Hypo-theses

Accretionary Wedge #26 : Whither the Geoblogosphere

hypocentre — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:02:25 +0000

In this month’s accretionary wedge David Bressan at History of Geology invites us to contemplate the geoblogosphere. He asks how geology can impact society and real geology, should and can we promote the geoblogosphere and are blogs private business or public affairs, and [are] institutions under-evaluating the possibilities given by this new medium of communication?

Why Blog?

There are probably as many motivations for geoblogging as there are geoblogs. The collective of the geoblogosphere is, of course, no such thing. We just happen to blog on a similar scientific topic. There is, I’m please to say, a good degree of camaraderie among those who geoblog and I’ve virtually met some people that one day I hope to meet in the flesh and share a cold (or warm) beer with. But does the geoblogosphere, what ever that is, need promoting and is it too nebulous to actually be promotable?

I blog for my own amusement. There are no ads on this site and I make no money from blogging. I started because I have always liked playing with shiny new technology and to try to cure myself of a bad case of writer’s block. I have always found it difficult to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and forcing myself to write more I hope(d) will make it an easier process in the future. Since I blog for fun, actually having someone read these ramblings is actually a bonus. I don’t really care if nobody reads this. Ok, I’d be slightly miffed, and one of the first things I do when logging on to wordpress is look at the stats, but I don’t actually think that my little corner (or cupboard under the stairs) of the geoblogosphere actually needs promoting. I don’t blog to impact society or real geology. I blog in hope that someone one day might stumble across one of my musings via a google search and find the contents helpful or interesting. It is ironic that more people read this whimsy than the (rare) scientific ‘real geology’ papers that I write. (At the time of writing I note that my recent post on coal bed methane ranks #8 on a google search of that topic).

Promotion of the Geoblogosphere

There are parts of the geoblogosphere, far more worthy than my humble scribblings, that do need promoting. Public understanding of science is a very good thing. There is a hell of a lot of stupid out there and any well-informed geological post is one small whack with a geological pick at that monolith of general ignorance. A single, apropos geological blog post turning up in an ignoramus’s google search can only be a step forward. In this respect, by lodging itself in google’s indexes, the geoblogosphere promotes itself. I’m not a great one myself for using blog aggregators like Geoblogosphere News or Regator, although this blog is featured in both. I have to say that blog collectives largely pass me by. I’ve only really noticed ScienceBlogs on their recent implosion. Of course a couple of blogs that I regularly read use(d) the platform, but I follow the messengers, not the medium. Would a GeoscienceBlogs blogs collective help promote the geoblogosphere? I doubt it.

The thing that has promoted this blog more than anything else has been RSS feed readers in general and Chris Rowan’s allgeo newsfeed in particular. My readership on the previous incarnation of this blog rocketed when Chris added it to his feed. RSS feeds mean that I, and everyone else, don’t have to trawl through a list of favorite blogs, any new posts will just turn up in my feed. The allgeo feed has also introduced me to a whole host of other blogs that I probably wouldn’t have found myself and interesting topics I would have never picked up a journal to read. RSS feeds also take the pressure off a bit of having to come up with a stream of posts to maintain a readership. It is now easy to take a blogging sabbatical and the articles will just pop into the feed on the author’s return.

On casualty, however, of my RSS feed use is my blogroll. Before RSS I had the incentive to maintain my blogroll as I used it myself to visit my favorite blogs but now that it isn’t necessary. Blogrolls are pain to maintain at the best of times, and at the moment with Pepsigate over at Sb, my blogroll would be highly dynamic. There is also the risk of offending someone by not including them and a comprehensive list will now take up a whole lot of sidebar. I suspect that very few people click through blogroll links and a central compendium like Geoblogosphere News is probably the way to go. Despite this, I do try to spread as much link love as reasonable, which is probably the best form of cross-promotion – along with twitter tweets of shortened links.

