Browsing through past Wo(G)E entries, it occurred to me that the most ubiquitous geomorphologic feature in the entire solar system had not yet been displayed. So here you go. The lat and lon are insufficient to win this contest; I want the name of the feature as well.
With oil prices flirting with new all-time highs, there has been a lot of talk about the global oil crisis recently. A combination of the price, the peak oil hypothesis, global security issues, and global warming means that the industrialized world’s reliance on petroleum is increasingly being questioned.
One increasingly popular alternative to petroleum is some sort of biofuel; that is oil derived from organisms that have been killed recently, instead of having died millions of years ago. There is a historical precedent for biological oil production; during the first 70 or so years of the industrial revolution, prior to the discovery of petroleum, oil was mainly produced by the whaling industry.
Needless to say, the global thirst for oil has increased since the days of Moby Dick and the old Nantucket sailing ships. But it is still a useful exercise to determine just how many whales would have to be harvested to supply the modern world with oil. In deference to the cultural and literary value of the sperm whale, we will use it as our cetacean of choice for the following calculations.
The current annual production of petroleum is just a shade under 30 billion barrels. Simply dividing this number by the oil that can be produced from each whale should tell us how many whales we will need.
According to industry website SaveTheWhales.org, a sperm whale could produce 2000 gallons, or 47.6 barrels, of oil. Thus a touch of long division tells us that we will need to slaughter approximately 630 million sperm whales each year in order to completely replace our petroleum production. Since there are only an estimated one million sperm whales currently living on Earth, wiping out the entire species would power the global economy for about half a day.
Clearly, a whale breeding program is needed to make such a scheme feasible.
Trouble is, whales are not rabbits. With a slow breeding species like sperm whales, we can only afford to harvest a small percentage- say, 10%, of the total stock each year if we are to use their oil in a sustainable fashion. So in order to have an annual 630 million whale kill, we will actually need a total population of about 6.3 billion animals. That’s about two whales for each person on earth.
And those 6.3 billion whales will get very hungry. Sperm whales have an unusual diet, which consists almost entirely of giant squid. And although the exact rates of consumption are not known, a good ecological rule of thumb for carrying capacities is that predators need a prey population with a body mass that is 10-1000 times larger than that of the predators.
Using a geometric average of 100 times per food chain step, and an average whale mass of 40 metric tones, we will need about 2.5x1016 kilograms of squid to feed our whales. That’s either 840 million billion calamari rings, or a single mollusk that is twice the mass of the Martian moon Phobos. Such a squid is illustrated below.
And because squid are not autotrophic, they too will need something to eat. 2.5x1016 kg of squid will need to eat 2.5x1018 kg of fish, which will need 2.5x1020 kg of zooplankton, which in turn will require 2.5x1022 kg of phytoplankton. This is either an absurd number of microbes, or a giant foram that is one third the size of our moon. And this is where things get tricky.
The Earth’s hydrosphere contains a mere 1.4x1021 kg of water, meaning that it is insufficient to host the phytoplanktonic base of our food chain. Thus we will need to move our whale breeding program to another celestial object, where more water is available. Fortunately, several such objects are available in our solar system.
Ganymede, the mercury-sized moon of Jupiter, has a mass of 1.5x1023 kg, more than half of which is water. Assuming that algal blooms can happily grow at concentrations of 30% of the water mass, this Galilean satellite would be a perfect place to host our whale breeding stock, provided that we can thaw it out. And this should not be too hard to do.
Ganymede, which is gravitationally bound to the giant planet Jupiter, orbits more than 500 million kilometers from the nearest swing electorate. There are relatively few special interest groups or corrupt corporations with a vital interest in the icy satellites of Jupiter, so the only barriers to harnessing this planetoid to fight global warming are physical, not political. Therefore, transporting this enormous iceball to Earth orbit and turning it into a cetacean breeding pool should be substantially easier than producing electric cars, or putting up windmills in Senator Kennedy’s backyard.
I suggest that we simply pop Ganymede into a 1:2 orbital resonance with our current moon. This would give Ganymede an orbital period of two weeks- a useful time frame for the commodities futures market. It would also give us great solar eclipses, and wicked tidal currents. As the whales are needed, they can simply be catapulted into a collision course with Earth, using a trajectory that minimizes the burnup of blubber during re-entry.
