Geobulletin alpha

Geotechnical Engineering #12 

I put this on the main blog, instead of just my geotechnical collection because it is so hilarious.  Remember calculus on how long it takes to empty a bucket with a hole in it?  This is much worse as they try to empty a permeable pit below the river level.  You can hear one guy saying that they should get another gravel silt bag to block things up.  They must want to pour a concrete

Photo Essay: High in the Hills, Climate May Challenge Forests 

Forests in the south-central United States are some of the country’s most productive and diverse. They also sit in a warming “hole”—an area where the progressive rise in temperature affecting most of the continent hasn’t yet taken hold. A team from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is studying how these forests might shift—or even disappear—when climate change does catch up with them, as

windows 

Spent the week in the cat room. It has been quite exciting, especially on Tuesday afternoon, when, through the miracle of Skype, we were transported to a meeting room in Reading University to discuss paleoclimate research with some colleagues. Hope they enjoyed the occasional cat appearance.  The reason for our retreat is windows, or rather, the hole created when a window is removed.

Big Money for Oklahoma earthquakes 

Reference Hey, they're a billion in the hole, but 1.4 mill is going to study earthquakes.  That's US dollars! All the existing seismologists have a big footprint on their rears and left the building, mainly because it was going to fall down on their heads.  :)  The best people in OK are working on it, and they are moving 'beyond merely recording' to a brave new world. Here's the job

Happy Birthday Andrija Mohorovicic! 

One of the main objectives of Expedition 360 is to start the hole that will hopefully lead us to the Moho. That's sort of a funny sounding name isn't it? And what is the Moho, anyway? read

Dreams of Summer and Southwest Travels: A Canyon Grander than All 

It's winter, and it's cold outside. I won't be in the field for another six weeks, so for now I'm reveling in the memories of this last summer, a journey through the Southwest states. We started our field studies trip at Hole in the Wall in the Mojave National Preserve, and after spending the morning hiking in Banshee Canyon, we hit the road and moved on to the state border with Arizona.

Dreams of Summer and Southwest Travels: Hole in the Wall, Mojave National Preserve 

Christmas is over and suddenly the snow and blizzards aren't so fun any more. I find myself dreaming of warmer places and times, including a great journey we took last summer across the southwest with my students. Since my current travels are over until February, I'm going to travel through the archives to check out some marvelous geology along our southwestern tier of states: Arizona,

Podcast Chapter 2: The Theory That Changed Everything 

An episode consisting of three stores: an idea that no one believed, how to start the hole itself, and an expedition of tragedy and discovery. read

Core on Deck! 

Just prior to 0400 a simple announcement rang out over a silent ship, "core is on deck". That marked the start of sample recovery from hole U1473 on Atlantis Bank. The handful of scientists who were awake at the time ran up to the catwalk leading to the drilling derrick to watch the arrival. read

New Podcast Episode: The JR Meets the Press 

The media is very excited about expedition 360 but this has brought to light some public concerns. Co-chief scientist Chris Macleod adresses the online comments on the latest episode of A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea. Plus, we talk to second mate John Powell as the JR navigates a storm and Dr. Gene Molina about the challenges of being a doctor in the middle of nowhere. read

Expedition 360, Delivered to Your Ears 

Introducing a new way to follow the JOIDES Resolution, A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea is a podcast mini-series that will be produces weekly during expedition 360 and the first episode is live! read

The End is Just the Beginning 

We're coring our last hole of our last site of our last week of expedition 356. Everyone's a little tired and frazzled after two months at sea, away from their family and friends, with only the Pet Wall for company. And pretty soon we'll be putting in at Darwin, celebrating, and then going our separate ways. This might seem like an ending, but for the scientists, this is only the beginning of the expedition. These two months at sea [...]

A Blog on the Log of the Hole at the Bottom of the Sea 

We've been talking a lot in this blog about the cores we recover, but they're not the only source of data we use. We also get a lot of information out of the holes those cores leave behind. The holes have the same sediment layers as the cores, and unlike the cores themselves, which can be incomplete or mixed-up, the sediments in the ground can give us a very consistent record, hundreds of metres long. We measure the sediments on the [...]

From site U1459C we have a core that shouldn't be 

Sometimes when we’re trying to get a core, we end up with  just an empty liner. We expect that to happen. What we don't expect is getting a core when we aren't even trying! This happened on Hole C, and left even our experienced geologists a bit baffled. read

Art in Science: Kubiena’s Soil Profiles in Watercolors 

Photographs of soil profiles are often disappointing. Usually the subject is a hole in the ground where light is dim and the surrounding ground surface is light. Getting a good, representative photo of a soil profile can lead to acres of frustration. W.L. Kubiena worked as a soil morphologist in the last century and from a practical standpoint, probably only had access to black and white photography. He opted for

The World's Rarest Fish is Where? The Most Restricted Vertebrate Habitat on Earth 

There is a lonely nondescript mountain of limestone in the barren desert east of Death Valley National Park. There is a hole at the base of the slope, the entrance to a cavern. Lurking within are prisoners, creatures that have been trapped in the cave for perhaps 20,000 years or more. They are mutants, no longer the same as their cousins who live freely just a few miles away. They are alone

Stuck 

"We are stuck" are the words that nobody on a scientific drilling expedition ever wants to hear but this is what happened to us today as we were trying to reenter our hole. It seems that the unstable sands collapsed in and trapped our pipe on the way back to the bottom of the hole. read

Salute to the techs! 

Today we are still waiting to get back to coring as the final stages of re-entering the hole after the casing is completed. This gives us the chance to thank our valiant technical staff that help keep all the labs running smoothly on a daily basis. read

Understanding the Moon Pool (or, How Does the JR Keep From Sinking?) 

There is a hole in the bottom of the JOIDES Resolution. And not a small one - it’s 22 feet wide. The hole is in the centre of the ship, directly below the derrick. It’s called a “moon pool” and is an essential part of our drilling operations. The drill pipe hangs from the top of the derrick, passes through this hole, into the ocean and all the way down to the seafloor. read

Possible Monoplacophoran fossil from the Ludlowville formation 

Sometimes you make good finds not in the field but at home when you are sorting through your finds. The fossil below is such an example.When I picked it up I probably thought it was an inarticulate brachiopod but as I cleaned it up and looked more closely it seems to me that it might be something different. When you look at it in profile the very tip of the shell appears to point backwards rather than straight up. If this were an inarticulate brachiopod I would expect the tip to be straight or [...]