Impact on Society and Real Geology

Just because I blog for fun, doesn’t mean that I, or any one else can’t make an impact on society. There are two current geoblog themes that have great potential for impact on society. The first is Dave Petley’s remote monitoring of the dam breach at Attabad, which appears to be the main means by which technical information is getting to the general affected population. The other is Garry Hayes’ crusade to stop lawyers in California allegedly starting a lucrative litigation gravy train by sneaking a defenestration of serpentine’s status as state rock into a bill on compost. I do hope Garry succeeds, but even if he and others don’t they will have contributed to society in increasing public understanding and awareness of geology.

Impact on real geology, whatever that is, is much harder to quantify. I’m a strong believer of the peer review processes but with internet publishing I suspect that the differentiation between blogging and journal articles is going to get blurred over the next few years. Research blogging on journal articles is already potentially impinging on the traditional ‘comment and reply’ of paper journals. Blogging does, however allow the journal article author to expand on a theme, present their information to a non technical audience and interact in a much quicker way than traditionally. The palaeontological community in particular appears to be getting its act together particularly in this respect (see Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings as an example but there are many others).

Private Business or Public Affairs

As previously noted, there are as many motivations for blogging as there are blogs. I have no problem with ‘corporate blogs’ as long as they are clearly labelled. The geoblogosphere is greatly enriched by the likes of geological surveys and societies. The likes of Lee Allison’s Arizona Geology consistently punches above its weight but generally I think that many organisations are missing a trick. Compare the USGS with blogs and podcasts to the blog bereft UK version, the British Geological Survey that is hardly known outside of academia. A well-written and informative blog can only help raise the profile of an organisation and in the days of tightening budgets, it doen’t cost much and a bit of link love from the geoblogosphere goes a long way.

Whither the Geoblogosphere?

So, indeed, whither the geoblogosphere? In general, we are slowly building a compendium of knowledge that courtesy of search engines will, in the long run help in the public understanding of our science and educate the great unwashed. This can only benefit society. But where technology will take us in the next ten years and what will become of the geoblogosphere is probably anybody’s guess.

Rock365 – The second hundred days

hypocentre — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:47:33 +0000

202 days ago I was on holiday in Morocco, sitting round a fire in a Bedouin encampment in the desert with a group of fellow travellers and we started making new year’s resolutions. I made the extremely rash promise to take a photograph of a rock every day of 2010. I’m starting to regret doing that. I’ve just reached the milestone of the second hundred days. At least I’ve past halfway and it should be down hill from here on in.

It takes about half an hour on average to do this every day. After I’ve found the specimen, photographed it, adjusted it in aperture, there is often the task of trying to find out where the sample came from so that I can geolocate the samples. I have to say that mindat has been invaluable with details not only of the minerals themselves but also a comprehensive catalogue of mines and their locations.

I then e-mail the image and a short description to my posterous blog – it is so much easier than having to do a wordpress post here. I then upload a copy to my flickr account, insert the description and tag it. Finally, I then go to google maps, try as best I can to locate the mine and then update my google map with the description, a link back to the posterous blog post and a thumbnail image from flickr. I then go back to flickr to geolocate the image there.

Here are the second one hundred images (you can find the first one hundred here).

The current google map is shown below:

View Rock365 in a larger map

Only 165 days to go …

Coal Bed Methane

hypocentre — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:33:54 +0000

Keele University, where I work, has a plan to become self-sufficient in energy. This involves installing a variety of energy sources such as wind turbines, solar panels and ground source heat pumps, but one of the major projects that is currently underway in pilot form is the extraction of methane from the coal seams beneath campus. I was fortunate enough to be allowed to visit the drill site at the end of last week.

The first impression of the site is its relatively small size, about the size of a football pitch and how quiet it is. From 100 metres away the road noise from the M6 motorway is louder.

The drill rig is also smaller than I expected it to be and, as can be seen in the image, is actually mounted on the back of a truck. The drilling plan is shown schematically below [not to scale].

The ‘mother’ borehole (in blue in the diagram) is drilled to about 1000m depth using directional drilling in an ‘S’ shape, shallowing through the target coal seam, and then steeping downwards to form a sump. This is the current stage of the drilling.