While this scheme may seem hare-brained and overly ambitious to some, it is far more practical than taking the bus to work, or driving a Prius.
When dropping acid, calcite is a hot, shaken coke, while dolomite is a glass of guiness left on the coffee table over night.
Calcite's reaction to dolomite is simply a matter of age and life experience. Calcite is merely a young, naive carbonate which, due to youth or sheltered lifestyle, has never had a significant relationship with magnesium ions.
Dolomitization is generally a one-way reaction. It is almost unheard of for a dolomite to get calcified.
I had some grad students over for dinner during my last break, and one of them asked me if my field areas were scenic, or just desolate. I wasn’t sure what the difference was, so I figured I’d let y’all make the call. And maybe this guy can tell us how to tell them apart. Whatever you decide, this is where I’ll be for the next fortnight. Catch y’alls later…
I recently heard from an old high school buddy with whom I had lost touch for a number of years. She is now an assistant principal at a 6-12 secondary school, and she is currently redesigning their science curriculum. She asked if I had any suggestions, and I told her that I could ask the science blogosphere, and she could stop by the lounge to see what people thought.
Now, I can’t guarantee she’ll actually visit the lounge, much less that she’ll care what any of y’all think. But if any of the scientists who read this e-rag have opinions on secondary school science curricula, feel free to introduce yourself in the comments here and state your opinion. With a little luck, one of the people crafting one such curriculum might possibly take note of what you have to say here.
Otherwise, she’ll have to go with what I told her are the four most important take-home points from the geosciences:
That the Earth is:
-flat
-less than 10 Ka old
-designed by an intelligent creator
and
-warming due to entirely natural causes.
Back in the middle Permian, Astropixie tagged me with the anecdote meme. Now, I lead a pretty boring life, so it has taken me a while to think up some events worth mentioning. And eight is a lot. But I’m leaving soon, so posting a book will give y’all something to doze off while reading for the next few weeks.
1. When we came into the last station on our first field tour of this season, there was a flock of hawks circling the corral. There must have been more than 50 of them, wheeling and soaring over the cattle yards. I’d never seen hawks flock before, and the sight of so many majestic birds was amazing.
The station manager was out, so we asked his partner, who was tending to the garden, what was going on.
“Do you guys have a plague of rodents?”
“No.”
“Did the muster stir up mice or lizards or something.”
“Don’t think so. Why?”
“Well, you’ve got all these hawks up near the yards. We were just wondering if they are after something to eat.”
“Oh, yeah. The boys just castrated this year’s steers, so the hawks are probably looking for…”
We looked up in the sky again. The same hawks were flying. Only now, their curved talons looked more powerful, their hooked beaks crueler, less august. And that glint in their eyes looked considerably more antagonistic. We shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.
“Look. I think it’s time we moved on up the road…”
2. The Thanksgiving after I finished hiking the Appalachian Trail, my brother and I had an eat-off. We weighed our plates before and after each course of the holiday feast, to determine who was the greater glutton. Although months of binge-and-fast eating had prepared my digestive system for the contest, I chose to rely on strategy as well as bile.
Knowing that my brother did not enjoy eating sweet potatoes, I went for the normal mash early, so that we rapidly demolished that and the turkey. With the mash, bird, and cranberry sauce depleted, I then turned to the orange root, while he was forced to consume Mom’s super filling whole-meal breadrolls. As they were a bit dry, he had to fill precious stomach space with water.
While I won the battle, I lost the war. He continued to grow into his college football O-line body and has soundly eaten me under the table every time since. I think he learned a lesson, though, as he also taught himself to cook, and he is now by far the most accomplished chef in the family.
3. In the second year of my PhD, I went to the Kimberlite Conference in Cape Town, along with several other students in our research group. A couple of us checked out the Lonely Planet guide for things to see. We are all of an age where the anti-apartheid leaders were childhood heroes of ours, and we realized that the diocese over which Archbishop Desmond Tutu presided was near our hostel, and that we would be in town for Easter Sunday.
Figuring that a sermon by one of the great moral crusaders of our time might be worth getting up in the morning for, we set our alarm clocks to hangover-banishing time, became Anglican for the day, and rocked up for the Easter Sunday Service. After doing all the standing up and sitting down whenever everyone else did, we eventually realized that the proceeding were being led by a boring old white guy who bore very little resemblance to the great Archbishop.
