Cetacean Liposuction

Last field campaign, I was discussing my whale farm proposal with one of our fieldies. As a South Australian farmer, he’s naturally interesting in any sort of animal husbandry that doesn’t require rain, so after a few kilometers he pointed out an obvious inefficiency in my scheme.

In the original plan, mankind’s oil needs were to be supplied by the slaughter of 630 million sperm whales each year. This isn’t necessarily a problem- environmental groups are historically indifferent to the plight of marine mammals, but it does create a waste management issue.

Whales are only about 10-20% oil, so the mass killing of millions of them would rapidly produce an inconvenient pile of whale carcasses. If the blubber could be extracted from the whale without harming the animal, then this inefficiency can be solved.

Thus, whale liposuction is the obvious solution. Without having to worry about the herd’s growth rate, a steady state population can be maintained with a factor of 10 fewer animals. This the size of the planet to house them will be similarly reduced. It would still require 10 times more water than exists in Earth’s hydrosphere, but instead of having to use Ganymede as a whale breeding facility, we could get by with an icy body the size of Pluto, or Triton.

And there might be additional bonuses. The planet’s cadre of cosmetic veterinarians need never worry about unemployment again, and the prospect of seeing svelte, physically fit whales might broaden the pool of prospective whale watchers.

Climatologists- in it for the money?

One of the recurring themes in anti-global warming arguments is that earth scientists are hyping global warming so that they can get rich off of the increased research funding. The recent Nobel Prize results will probably initiate yet another round of motive questioning. Unlike some of the wishy-washier arguments made against climate change, this one is testable.

Suppose a college graduate in geology is looking to earn some money. Is climatology his best bet? For recent graduates, the next step towards a climatology career is a PhD. So, how do climatology PhD scholarships compare with other career options available to graduate geologists?

Well, PhD scholarships can be quite variable. This one gives A$19930 per year for three years. I found several other Australian universities that offer scholarships between $19,500 and $20,000 per year

Things in Europe are a bit more lucrative- this mob is offering 38,000 euros per year- more than twice as much.

I haven’t seen any American stipend figures in my brief net search, but my impression is that they are generally even lower than the Australian examples.

So, what other options does a freshly minted geologist have?

With a bachelor’s degree, a college grad is qualified for a junior position in the resource industry. But are these positions comparable with a PhD scholarship? After all, that European stipend looks pretty cushy. Here are a few entry level jobs advertised on seek.com.au, a popular Australian job site:

Coal mining: $100,000 - $160,000 (experience preferred, but graduates encouraged to apply)

Nickel- $85-$115K

Unknown type- $95-$125K (this actually asks for 1 year experience, so is not strictly a graduate level job)

Iron ore $80-$110K

Admittedly, most junior positions listed don’t name a figure, and people in the know say that $60,000-$75,000 is a more realistic expectation for a graduate with no work experience or advanced qualification. So there seems to be a selection bias in the ads that list potential salary figures. However, I expect that the same may be true of PhD programs.

So, if we assume a conservative Australian industry starting salary of $60,000, and compare that with an Australian PhD scholarship of $20,000, then it appears that those money grubbing climatologists are earning about a third of what they could get working in the resource industry.

Of course, climatologists won’t be students forever. In five years, they could be post-docs, earning about $50,000. In a comparable period of time, a senior geologist should be looking at about $150,000, still three times the academic salary.

Thus, the hypothesis that climatologists are in it for the money does not stand up to quantitative analysis. At least at the moment, an industrial career is several times more lucrative than an academic one.

Parenting is not babysitting

Last break, I was sitting in a coffee shop, rocking LLLL’s stroller and sipping at a flat white. A woman with a not-quite-toddler came up to me and asked, “So, baby sitting today?”

No.

Babysitting is looking after somebody else’s child. Looking after one’s own child is called parenting. Or in my case, fathering. The number of people who refer to a dad looking after a baby as babysitting is actually a bit surprising. And annoying.

Babysitters get free pizza, pocket money, and access to movies that their folks don’t let them watch at home. It is a commercial transaction. Parents don’t get paid- we do it all for love. A dad doing his parental duty should not be such a rare sight that people assume he’s getting some transactional reward out of it. It’s just something we do.

If someone asks me again, I might just say I’m a kidnapper. They’d probably be less surprised.

p.s. Littlest Loveliest Lab Lemming is half a year old!

Corkwood flower

We may be working 15 hour days in brutal conditions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that industrial geologists don't occasionally find the time to take a breath and sniff the roses hakeas.

Too hot for science

I have a new definition for when it is too hot for fieldwork. Last week, the rig broke down, so the other geo and I had a free afternoon. We decided to do some recon in an area of cambrian arkose. The sandstone was somewhat ferruginized, the day was hot, the sky was clear, and there was no wind. About midafternoon, I tried to pick up a rock to get a better look at some stratigraphic features. I failed. I failed because the rock burned my hand. So, my new definition is this: It is too hot to do fieldwork when you can no longer handle the rocks with bare hands.

Where on (Google) Earth? #47

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.

Can whales solve the oil crisis?

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.

The reactions of calcite, dolomite, and HCl in metaphor

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.