Summer Fun

Why blog when you can do this?

Accretionary Wedge 5 and 6

Late last week, the fifth and most recent installation of Accretionary Wedge was posted at Green Gabbro. The topic was Geologic mythconceptions. Go there to read about such foolish misunderstandings as: the mantle is molten, people sink in lava, or Ar/Ar is superior to U/Pb.

Next month’s plate scraping will occur here. The theme for Accretionary wedge number 6?

Things that make you go "hmmm."

I want to know what you want to know. What geological mystery intrigues you. What process or event in the history of terrestrial planets are you dying to find out?

This doesn’t have to be the focus of your research. It can be some big picture thang that nobody has any handle on (When did the inner core solidify? Whenever you wanted it to). It can be a broad question that is outside your field. Or it can be some tiny piece of minutiae that appeared to be totally trivial until somebody realized that it was crucially important for answering big questions.

Non-geologist lemming lab loungers are welcome to participate as well. Is there anything about this six billion billion billion gram peridot that you ever wanted to know? Have you heard of some Earth trivia that sounds impossible to scientifically prove? Do you own a grey, featureless rock that you’d like Chris from Highly Allochthonous to identify for you?

Post the targets of your curiosity on your own blog, and supply me with the link. Deadline is February 17 ± 2 (2 sigma, no decay constant error) of this (calendar) year.

Laser ICMPS Open thread

In my last entry, a New Zealand internet rabble rouser made a blatant attempt to hijack a fluffy politics of science thread with some nitty-gritty technical analytical questions. Then this afternoon, somebody from the Earth Environment group at the Australian National University read my entire 2007 archives. EE is the research unit responsible for running the ANU’s ICPMS lab, so it is conceivable that they were looking for some analytical alkali porn.

So, ladies and gentlemen, here is your open thread. Ask you questions about getting laser ICMPS systems to work in a reproducible and reliable manner. Background issues, interferences, sample-laser coupling, you name it. If I know, I’ll answer. Of course, I haven’t worked in a laser lab for 7 months, but it never hurts to stretch out the gray matter a bit, just for nostalgia’s sake.

Calling all AGU members

Andy Revkin at dot Earth recently posted the amended AGU statement on climate change on his blog. A obstructionist politician challenges the statement, saying that it was made by the union leadership without any support or knowledge by the membership. In response, Mr. Revkin asked any and all AGU members to stop by his blog and state their opinion on the matter. So here is the link. You get your comment put in bold, and if you are lucky, you might even get some linkage love from the New York Times.

Personally, I’ve never seen a blog with 10,000 comments before, so even if we can only get 20% of the membership to chip in, that would be something…

Sunglasses on Mercury

I was having an email chat with Emily at the Planetary Society blog about the spectral capabilities of the MESSENGER spacecraft yesterday. It turns out that she has an excellent summary of the camera system on that website. We were talking about filters and false color schemes. Evidently, one of her readers was wondering what Mercury would look like to an astronaut in orbit. It was basically a true color vs spectral recombination question. What we were wondering was whether or not that astronaut would be blinded by the glare from the much higher illumination. So here are some back-of-the-spreadsheet calculations, using 1500 w/m² for earth insolation, and various orbital and albedo values from the web (mostly wikipedia).

Planet	w/m2	albedo	distance	reflected w/m2	notes
Earth	1500	0.8	150,000,000	1200	snow
Earth	1500	0.35	150,000,000	525	desert
Venus	2894	0.65	108,000,000	1881
Mercury	6927	0.15	69,800,000	1039	aphelion
Mercury	15950	0.15	46,000,000	2392	perihelion

Venus and Earth both have orbits that are almost circular, but Mercury is the most eccentric planet that hasn’t been cruelly demoted, so the insolation at perihelion is more than twice what it is at aphelion. As the table above shows, the fairly dark mercurial surface is slightly less bright than fresh Earthly snow when Mercury is farthest from the sun, but it is almost twice as bright when the planet is at its closest approach. So an astronaut could very easily go snowblind from looking at it. On the other hand, mountaineering goggles would be more than adequate when near apahelion. But the original question was about ‘true’ color. Sunglasses are rarely spectrally neutral, so as soon as they go on, true color disappears.

In fact, when we log drill cuttings in the desert, the time when sunnies go on in the morning and come off in the afternoon is noted, because it can change the reported rock color.

Flying with our baby

In November and December of last year, Mrs. Lemming and I did a lot of flying with LLLL. All up, we had 4 domestic USA flights, two domestic Australian flights, 2 trans-pacific flights and one trans-Tasman flight. Aircraft were 737, dash-8, and 747; flying times ranged from 45 minutes to 13 hours. The carriers were Southwest, QANTAS, and Alaska.

Overall, it was a lot less stressful than we expected it to be. LLLL cried a bit due to tiredness on some of the longer flights, but slept OK on most of them. When she was awake, she generally tried her hardest to make friends with the entire aircraft.

On the first Australian flight and the first trans-pacific flight, LLLL had a seatbelt coupler, that basically tied her to Mrs. Lemming’s seatbelt. Evidently these are illegal in the USA, and they were not available. We bought a aircraft-compatible car seat from a US internet site and had it shipped to friends in LA, so we used that for domestic USA flights.

We bought LLLL a seat for all of the flights. This was affordable mainly because Mrs. Lemming did the trans-Pacific on frequent fliers, and child seats were discounted on QANTAS and one of the two Southwest flights. Additionally, the weak US dollar made the domestic flights seem less expensive than they really were.