The white guy proceeded to give the most boring sermon that I have ever heard in any house of worship on this entire planet. He talked about fidelity to the church, and the important of obedience, and the danger of individuality and of questioning authority. He did not mention the freedom struggle, the new government, or even the historic Good Friday agreement signed three days before.
We stuck out the whole thing, partly because not even I am game enough to walk out of an Easter Service in a strange town, and partly because we clung to the forlorn hope that this guy was the Anglican version of a warm-up act.
It was not until much later, as we medicated the hazardous level of boredom with some beers, that we realized that our guidebook was out of date, and that the Archbishop traded in the preaching gig for the chairmanship of the truth and reconciliation commission several years before.
As we sat in the fine autumn afternoon, we wondered if there might be some sort of lesson in our getting bored out of our skulls by attempting to use a religious holiday to go celebrity spotting. After a few more fine Namibian lagers, though, we stopped wondering what that lesson might be.
4. I have never been overly enthusiastic about formal education. Throughout most of my overly drawn-out academic career, I have received A’s in the classes I liked, and C’s in the ones I didn’t particularly care for. But I didn’t really care one way or the other, with a single exception.
Brown University’s geology department did not offer its own field course when I was an undergrad. Like many east coast schools, it farmed its students out to whatever western course offerings we could get accepted to. I ended up going to Cal State Hayward, partially because it was small and different, but mostly because it was cheap.
As a quiet kid who grew up in a conservative East Coast suburb, and who never lived anywhere more flamboyant than Germany, Northern California was a bit of a shock to the system. Reticent around groups of strangers at the best of times, I simply slunk into the back corner of the classroom for orientation, determined to keep my own company.
The local students knew each other already, of course, and the professor gave th5e rest of us a short introduction, even though most of the other students had taken classes with the Hayward mob before, and only two of us were from East of the Mississippi.
Finally, the professor said who I was, and where I was from, and that was all OK. Except that he then continued….
“Now Chuck here is a bit of an unusual situation. We actually had more people apply to this course than we had places, so we had to turn a few people away, and Chuck was missing several pre-requisites for this class. But I thought his application essay was somewhat amusing, and if we’re all going to stay sane for the next six weeks, we’re gonna need some comic relief. So, I decided to bring him along. As for the prereqs, since this class is graded on a curve, you can all consider his inclusion a gift to your grades.
I was absolutely stunned. Nobody had asked me to entertain anyone ever before, much less an entire crew from whom I could not escape. And the curve comment was outright insulting. As I sat there, trying to figure out how to get my jaw back up to my mouth, only one thought registered in my mind. I HAD to get an A in that course.
In the first field area, I pushed so hard that my partner got exhaustion, slipped in an Arroyo, and busted several ribs. This cut into our mapping time, and my grade for that project. But after that I started to get canny instead of simply powering through, and I earned that A by the end of the course.
It was not until years later that I realized the professor had read me like a book.
5. When I first came to Australia, I tricked myself into thinking I was prepared by looking up Australian slang on the internet. Nothing I ever saw said anything about garnishes, so when it came my turn to cook in the share house I was in, I pulled out my American lasagna recipe and headed to the store. Once at the supermarket, I though nothing of grabbing a big jug of tomato sauce, oblivious to the possibility that it could be anything other than sauced tomatoes.
We sat down to eat, and after a bite I realized that something was amiss. The cheeses were blended fine, the pasta was well cooked, but the sauce didn’t seem quite right. It was unusually sweet, and extremely vinegary. Despite these obvious warning signals, I puzzled over the strange taste for several days, before a few chats with my native housemates and a good hard look at the ingredient list finally convinced me of what should have been obvious all along; in Australia, tomato sauce is the substance that American call Ketchup.
The really scary thing, however, is that my housemates said the lasagna tasted great.
6. I was a post doc in Washington DC during the sniper attacks in 2002. I suppose that in the long run it was good for me in that my cycle commute times dropped by 5-10 minutes for the duration, improving my fitness levels, but it was stressful at the time. I really wanted to let off some steam by calling up a radio station, and request Pat Benatar’s Greatest Hit with a dedication to the scumbag who was going around shooting up parking lots. But I was too cowardly, disorganized, and lazy to follow through with that plan.
