And here superimposed on the travel time curves …

We have now put our seismometer ‘semi-live’ on the web. The last 24 hour data trace can be found at http://geophysics.esci.keele.ac.uk/quakes/ updated every five minutes.

The mine in Inner Mongolia was flooded on the morning of March 1st. There were 77 people underground at the time. One miner was killed, and 45 rescued, leaving 31 trapped in the flood waters. The Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, himself a geologist, had ordered the rescue effort to proceed as quickly as possible, but the efforts were called off yesterday after two weeks when it was decided that there was no remaining chance of the trapped miners remaining alive.

In January and February of this year there were 115 accidents in Chinese coal mines, but this was down almost 20% on 2009. Fatalities in Chinese coal mines dropped from 3,215 in 2008 to 2,631 in 2009 – but is STILL A STAGGERING 7.2 FATALITIES EVERY DAY.

That is the real price of coal.

I’ve always been intrigued by gold as metal. It’s not much use for industry except that due to it not tarnishing or corroding it is used in electrical contacts. Apart from that, a minor use as a lubricant on space missions and gold fillings, that’s about it. Unlike a genuinely useful metal like copper, its main ‘uses’ are bullion and shiny things. So as the world goes into recession and demand for useful metals plummets so does their price. Unlike gold. Gold price is currently governed by the weakness of the dollar due to quantitative easing (printing money to the likes of you and me). Although, whisper it quietly, we might be seeing the first green shoots of recovery in the price of copper, gold is now touching $1000/oz and some analysis think that it could rise to $1400 once the psychological barrier is breached.

But this rise in the price of gold has lead to some tragic consequences in South Africa because the returns have made illegal gold mining much more lucrative. 76 illegal miners were killed this week in the Eland Shaft in South Africa’s Free State. The owners, Harmony Gold, have brought 294 illegal miners to the surface. The fatalities are believed to have been caused by poisonous fumes from an underground fire they are believed to have started themselves which blazed for days.

Harmony states that it has suspended 77 employees and 45 contractors since January for assisting illegal miners, most either for allowing them access to the mines or buy providing supplies. Some of the illegal miners are believed to spend many months underground at a time.

So the next time you want to buy something shiny you might want to consider the real price of gold.

Full coverage from Mineweb.com here, here, here and here

P.S. does anyone else find Mineweb’s strapline oxymoronic – “Uncompromising Independence … in association with InfoMine”.

P.P.S. Looks like it is a bad week for miners – Dave Petley is reporting on his Landslide Blog that 27 iron ore miners are trapped underground in China with a massive rockfall covering the two mine entrances. Getting them out doesn’t look like it is going to be easy.

Here is a quick geological conundrum. I’ve been scanning a few old photographs and came across this structure. How is it related to the underlying geology and how does it work?

Suggestions in the comments.

[clue: it is sort of related to a recent post]

Update: The solution is here

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “Creationism is completely unsupportable as a theory, and the only reason to mention creationism in schools is to enable teachers to demonstrate why the idea is scientific nonsense and has no basis in evidence or rational thought”?

Agree 26%, Disagree 54% (67% who cite humanities as their subject specialism).

37% of teachers thought that creationism should be “taught” (as opposed to “discussed”) alongside evolution “in science classes”, including 29% of teachers who identified themselves as science teachers.

Thursday saw me dash down south to the Times Higher Education Awards at the swanky Grosvenor House Hotel, in Park Lane, London.

I’ve been doing some work with my university’s widening participation unit which encourages students from backgrounds who traditionally don’t go into higher education, to consider it. Part of what we do is give potential students a taste of university. They come up for a few days, have academic taster sessions, do sports, have a disco in the union building, stay overnight in halls, etc. My small contribution is to do an hour on the Indonesian Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunami. Our KeeleLink project was one of six nominees for a Times Higher Education Award in the “Widening Participation Initiative of the Year Award” category.

Unfortunately, we didn’t win the award but congratulations to Birkbeck who did. However, getting a nomination was a major achievement.

It was a cracking night out and a chance to see how the other half live (tickets and wine were not cheap – I’m just glad I wasn’t paying). Only downside was to have to get up the following morning at stupid o’clock to get the train back to give my Friday morning Java for geologists course.

In following up a comment on Kim’s blog via e-mail I was asked “who are you?”.

This set me thinking about why I have been blogging anonymously, and do I still want to keep it that way.

When I started this blog, I used it as a stress release mechanism. Fuelled by a couple of fluid inclusions in amorphous silica (of the Chilean red variety) I would let fly at random targets. Global warming was one of them. It was fun playing devil’s advocate.

But blogging that way was not compatible with having an official lecturing position in a university, and while I still don’t have much of a career to damage, I wanted my rantings to remain anonymous.

Fifty odd blog posts and a few years on, things have changed. I have attained a place on the holy grail of the geoblogosphere, an entry on the allgeo google feed. I get 20-30 hits a day even if I don’t post anything. My posts have (I hope) become generally less rant like and more scientific and interesting. I want to discuss things that are related to my research and me. There is now probably more than enough information in my collected blog musings for somebody semi-proficient with a search engine to find out who I am anyway.

So does having a real world identity add gravitas and credibility to a blog? I have a huge admiration of the ‘real’ bloggers, Dave, Kim, Chris, Ron, Callan, Erik, Andrew et al. (my sincere apologies if you have been left out) and I feel it is time to join you.

That is not to say that I have any problems with those who want to stay anonymous. I suspect that those bloggers of a female persuasion might attract more unwanted attention than a male would and different people blog for different reasons. My reasons and blogging have changed and so I’m coming out.

So who am I? I’m Ian Stimpson, and I’ve been lecturing in geophysics and structural geology at Keele University, Staffordshire (about halfway between Manchester and Birmingham) in the UK for over twenty years.

There, I’ve done it, I’ve come out. I suspect in some respects I’ll have to be more careful about what I post in future, the rants will be more mild but in other respects in more posts I hope I can be a bit more free in what I what do say. However, all the opinions in my posts, past, present and future will continue to be all mine and not those of my employer.

In case you are wondering, I’ve removed the (three) global warming rants, not that I don’t stand by what I said at the time, but I (and the evidence) have moved on (although I still have reservations about the process of global warming politics) and I feel that they no longer have a place on this blog. They are probably in some search engine cache anyway if you really want to find them.

By the way, I’ve adopted a new anonymous identity elsewhere in case I feel like a really good rant!