Explore Posterous
Search posterous
Search all posts and users. Type a name, type a favorite song title, whatever! See what comes up.
More posterous blogs
Here are posterous posts filed under geology...
Bonneville Salt Flats, 2007
Surreal pictures of the kids on the salt flats. An amazing place.
Jean Dry Lake, Ivanpah Valley area, Nevada
Part of the movie 'The Hangover' was filmed out here. It is exciting
when one of your field areas makes the big time in Hollywood. What is
more exciting (to me, at least) is envisioning the runoff events that
deliver the cobbles to the flat playa surface.
Mount St. Helens
Hi everyone!
Today my Environmental Geology group project mates and I went up to Mount St. Helens to try to do some fieldwork. Our group project is to map a landslide that happened on the sourheastern flank of the mountain after the record breaking storms of November 2006. The project is super cool since nobody has really studied this landslide until now. The event was large enough that it actually took out part of highway 83 on the way to lava canyon. The forest service has since repaired the road. We hope to be able to do a detailed characterization of the event. But of course it's the Cascades in the wintertime and the weather has so far been less than cooperative. We all knew it was going to be cold and rainy/snowy, but we decided to try to gather some data anyway. Here are some pictures of what we found when we got up to the field area. Needless to say, it wasn't a good day for fieldwork. The snow was coming down pretty hard and we really couldn't see anything. We decided to make the best of it and made a snow-geologist and had some beers! There are also a couple of photos of the landslide taken from the newly repaired bridge. That's what the big open area is. I love the northwest mountains in the wintertime!
Global Spatial Repurposing
In 2005, a large crack was discovered in the desert of Ethiopia. At first, there were a few theories as to what this rift might be and what could possibly come of it in the future, but after further study the general consensus is that this might be the beginnings of a new ocean. Using their knowledge of similar events and the formation of rifts in the ocean floor, geologists have been able to guess what will happen with this current rift.
It is now understood that this rift, small when you take time to consider the true scale of the world, could become a new ocean in as little (on a geological time scale) as one million years. After all, they do believe the rift opened in a matter of days.
For the full article, click here.
Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean
A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.
The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.
A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.
The same rift activity is slowly http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060719_red_sea.html">parting the Red Sea, too.
Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.
"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.
The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more http://www.livescience.com/environment/top10_naturaldisasterthreats_us.html">serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.
"The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger. "We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous."
The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been http://www.livescience.com/environment/070130_africa_torn.html">spreading apart in a rifting process - at a speed of less than 1 inch per year - for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060719_red_sea.html">Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.
Atalay Ayele, professor at the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, led the investigation, gathering seismic data with help from neighboring Eritrea and Ghebrebrhan Ogubazghi, professor at the Eritrea Institute of Technology, and from Yemen with the help of Jamal Sholan of the National Yemen Seismological Observatory Center.
Original Story: http://www.livescience.com/environment/091102-africa-rift-ocean.html
via news.yahoo.com
I hope when I am dead, I can get a special app on my i(mded)phone that lets me go down to Earth and check out the new ocean in a million years. Maybe I'd even charter that morbid guy from the River Styx to take me out on it for some deep sea fishing. Awesome how the Earth is always changing right before our eyes!
Untitled
Huge magma pool under Washington state!!! http://ow.ly/wJUv washington volcano geology news
via Ping.fm
The Amazing Spider-Sensors
Remote sensing is busting down doors of research and business; what was once a logistical nightmare in the form of miles of cable and archaic databasing, is now the leading edge of possibility. Wi-fi goes wild.
West coast citizens should benefit from a NASA project that is a marvel of remote sensing. Why not strap a GPS, infrared sounder, a seismometer and a lightning detector to remote sensing "spiders"? Couple the pods with a dedicated satellite and you've got a volcano-sized project underway. The applications for this stuff are endless. As robotics improve, along with A.I., we could potentially introduce a robotic lifeguard, a robo-golf ball collector, a roaming-litter-eradicator - the sky, the moon, the galaxy's the limit. With GIS and GPS alone, why couldn't we have city buses with GPS transponders so no commuter would have to waste air-time calling the city bus hotline ever again? Just think: one click on the city bus app. and your pre-programmed bus route shows up on the display telling you there's a eight-minute wait. Cool, more time to tweet about the morning, but with a drastically reduced stress level.
Combining data streams from weather radar, satellite and temperature data could, in effect, put the Weather Network out of business. By "nowcasting" weather updates via highly localized, real-time data, you could make the decision to take an umbrella with you on the morning bus trip with confidence.
All pipedreams aside, here's hoping the scientists are able to make something of the info miss St. Helens provides.
Mt. St. Helens on a day not recommended for ascent.