The drill bit will next be withdrawn back up the hole to the level of the target seam (in this case the Great Row Coal) and a spur drilled along the the coal seam itself, slightly dipping upwards (in red on the diagram). Water then drains from the coal seam to the sump where it is pumped out. The draining of the water decreases pressure in the seam and stimulates the release of methane from the coal.

If this proves successful, and the mother bore is already showing promising signs of methane, then the next stage will be to drill a number of other bores through a variety of seams, extract the methane which will then be piped to the University’s boiler house.

Keele is blessed with several unmined coal seams below campus. The land on which the university was built was once owned by the Sneyd family who built their family seat, Keele Hall, here. Whilst making, and losing, a fortune from coal mining in North Staffordshire they had the common sense not to undermine their own house!

The other thing that we are interested in are the bottom hole temperatures. North Staffordshire coal mines were amongst the warmest in the country, and if, as we expect, the downhole temperatures are around 50-60°C then we also have the potential for geothermal energy as well.

Disclaimer: As always, this blogpost represents the views of myself only, and are not necessarily those of my employer.

Beech Caves

hypocentre — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 17:09:37 +0000

Now that teaching and exams have finished for another year, thoughts turn to the field. Whilst the likes of Geotripper and Dr Jerque get to visit some spectaclur and unspoilt places, my field work takes me to somewhere interesting but not quite as pretty. These are Beech Caves in Staffordshire.

The caves aren’t natural but the result of mining the Triassic Bromsgrove Sandstone (formerly the Keuper Sandstone) for building stone. The pillar and stall workings were begun possibly in 1633 for the construction of the nearby Trentham Hall. The Trentham records for August 31st 1633 note a Roger Low being paid 22 pence per score for carrying 130 foot of stone from Beech.

Trentham Hall 1686 : Image source – Lost Heritage

This was the first of several halls at Trentham, being rebuilt in 1690 and again in the 1830s, ultimately becoming one of the finest buildings in England. Unfortunately, pollution from the growing Potteries conurbation filled the lakes with sewage and the magnificent hall was abandoned and demolished in 1912. The gardens did remain and now the lakes have been cleaned and the gardens refurbished (well worth a visit) there are plans to rebuild the hall as a five star hotel.

Beech Caves still show the evidence of the hand-pick marks by the miners as they followed a layer of pale-coloured sandstone dipping gently down into the hillside. The thick overburden made mining rather than quarrying a more attractive proposition.

In more recent times the caves were probably used as a munition store in the second world war but lately they have been used for raves and other undesirable activities. The caves are now litter strewn and graffiti covered. The land owner and the local council now want to block off the entrances to stop the ne’er-do-wells from getting in. However, in doing so, they will bury an important piece of Staffordshire’s geological history. It would be a great shame if these historic pillar and stall workings were lost. Whilst understanding the landowner’s concerns for the site, it is hoped that some limited, secure access can be maintained for historians and geologists alike.

Reference: Middleton T, 1986. A survey of Beech Cave, Staffordshire. Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, 9, 401-403

Nicobar Is Earthquake M7.5 June 12 2010 Recorded at Keele

hypocentre — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:37:42 +0000

Here is the Nicobar Islands earthquake of June 12, 2010 as recorded at Keele, UK

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.

Shark!

hypocentre — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:06:48 +0000

On a field trip to the Peak District this weekend. He is a close up of some Lower Carboniferous shark dermal denticles.

Also some nice crinoid fragments.

Geology Teachers in England – An Endangered Species

hypocentre — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:46:30 +0000

If Geology Teachers were a species, then in England they would have just had their ‘Red List’ status upgraded from VU vulnerable to EN endangered – a high risk of extinction in the wild. There are only two universities where geology teachers are trained for the award of Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). Bath University had no geologists on their PGCE course last year and Keele University has just announced that its Geology PGCE course is to close this summer after 50 years of training the country’s geology school teachers. This now means that there is unlikely to be any further specialist geology teachers to be trained in England.