7. I love hitch hiking. I’ve thumbed down rides of up to 200 km on 4 different continents. The people who give rides always have amazing stories, as boring folks generally don’t slow down. One of the oddest rides I scored, however, was more of a business transaction than a hitch.
I was in Idaho Falls in the summer of ’94, seeing the west and getting dissed by girls in the weeks between field school and the start of fall semester. And I was in a bit of a fix.
Greyhound had previously lost everything I owned save my wallet, my journal, and half a loaf of banana bread. More seriously, my grandfather had unexpectedly passed away back east, so I needed to catch a flight leaving from Jackson WY the next day. I decided to start hoofing it, realizing that my luck might be better the farther out of town I got. While walking, I came across a woman broken down on the side of the road. She had a flat, and didn’t seem real handy with a jack and a tire iron, so I bartered a repair for a lift to the Jackson Pass junction. Despite her not being a lift-giving regular, we engaged in the ritual chit-chat anyway, and it eventually came out that I was a geology student. This piqued her interest.
“Is it true,” she asked, “That the states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho are going to fall into the ocean in 1998?”
It took every ounce of self control I had (e.g. both of them) not to say, “That’s right, ma’am. We’re all going to die.”
I haven’t used my thumb in anger since getting married, aside from an emergency situation on the honeymoon. It is one of those things where I don’t realize what I’m missing until sitting down and reminiscing. But these days, I wouldn’t hitch with the baby anyway- driving a bub without a properly installed car seat is just too risky.
So, that’s seven. One anecdote to go. So in order to liven this place up a bit while I’m out, I’m gonna do something foolhardy. I know there are people- people from my real life- who occasionally read this blog. Most of these folks are generally fairly shy when it comes to commenting. But all of them have at least a little dirt on me. So here is what I will do. I’m opening up anecdote #8 to the readership. If you have some illuminating, embarrassing, or remarkable occurrence that you’d like to share, post it in comments below. I’m off tomorrow, so I can’t even screen the comments or defend myself.
There have been a lot of things written about Alice Springs over the years. However, despite the many descriptions and opinions of the desert atmosphere, the scenery, the culture, the art, and the politics, the town’s ductile deformation is rarely mentioned. Which is too bad.
Look at the above rock, from an outcrop on Bath Street. Viewed end-on, it could almost be mistaken for a granite porphyry. But a simple rotation out of the plunge direction shows extensive linear deformation. With rocks like this, who needs camel races?
Starting about a year ago, I have seen the above slogan used increasingly in zinc-bearing goods, especially batteries made in China. It is one of those statements that is both technically correct, extremely misleading and dangerously deceptive.
The fact of the matter is that nobody ever intentionally added mercury to zinc products. This is why I have no doubt that the statement is correct. This is also what makes it misleading. The statement implies that Hg contamination is caused by an additive, kinda like lead in gasoline. But that implication misrepresents the most obvious source of mercury contamination.
A quick look at a periodic table will show that Zn, Cd, and Hg are all in column 2b, and one might surmise from this that they have broadly similar geochemistry. And indeed they do. In nature, they all occur primarily as +2 chalcophile cations, meaning that sulfur, and not oxygen, is their preferred anion in the Earth’s crust. Indeed, most zinc mined today is mined from sphalerite (ZnS) ore. But because of the similar chemistry of these three elements, Cd and Hg can, and generally do substitute for Zn in natural sphalerite to varying extents, depending on the particular mine and type of deposit. So in order to have zinc that is contaminated with Cd and Hg, you don’t need to add those toxic metals- they are often already in the orebody.
Therefore, the important health and safety question is not whether or not Hg has been added, it is whether or not the primordial Hg already present in the ore has been removed during the smelting and refining process. Most of the products I’ve seen with the “No mercury added” claim also say “Made in China” , a country not exactly famous for stringent environmental regulation of its heavy industry. So the fact that they put a true but irrelevant statement on their product does not exactly convince me that it is non-toxic.
In fact, it might be a fun undergraduate research project to figure out just how much Cd and Hg various zinc-based “no mercury added” products actually contain. Too bad I don’t work in a lab anymore…
