Iron ore exports off the rails

Source: Laurissa Smith, ABC Rural


Story here.

I've been to:

These states:

visited 39 states (78%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project

And these countries:

visited 12 states (5.33%)
Create your own visited map of The World or try another Douwe Osinga project

Hat tip: Julia.

Dirty secrets

It seems that my secret zircons are also obscene. This morning the client called up wondering where the results he wanted were. I emailed them last week. He hadn’t gotten them. A morning spent breaking a work email down into its component thoughts showed that his server thought my research was pornographic. Evidently the juxtaposition of ‘single’ and ‘dating’ in the same message was enough to classify my geochronology summary as pornography. I might email their webmaster and tell them their program is fucked- will the message get through?

Non-basaltic rocks seen in Hawaii

We all know that the Hawaiian Islands are supposed to be huge blobs of Basalt piled up in the middle of the Pacific plate. So I was moderately surprised to find other rock types. Here is what I saw:

K-spar porphyry. Fine-grained matrix hard to ID, but presumably some sort of Monzonite. A late differentiate? On the East shore of Oahu.

Sandstone. Lithified beach sand. Cement type not obvious, but I’d guess some sort of silcrete. Possible silica precipitation due to pH change from groundwater to seawater? I honestly don’t know. Oahu and Kauai.

Dunite. Xenoliths in basalt. Kauai.

Felsic Gneiss. K-spar, plag, quartz, biotite folded foliated granite. Possibly an artifact.
Hotel countertop in Waikiki.

Is this how one actually makes money blogging?

http://mostlab.blogspot.com/

As far as I can tell, it just runs ads for lab equipment. If anyone who is currently equipping a lab could tell me if this is useful, that would be great.

What is missing?

Last week the science debate 2008 folks sent me the following survey from the National Academies, asking what sort of science was important to me. Click to make more readable.



Hint: I've spent most of my career in tectonic hazards, hard rock geochemistry, and resource exploration and extraction.

On the other hand, some other less interesting Earth science topics seem to be doing pretty well, so go over and vote.

Astronomers see Martians fart

Astronomers have detected huge plumes of methane on Mars, which may have a biological origin. Further work needs to be done, which will include spectroscopically analyzing the various associated sulfur species. This will allow sophisticated computer modeling simulators to digitally reconstruct the smell, which will be used to differentiate between biological and geologic processes. See Universe Today or The Planetary Society Blog for more mature interpretations.

My problem with Wilson Cycles

Chris over at Highly Allochthonous has just done an unusually good job at explaining what Wilson Cycles are, and the role they play in tectonic reconstruction. And he did it without using the most evil diagram in tectonics.

I don’t like the Wilson Cycle idea. I don’t deny that ocean basins open and close, but I think that it is too neat, too pat, and inadequately describes most real orogenies.

Take another look at that linked diagram. What is missing? I’ll give you a hint. If you live in Turkey, California, New Zealand, or China, it could kill you. If you still don’t know, think about which dimension that diagram considers expendable.

Crustal thickening and thinning is fairly easy to identify in the geologic record. The both initiate sedimentation, igneous activity, and/or metamorphism. Lateral tectonics, on the other hand, doesn’t leave nearly as big a mess behind. As a result, it can be (and often is) overlooked much more easily that a rift valley, or a mountain of ecolgite. And the open-and-shut presentation of Wilson cycles further de-emphasizes strike-slip motion.

I think that’s a mistake. Continents don’t just move back and forth; they also slide past each other and spin around. In most cases, continental collisions don't involve happen in the same orientation as the previous rifting (I'm ignoring the Alps tonight). Most of today’s active plate margins have some degree of lateral faulting associated with them. But the Wilson cycle doesn’t call attention to this fact.