Geobulletin alpha

Innovative Micropile Construction with DTH System 

Our friends at Deep Excavation posted about an interesting micropile case study in Northern Baltimore County for a bridge replacement project. The project consisted of 38 Micro Piles; 7” OD X 38 ft. deep including a 7 ft. rock socket, installed on a 3/1 batter, load tested to 272,000 lbs. What caught my attention is the down the hole hammer system used for installing the micropiles. The system uses a ring bit to install the casing and allow the drill string to continue beneath the bedrock [...]

Educator How-To: Cross-curricular Education Gets Cheesy 

As educators, we all want students to understand the world holistically, but we still tend to teach each subject independent from all other subjects. Food is an effective way to capture the attention of students and provide a useful tool … Continue reading

Fun and games at the BYU museum 

Things remain frantic on the Sauropocalypse tour. Today, we were back at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, working on four or five separate projects. Here’s Matt, photographing broken bone of the iconic Supersaurus cervical BYU 9024, while a pallet of Big Pink Apatosaur cervicals wait for attention in the background: You’ve seen this bone before – I

Ashumet Pond Nitrogen Questions 

A lot of attention has been given to the role of runoff in spurring harmful algal blooms. But what about the actions taking place beneath the surface via groundwater? It’s[...] The post Ashumet Pond Nitrogen Questions appeared first on Lake

Heavy Metals In Lake Michigan Turtles 

Fish probably get the most attention when it comes to gauging the effects that heavy metals have on Lake Michigan’s inhabitants. But overlooked in this realm of research are turtles.[...] The post Heavy Metals In Lake Michigan Turtles appeared first on Lake

Common sense and volcano tourism 

It's not very often that I comment on news articles, but a reader of the blog recently brought this one to my attention, and it hits close to home. The article is in the Washington Post's Travel section and is entitled, "In Guatemala, a treacherous hike to one of the world’s most active volcanoes". That title pretty much covers why I'm so upset - and conflicted - about the author of the piece is writing

Getting to the Root of How Earth’s Massive Coal Seams Formed 

Writing about science is a tightrope walk. You can practice as much as you want, and during preparation you have lifelines in the form of editors and experts you can phone for answers, but in the end it’s just you out there, trying to toe the line suspended between attention and accuracy. Eyes are on

Ship Tours and My Farewell 

When this ship pulls into port, it draws a lot of attention, and tours are plentiful.  The co-chief scientists and I gave two tours - one to the staff and students of the Goedgedacht Trust, the recipients of the marathon money raised, as well as three boxes of donations from generous shipmates, and the second to the University of Cape Town's  Dept. read

This Is Why The Record Warmth is Not Natural 

Lots of talk about the global record temperatures that both NOAA and NASA (They do separate calculations) announced this week, but here’s something that doesn’t get as much attention, and should. Look at the graph above, it shows two different temperature traces. The red line is the actual global temps. since about 1880. Black line is the CMIP 5 model average forecast when you put in CO2 volcanic eruptions minute

How Will Shifting Climate Change U.S. Forests? 

One foggy spring morning just after a hard rain, Park Williams was tromping through the woods deep in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains. Toiling down a steep slope, he supposedly was keeping a simultaneous eye out for rattlesnakes, copperheads, poison ivy and big old trees. Williams seemed mostly focused on the trees, though; attention to the other stuff was just slowing him down. Williams studies how forests react to changes in climate, and the Ozarks’ deeply dissected hills and hollers—what [...]

What do I miss? 

It was brought to my attention that I did not mention what I do miss the most while being out on the ocean so long.  I would have to say that it is weekends. read

Sea-Level Rising Faster Than Anytime in Last 27 Centuries 

A new paper in PNAS this week (that looked at sea level over the last 2700 years) has gotten quite a bit of attention by the main-stream media this week. A good summary of this paper and the implications is here from WBOC TV Reporter Tyler Butler. I work with Tyler and he is an exc. reporter, and he’s proof that you can do a  great story about climate change

That paper that says women are better coders than men but are judged on their gender? It doesn’t say that at all 

As a long-standing proponent of preprints, it bothers me that of all PeerJ’s preprints, by far the one that has had the most attention is Terrell et al. (2016)’s Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men. Not helped by a misleading abstract, we’ve been getting headlines like these: Study: Female

Top 3 posts 2015 

Today I was reviewing my blog posts of 2015 in search for ideas for what topics to write more about. Going through the statistics I found three blog posts that received the most of attention since restarting my blog in 2015. So, I here are the Top 3 posts 2015! Most viewed was the rather short Online clay science resources post with 2050 views. Seems like there is a need for such information

Midweek Music Picks: Pure Reason Revolution 

Pure Reason Revolution are a band that caught my attention first as prog, but I soon realised they were inhabiting the prog genre at the most progressive, eclectic fringes of it – as you can tell upon listening to the song below, Blitzkrieg. The music hovers between the electroclash rock of Justice, the fast-paced drum’n’bass rock

Scientific Assistant (Paleontology). American Museum of Natural History 

Job Title: Scientific Assistant (Paleontology)The Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural Historyis seeking 1 full-time (35 hours per week) Scientific Assistant in theInvertebrate Paleontology preparation lab.Responsibilities & Duties:The responsibilities and duties of the position include preparation andrestoration of invertebrate fossils, including detailed microscope-basedpreparation using a full range of mechanical and chemical methods;creating molds and casts; [...]

Art in the rock ... What do you see in these thin sections ? EPISODE 3 

Answer to the second episode ... A runaway couple ! It can be a good way to present geology to kids and teenagers by the artistic side ! they are often very attracted by beauty as everyone ... and it is a way to catch their attention and to begin with rock. read

Friday fold: Folded Mountains Ale 

My friend Eric Pyle drew my attention to this ale earlier in the week – I reckon that will do for this week’s Friday fold. Cheers! And Happy New

Paleo Profile: Amidala’s Strange Horn 

Fossil mammals don’t get the attention they deserve. If you’ve ever been to the sprawling fossil halls of one of the great eastern museums – the American Museum of Natural History, the Field, the Carnegie, the Peabody – you know what I mean. The skeletons of ancient camels, horses, cats, sloths, and their beastly kin

DTTG Workshop 2017 

It passed my attention but now I noticed the first announcement for the next and 7th international DTTG (German-Austrian-Swiss Clay Group) Workshop on qualitative and quantitative analysis of clays and clay minerals to be held in at the University of Greiswald, February 20th to 27th 2017. Georg Grathoff and Lawrence Warr will be the organisers, whom I met at several occasions and they are