it when your papers citation me
And even when you plagiarize I know you think of me
I know you talk about my protocols
again and again (and again and again and again)
So come over here, tell me what I want to hear
Better yet make your post-doc disappear
I don't want to hear you cite her work ever again
(And again and again and again!)

Her blanks- so whatever
My pre-cision’s better
I think we should get together now
And that's what everyone's talking about!

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I don't like your postdoc!
No way No way!
Think your lab’s in gridlock
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I could be your postdoc

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I know that you cite me
No way! No way!
No it's not a secret
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I want to be your postdoc

In a season you'll be wrapped around my finger
Cuz I can, cuz I can measure better
There's no other
So when's it gonna sink in
A theorist with a lab-
What were you thinking?!

In a decade you'll be working in my basement
Cuz I can, cuz I can fund it better
I’ll have tenure
So when's it gonna sink in
You can adjunct
Or be working in my system!

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I don't like your postdoc!
No way No way!
Think your lab’s in gridlock
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I could be your postdoc

Hey! Hey! You! You!
I know that you cite me
No way! No way!
No it's not a secret
Hey! Hey! You! You!
I want to be your postdoc
No way! No way!
Hey! Hey!

---

It's a bit scary how few words in the song lyrics I had to change to make this work. Of course, the big conceit here is that in our universe, I find it is the men, and not the women academics who are more likely to be snarky and petty instead of rational and professional.

p.s. link to original music video (so you can sing along).

Hose rage

When the IPCC tries to calculate the number of people likely to lose their lives as a result of climate change, do they include this sort of fatality?

Rain

As you can see from this website, the first rain since June fell in the central NT last week. 8 mm may not seem like much, but it means that the dirt roads will be turning to mud. Our field season will be suspended until the wet tails off in March or April. So I'll be sleeping under a roof until then.

Gore's climate calculator is crap

I bumped into climatecrisis.net's climate calculator via skookumchick's blog, but it appears to be a front for generic environmentalism, rather than a good-faith attempt to measure one's carbon emissions. Here is why:

It asks the question:
"What % of your electricity comes from clean, renewable sources such as solar, or wind?"

This question is only marginally relevant to greenhouse gas emissions. A much more perninent question for emissions would be
"What % of your electricity comes from hydro or nuclear?"

Hydroelectric power contributes about 19% of the world's electricity supply. Nuclear contributes about 11%. Solar and wind contribute less than 1% combined. So a person trying to accurately calculate the carbon emissions from their electricity use is much more likely to gain low carbon energy credit from hydro or nuclear than from wind or solar.

From the carbon cost point of view, all of these technologies generally have much lower emissions than fossil fuels, so there really isn't much of a good reason to distinguish between them for the purpose of calculating a climate footprint.

On the other hand, The environmental movement has long objected to hydro and nuclear for reasons that have nothing to do with GHG.

Therefore, one can only assume that the omission of 'dirty, non-renewable' low carbon energy sources from climatecrisis.net's list of low carbon energy sources is an indication that they are using climate change to push a broader environmental agenda at the expense of actual carbon emissions.