100 Geology Things You Have Done

 intelligent [sic] design, memes  Comments Off
Dec 142008
 

Still avoiding that marking.

This meme via Geotripper.

iceland guysir

Things I have done in bold [with commentary]

1. See an erupting volcano
2. See a glacier [Iceland]
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland [Iceland]
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. [ish - I've seen the K/T boundary on the Isle of Wight but it is an unconformity]
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage [Ireland]
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia) [Thor's cave, Peak District]
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile. [Several including Blackbank opencast]
8. Explore a subsurface mine. [Several including coal, lead and gold mines, most recent Ecton Copper Mine]
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there’s some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere. [Lisan Fm, Masada, Israel]
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada. [Granite Tors, Devon]
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. [St David's Head Sill, Pembrokeshire]
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth – The Story of Plate Tectonics – an excellent website). [Chile]
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. [There is one planted outside our department building at Keele, in memory of the founding Professor of Geology, F. Wolverson Cope]
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) [only in the lab.]
18. A field of glacial erratics [Cheshire - a field with glacial erratics]
19. A caldera [Santorini]
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high [Natal, Brazil]
21. A fjord [Norway]
22. A recently formed fault scarp [Turkey]
23. A megabreccia [Gwna Melange, Anglesey]
24. An actively accreting river delta [Lake District, Cumbria]
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole [Gaping Ghyll, Yorkshire]
27. A glacial outwash plain [Iceland Sandur plains]
28. A sea stack [several]
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide [Colorado]
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals [We have a display of them at Keele]
33. Petrified trees [several, including Lulworth Fossil Forest]
34. Lava tubes [Iceland]
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back.
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth’s fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil’s Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley – 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land’s End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant’s Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic “horn”.
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the “father” of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) [Trilobite, now in National Museum of Wales]
85. Find gold, however small the flake [Guanaco gold mine, Chile]
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand.
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century [Hale-Bopp]
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane [Typhoon, Japan]
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

Before 'Intelligent Design' was Intelligent Design

 historical geology, intelligent [sic] design  Comments Off
Jul 152008
 

Before I start this post I think I need to point out that I don’t believe in ‘Intelligent Design’ creationism. I use the word ‘believe’ purposely since ‘Intelligent [sic] Design’ is a faith concept rather than a scientific theory or hypothesis. You might have noticed from my blog sidebar that I am without belief in any deity of any persuasion. However, I do have a strong interest in historical geology and this has got me involved in a project which involves going back to a time where creationism and geology were strongly intertwined in the UK, indeed to the time of publication of the Darwin’s “Origin of Species”. I’m purely involved in this project from a position of scientific interest and understanding in historical geology in context, not through any belief in the underlying theology.

In Staffordshire, in the English Midlands, lies Biddulph Grange. The Grange was home to James Bateman (1811–1897), a noted botanist who worked particularly on orchids and he created wonderful gardens in the grounds, on the theme of a world tour, between 1841 and 1868. The Grange is now owned by the National Trust and the gardens are open to the public.

Bateman also designed a geological galley to connect the Grange with the gardens. It’s arrangement is unique and it is a marvellous example of intelligent design [in its purest sense].

Bateman\'s geological gallery at Biddulph Grange

Bateman's geological gallery at Biddulph Grange

The gallery’s unique layout, trying to reconcile known British geology with the creation myth is best described in a contemporary report by Edward Kemp, writing in The Gardener’s Chronicle in 1862

‘The geological gallery, which is upwards of 100 feet long, is lined with stone and lighted from the roof … Advancing into the gallery, it will be found treated in a way that is quite unique, and is singularly illustrative of the great geological facts of the globe. On the one side, at about three feet from the ground, a series of specimens, showing the earth’s formation, and exhibiting all the various strata in their natural succession, are let into the wall, in a layer about eighteen inches wide; and above this are arranged the animal and vegetable fossils that the respective strata yield … The whole is distributed into ‘days’ supposed to correspond with the six (so called) ‘days’ of the Mosaic cosmogony, beginning with the granites, and passing into the slates, the limestones, the old red sandstones, the coal formations, etc, with such animal and vegetable remains as occur in each. On the other side of the gallery the walls are covered with geological maps and sections, and between a set of seats provided for the accommodation of those who wish to make the matter a study, is a series of tables, on which various remarkable geological specimens are arranged; thus rendering the general effect artistic as well as instructive.’