In a year that has seen major geological news stories, large earthquakes in Mexico, Haiti and Chile, the volcano at Eyjafjallajökull and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill amongst others, geology as a subject in English schools is slowly dying. The mining industry is coming out of recession, as we pass peak oil hydrocarbons become harder to find, in a world of diminishing water resources hydrogeology becomes increasingly important, with increasing populations it becomes crucial to better understand natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides, alternative energy sources such as geothermal and coal bed methane are now serious contenders, and the construction industry is belatedly cottoning on to the need for a better understanding of the subsurface, geology as a subject in England is being slowly killed off.

To be fair, this has been coming for some years now, since the introduction of the national curriculum. The few bits of geology that are still taught in English schools are, in the main, now taught by chemistry teachers. I don’t want to disparage chemistry teachers but in general they don’t have the background knowledge in geology to allow them the confidence to teach the subject well. If the situations were reversed, and I had to teach chemistry, I’d give it my best shot but without that foundation in the subject I would struggle, and I certainly could not teach it with the enthusiasm that comes from really knowing one’s subject. The other significant education event was dropping the compulsion for English school children to study geography to the age of sixteen. At university level, we used to pick up a significant number of students who came to study geography, really didn’t get on with ‘human’ geography and the things that they thought were physical geography (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.) they discovered were actually geology. These changes in school education has led to a downward spiral. School children are either no longer exposed to geology or are taught it by teachers who are not specialists in the subject. Fewer go on to study university and ultimately go on to geology teacher training. As specialist geology teachers retire from schools they are either replaced by non-specialists or the geology-oriented courses are closed. Student numbers decline further and the downwards spiral tightens. There are now so few specialist geology courses taught in schools now that there are very few teaching opportunities for geology PGCE students. The lack of career opportunities in geology teaching causes geology PGCE applications to drop. And the spiral tightens further.

What can be done to reverse this trend? It the cause has to be treated, not the symptoms. It is unrealistic to expect any university to run a loss making course, particularly in the current economic climate, when there is little demand from either potential students or future employment in schools. If geology is to extract itself from the downward spiral, first there needs to be recognition at a national level that geology is of critical strategic importance to the country and is under threat. Certain STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) subjects have a recognised ‘Vulnerable’ status. These subjects get increased funding. Physics, chemistry and chemical engineering are considered vulnerable subjects of strategic importance by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) but geology isn’t. It should be. It is important that geological institutions in the UK should lobby hard for geology’s strategic vulnerable status to be recognised. They also need to lobby for a proper recognition of the importance of geology as subject in its own right within the national curriculum. Only with geology taught by geologists in schools will the downward spiral into oblivion be broken. The oil revenue from the North Sea has netted various British governments an estimated one trillion dollars. They have wasted it all. If only a fraction of a percent of this revenue had been given back to the subject that found them the resources in the first place then we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Which brings be on to the oil and mining companies. They have largely sat back and let this happen. They might moan about a lack of suitable graduates to employ but they have failed to address the fundamental root problem. They might get persuaded to fund the odd PhD topic or a couple of places on an MSc course in an area that might benefit them in the short term but they have not really engaged with developing the next generation of geologists. Oil companies in particular have profits in the billions annually. If only for their own future, they really do need to help support the training of future geology teachers a lot more than they currently do* and start lobbying for geology as a subject in schools … whilst they still have a subject in the UK to lobby for.

Disclaimer: Although I am employed by Keele University, I have no direct connection with the Education Department that provides PGCE training or the Earth Science Education Unit (other than that the Earth Learning Ideas website is hosted on our geophysics server). As always, this post is written solely on behalf of myself and not the University. My concern is for the future of geology as a subject in England irrespective of where any teacher training may or may not be done.

* The UK offshore operators association (UKOOA) do support the Earth Science Education Unit at Keele (who produce the Earth Learning Ideas for school teachers).

Accretionary Wedge #25 : Images

hypocentre — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:11:10 +0000

I’m late with last month’s accretionary wedge on images hosted at Highly Allochtonous (I’m writing this post between chairing exam boards).

As a quickie, I’m going to nick Clastic Detrius‘ idea and use my blog masthead image.