Mrs. Lemming and LLLL between Los Angeles and Phoenix

We generally gave ourselves an extra hour at all airports for check-in, so that we could get all of our junk through security and feed the baby before flying. In addition, LLLL usually got a breastfeed on takeoff for ear equalization purposes. No puritanical Americans gave Mrs. Lemming a hard time for this, so I didn’t have to dislocate anyone’s jaw.

We had sterilized (boiled) water in the baby bottle for making formula, if needed. The liquid ban meant that we had to dump this at 2 of the 4 US airports. Evidently, made-up formula is fine, but powder plus water isn’t. Many of the airlines offered to refrigerate our bottles if needed once we were on the plane, but we didn’t want to sit around waiting to board with made-up, room temperature formula for an hour or two, so we either did without or used plane water for formula.

Flying Sydney to LA, we used the 747’s bulkhead bassinet, which was OK when LLLL was asleep. Once awake, she didn’t like hanging out there much.

LLLL asleep in the bulkhead bassinet, over the central Pacific

The car seat took a bit of practice to install and uninstall the first few times, but once I got the hang of it the time and hassle was minor. We installed it rear facing in the US, but turned it around to front facing halfway across the pacific.

Both of the American carriers were helpful and supportive about car seat use. QANTAS, however, was difficult. Halfway across the Pacific, in the middle of the night, when most of the plane was asleep, the crew chief woke me to read me the riot act, her finger jabbing at the relevant paragraphs in her 2-inch-thick rule book. Evidently car seats were discouraged, and rear facing ones especially so. So the lovely hostess made me wake the baby up and turn the seat to forward facing. She then woke up the lady in the seat in front of the baby, just to make sure that her seat would fully recline without hitting the car seat, as that would violate the rules.

The Auckland to Melbourne leg was cool about it, but on the domestic Melbourne to Canberra flight they gave us shit about it not carrying an Australian government agency safety stamp. The seat was FAA approved, but we were no longer in FAA jurisdiction. They decided to grudgingly let it slide providing that we installed it front facing, which we did.

The LAX->PHX Southwest 737-300 did not have change tables in the lavatories, but every other plane and most of the airports had acceptable facilities. Flying to Phoenix, we just changed her on my seat.

We started out with an entire carry-on suitcase of extra outfits and rags for LLLL, as she like to chunder a lot. Fortunately, she was a lot less vomitous than we feared, so we checked the backup suitcase for most of the domestic US flights. We checked the stroller at check-in half the time, and at the gate for the longer flights. This was OK for everything but the LA-Auckland flight, where they unloaded at Auckland instead of sending it on to Melbourne (same plane, just refueled and reshuffled). I was not allowed to leave the car seat on the plane- we switched seats anyway.

LLLL and me surrounded by our stuff

QANTAS wasn’t able to figure out that we were supposed to be traveling together, since Mrs. Lemming was frequent flying and LLLL and I were not. Also we had to change seats on the first Alaska Air flight, as car seats are not allowed in the row before or after an exit row. In all cases, they eventually managed to get us seated together.

LLLL was mostly smiley and gurgley towards other passengers. None of them complained to us, and many flirted back. A pack of middle aged Chinese ladies on a package tour from Auckland to Melbourne took friendliness a little too far- one of them taking LLLL out of Mrs. Lemming’s arms for a photo shoot before she could object or react. LLLL was at the developmental stage where she could sit up, but not crawl. I reckon this is an ideal age for baby traveling. She was just starting solids at the time, so she mostly ate organic jarred food- lack of preparation facilities and rules against transporting fresh produce pretty much ruled everything else out.

Any questions?

Rocky Planet Pie

Here is the inner solar system, with radii normalized and slices cut according to mass. The Sun is obviously not included. The moons of Mars and the asteroids combined would be less than a pixel wide, so they are omitted. The planets go in from Mars as you go clockwise from 12 o'clock; the Moon is between Earth and Venus. One thing I never realized until it was mentioned in seminar last year is that the Earth is just a little bit bigger than all the rest of the inner solar system put together.

All images are from NASA, taken between 1972 and 2008.

edit- ugly white border problem fixed.

Geological version of iTunes iChing

Yami has been befuddling me with iTunes iChing for quite some time now. Part of this is because she uses a _diVination method that seems to be rooted (so to speak) in some sort of pre-enlightenment mystical mumbo-jumbo, and does not use proper geologic terms. Therefore, the first step towards making this system comprehensible is to translate the original names of the cards. As far as I can tell, the most direct translation is the one that follows:

• Covering: Regolith
• Crossing: Intrusions
• Crown: Stratigraphy
• Root: Basement
• Past: Geochronology
• Future: Modeling
• Questioner: Investigator
• House: Institution
• Inside: Lab equipment
• Outcome: Journal of publication

Let us test this _diVination method. Obviously I don’t want to talk about my upcoming field season, but kids are always good fortune-telling material. So, Oh great and glorious iPod, what will my child surprise me with next?

• Regolith: Nutcracker Act I,4 (presents of Drosselmeyer) (Tchaikovsky)
• Intrusion: I’m a man (Yardbirds)
• Stratigraphy: East Wes (Eric Johnson)
• Basement: Happiness (Orson)
• Geochronology: Heartful of Soul (Yardbirds)
• Modeling: Marriage of Figaro Act III, Ecco la Marcia (Mozart)
• Investigator: Best of Friends (Joan Baez)
• Institution: I’ll take care of you (Dixie Chicks)
• Lab: Boom Boom (Animals)
• Journal: Ride across the River (Dire Straits)

Hmm. Dunno about this man and marriage thing. Looks like I might have to lock up my daughter early.