The gallery is now sadly in a poor state of repair, the Grange was converted into a hospital in the 1930s and the gallery was used a a workshop. Many of the rock and fossil specimens are now missing, either taken or simply crumbled away to dust. Day III (in the image) is probably the most complete. The strip of rock layers are of Upper Carboniferous sandstones and coals (Bateman owned a number of local coal mines), above which were a number of plant fossils from the corresponding strata. This in turn corresponds to Day III on which ‘God created grass and trees’ (we’ll ignore the fact for the moment that ‘grasses’ should be much later in the sequence geologically). Day V is similarly arranged with Jurassic strata and Ichthyosaur fossils corresponding to ‘God creating whales’.

The strata strip covers known British geological history beginning with Precambrian granites (as jumbled blocks) before Day I, moving to layered (ordered) Cambrian strata on Day I. The strata progress through geological time with at the other end of the gallery Lower Eocene ‘Hertfordshire Puddingstone‘.

Here the gallery tantalisingly stops. The end of Day VI is truncated by the building of a hospital ward (now demolished) in the 1930s; the slot for a hominid skull is clearly cut in half. There are no contemporary descriptions of what lay beyond Day VI. It could have been a display of Bateman’s orchids which he believed could only have been created after God created Man because until then there would have been no-one to enjoy them. Alternatively there could just have been a door to the garden – the Garden of Eden. There are also allusions to the ‘Second Coming’ in the garden as Bateman refused to plant any hybrids as these impure creations of man would be swept away during it.

The gallery is pretty much contemporaneous with “The Origin of Species”. Darwin’s work was published in 1859 and, whilst the precise date of the gallery in unknown, its first description (above) is in 1862. Bateman knew Darwin, he even sent him some orchids to work on, but whether the gallery was built as a direct riposte to Darwin or simply Bateman reconciling his evangelical Christianity with known British geology is unknown, but it truly is an intelligent design.

The National Trust acquired the gallery in 2002 and hopes to begin the restoration of the gallery in 2009 to coincide with the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Trying to work out what rocks and fossils are missing and trying to recreate as faithfully as possible Bateman’s extraordinary gallery is going to be a fascinating project.

Note that although the gardens are open to the public, the gallery isn’t yet. There will be an opportunity to visit it in September when an open weekend will be held. Details will appear on the National Trust’s website.

Depressing news from the US

 intelligent [sic] design  Comments Off
Feb 212007
 

I’ve had my odd pop or two at creationist / intelligent design in the past (and will continue to do so in the future) but the following shows something of the scale of the opposition to rational thought in the US. By way of political betting and polling report comes this depressing (for me anyway) poll result from USA Today/Gallop. Asked “if your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [category here], would you vote for that person?

Creationist gets Palaeontology Ph.D.

 intelligent [sic] design  Comments Off
Feb 192007
 

Do you have to believe what you write in your Ph.D. thesis for it to be valid?

A student, Marcus R. Ross, at the University of Rhode Island has been awarded a Ph.D. for his palaeontological research into mosasaurs that became extinct that he, himself writes in his thesis, at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago. But, according to the New York Times , Dr. Ross is a ‘young earth creationist’ and as such believes literally in the Bible and that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.

He has played by the rules, his dissertation supervisor claims that the work is ‘impeccable’, but does stating one thing in his Ph.D. thesis and believing something else make him a hypocrite?

Dr. Ross states that the theories of palaeontology are one paradigm and scripture is another and the dates given in his thesis are ‘appropriate’. He says he is just separating the different paradigms.

My personal belief is that religion is no more than superstitious ‘mumbo jumbo’ but I find myself in the realms of the ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ territory here. Where is the line drawn? There are many degree level students (particularly first year ones) who regurgitate material, not believing (or even understanding it). Are they not entitled to a degree? Some of those first year students will be studying geology or astronomy as an auxiliary subject – do they have to believe in an ‘old Earth’ to pass the module? The same thing also holds for degree level students with fundamental religious beliefs – can they have a degree if they don’t believe in what they write in their exam papers. The answer has to be no – if they satisfy the examiners and achieve the intended learning outcomes then they must pass.

Is a Ph.D. any different? Chad Orzel argues not and I have to agree. As he states, a Ph.D. is not a licence to practice like a Medical or Law qualification. It is just another degree. Dr. Ross has satisfied the examiners and is entitled to the qualification. Just what is a degree in the ‘Philosophy of Science’ anyway?

What does stick in my craw, however, is that having played the secular scientific system and gained his Ph.D., Dr. Ross is now in a position to use this qualification against this very secular scientific system. According to the New York Times, he has already appeared in a DVD arguing that ‘intelligent design’ is better than evolution in explaining the Cambrian explosion and online information about the DVD has Dr. Ross as ‘pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences’ as part of his ‘authority’. Now he has the Ph.D. he is now clear to use this qualification to back statements on his beliefs on ‘intelligent design’ to an unsuspecting public.