It is a seismogram from my PhD thesis. It comes from the pre-digital era where the original seismograms were recorded on light sensitive paper, a day at a time. These were then copied to microfiche and the copies sent round the world to a number of libraries. To get a record one had to travel to the library, find the set of microfiches for that day, then the station you wanted, then the fiche for the long period vertical component. You then had to load it into a microfiche reader and decode the time by eye. Each dot above the trace represents a minute, longer dashes represented hours (with some missing so you could work out what hour it was!). When you had found the right part of the record you then took a copy of the image. The system in the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh used a liquid petroleum based copier and after a day working in the microfiche library one reeked of petroleum vapour. It took about two years between the earthquake happening and the microfiches being lodged in the library. The contrast between 25 years ago when I had to travel from Cardiff to Edinburgh, look up at least two year old records by hand, copy them, bring them back to Cardiff and then digitise them by hand using software that I had written myself on an Apple IIe – and today when I can watch earthquake waves arrive in realtime from around the world sat at my computer screen – is staggering.

The long-period, vertical component seismogram in the image is from a mb 6.0 earthquake on September 21, 1981 274 km beneath the Kermadec Islands in the Pacific recorded at Adelaide, Australia. The direct P-wave arrives just before the second minute mark. A minute later a second downward kick indicates the arrival of pP, a wave that leaves the earthquake upwards as a P-wave, gets reflected back down from the surface near the epicentre and then travels back down through the mantle. The large arrival on the right-hand side of the image is sP. This leaves the source as an S-wave upwards and at the surface undergoes a phase conversion to a P-wave as well as a reflection and continues back down through the mantle as a P-wave. The interesting arrival here to me is the high frequency one between pP and sP which doesn’t appear on the standard travel-time tables. I tracked it down to being S670P, a wave that leaves the source downwards as an S-wave, hits the upper/lower mantle boundary at 670km depth and part converts to a P-wave that then travels on downwards through the mantle. A few years later I had a PhD student do her whole thesis on S670P, but it all started with this strange pulse on this seismogram.

I’m a great believer in observational seismology, actually looking at earthquake records rather than just pumping seismograms through big inversion programs. It is by looking at things closely and recognising when something strange is occurring that science advances.

Irish Earthquake

hypocentre — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:07:47 +0000

An interesting event in the world of seismology yesterday, an Irish earthquake. The British Geological Survey report a magnitude 2.7 tremor felt in County Clare yesterday evening.

Irish earthquakes are as rare as hen’s teeth, which is really quite curious. The geology of Ireland is very similar to that of the rest of the British Isles and many of the geological structures in the UK can be traced into the Republic. However, whilst Great Britain has a modest level of seismicity, ‘Lesser’ Britain virtually has none.

Historical seismicity of the UK (yellow) from 1832 to 1970 for earthquakes of magnitude above 3.0 and instrumental seismicity (red) from 1970 to present for earthquakes with ML >2.0. Source BGS

Image source BGS.

One of the most sensible reasons for the lack of Irish earthquakes is that St Patrick banished them from Ireland at the same time he banished the snakes!

Gnosall, Staffordshire Earthquake M1.3 20/04/2010

hypocentre — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:13:54 +0000

An intriguing little earthquake from the south of the county this morning, a magnitude 1.3 tremor southwest of Gnosall (west of Stafford). This is the recording from Keele University.

The region is underlain by Mercia Mudstone so it could be salt collapse related, but most of the salt extraction is the other side of Stafford. Nearby is the enigmatically named “Coal Pit Bank Coverts” but there are no mines to my knowledge at the ‘pit’ is almost certainly a ‘marl-hole’ (marl being spread on the local fields to aid agriculture).

The ‘quake does lie between the epicentres of the Dudley 2002 M4.7 and the Stafford 1916 M4.6 earthquakes so could be related to a structure running north-south between the two, possibly an extension of the Malvern Line, but this event has been located very shallow by the BGS where as the larger events were at about 10km down.

Update: The BGS in their infinite wisdom have relocated the event to northeast of Gnosall and upped the magnitude to 1.4. However, the geology is broadly similar and most of the above comments still hold.

View Gnosall Quake in a larger map