Geobloggers need your help to give kids the Earth (Science)

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Anne Jefferson

A post by Anne JeffersonEach year, bloggers at ScienceBlogs team up with the non-profit DonorsChoose to drum up support for desperately underfunded public school classrooms in the United States. As Janet Stemwedel from Adventures in Ethics and Science writes:

DonorsChoose is a site where public school teachers from around the U.S. submit requests for specific needs in their classrooms — from books to science kits, overhead projectors to notebook paper, computer software to field trips — that they can’t meet with the funds they get from their schools (or from donations from their students’ families). Then donors choose which projects they’d like to fund and then kick in the money, whether it’s a little or a lot, to help a proposal become a reality.
Since 2006, ScienceBlogs bloggers have rallied their readers to contribute what they can to help fund classroom proposals through DonorsChoose, especially proposals for projects around math and science. Over the course of our three Blogger Challenge drives, we’ve managed to raise about $128,000, funding hundreds of classroom projects impacting thousands of students.
Which is great. But there are a whole lot of classrooms out there that still need help.

This year the collective of geo-bloggers is getting in on the act and trying to fund projects that bring Earth Science into the classroom (or brings the classroom outside onto the Earth). Kim Hannula of All My Faults Are Stress Related has set up a giving page and invited Eruptions and Highly Allochthonous to throw our support behind it.
We’ve identified 26 deserving projects covering all aspects of Earth Science (rocks, water, weather, oceans,earthquakes, soils, environmental science, dinosaurs, more rocks and fossils, sediments, etc.). These projects are fabulous and they showcase the creative and inspiring education that can occur in the public schools…if they just have the money to make the ideas into reality. Please help us give kids the Earth (Science) by contributing what you can to our DonorsChoose challenge.

Categories: bloggery, by Anne

Water in the sky, rocks underfoot, and a little stream to carry it all

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Anne Jefferson

A post by Anne JeffersonOn Saturday morning, a hydrologist and a meteorologist were planning to go for a hike. One person looked at the weather radar, said something about 2″ of precipitable water in the air mass and strong divergence in the upper atmosphere, and sagely decided to stay inside and dry. The other person muttered something about canopy interception and runoff generation mechanisms and decided to head out on the hike. The only question is: how wet did the hydrologist get?
Crowder Mountain State Park forest
My destination for the day was Crowders Mountain State Park, about 30 minutes west of Charlotte, North Carolina on the border with South Carolina. The state park protects forest land and two mountains rising 300 m above the mostly flat Piedmont landscape. These are what Americans call monadnocks, Europeans call inselbergs, and South Africans call kopje, all terms to describe isolated mountains that presumably have survived erosion that has worn away the surrounding landscape. Usually monadnocks are made of weathering-resistant rocks like quartzite.
Crowders Mountain and nearby The Pinnacle are made of kyanite-rick quartzite, though the kyanite here is gray rather than its typical blue color. The rocks of the surrounding lowlands are mica-rich schists and much more easily erodible. Strong vertical foliation at Crowders Mountain and the Pinnacle have resulted in greater than 30 m high cliffs, popular with rock climbers.
I am told that the mountains afford a spectacular view of the surrounding area. In good weather, I should even be able to see one of my field areas from the summit, but I was not so lucky on Saturday.
The Pinnacle at Crowder Mountain State Park
Fortunately, most of the moisture held off until after I was done hiking, and the forest canopy kept me dry enough to hike without raingear, so I didn’t notice any overland flow at all. In harder rains, impermeable clay-rich red soils of this region do generate quite a bit of surface runoff, so the scientist in me was a bit disappointed to miss it, but the hiker in me was glad not to be soaked.
Headwater stream at Crowder Mountain State Park
I did manage to find some flowing water in the park though – a headwater stream making big meanders across a alluvial valley bottom, and occasionally splashing over on some exposed bedrock. This stream seemed pretty typical of relatively pristine Piedmont headwater streams, but those undisturbed streams are very hard to find, so I may have to come back to this one for research in the future. In the meantime, the little stream will continue the work it and its predecessors have been doing for ~500 million years – conveying that precipitated water downhill and trying to erode away those hard, hard quartzite mountains.

Categories: by Anne, outcrops, photos

Stuff I linked to on Twitter last week

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Chris Rowan

A post by Chris RowanSince there was a positive response from my first attempt, I’ll make this a regular weekend thing. I’m still working on the format. Apologies for the pirate-speak in some of the more recent tweets, but traditions must be upheld lest I be dispatched to Davey Jones’ Locker. Arrr.
Nova Scotia looks to tap powerful Bay of Fundy tides for clean energy.‚Ä®(via geographile, aseachange, cleaner_energy)
Not that deniers will listen but… contribution of sun to observed warming: 7% over 20thC, none since 1980. ‚Ä®(via KHayhoe)
Sci-fi authors’ visions of 100 years from now at New Scientist.‚Ä®‚Ä®
Ahoy! Feast yer eyes on t’ findings from t’ moon: cold traps for water & other volatile treasures! ‚Ä®(via geogirldi)
Intelligent Design’s 8 Biggest Fails [Gallery]: Reducible complexity. A veritable broadside, me hearties!‚Ä®
Arctic Sea ice minimum for 2009 reached. Bit higher area than 2007, but wonder about volume – more thin, new ice? ‚Ä®
How The Daily Mail writes it’s science articles (via morphosaurus).
How Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough. Might make citation hopping easier… (via guardianscience ).
New geological map of Jovian moon Ganymede. It’s been a bit beaten around, hasn’t it?‚Ä®
British firm will fire probes into the moon to study its geology. A bit light on the ‘how’… (via geology4u)
Peer review in scholarly journals: Perspective of the scholarly community – an international study [PDF] (via mocost).
Poe or no? Those clinging to outdated notion of horizontal x axis: masks huge incr in arctic ice! (via KHayhoe jhiskes) [other posts suggest it is a Poe, but it’s increasingly hard to tell nowadays].
The Zero Growth Mind. (via TheOilDrum)
Amazing photo on Flickr from thunderstorm in SF Bay Area this weekend (via clasticdetritus).
Where is New Horizons today? Bookmark http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php. Maps show later Pluto probe would have been MUCH harder. (via NewHorizons2015)
Torygraph officially not a serious paper anymore: No evidence for Evolution? Really? A staggering science journalism FAIL (Times Science Central, via edyong209, TimesScience )
Glaciers flowing into a Greenland dry valley (NASA Earth Observatory)
It goes without saying that any discussion on any link is welcomed, nay encouraged.

Categories: links

Chris takes on geo-engineering on SeedMagazine.com

Posted on September 14, 2009 by Anne Jefferson

A post by Anne JeffersonOver at our sister site, Chris offers up a geologist’s perspective on the latest assessment of geo-engineering schemes to use technology to deter on-going climate change. Here’s a sampling of what Chris says:

Resorting to geoengineering cannot be viewed as anything other than a failure on our part. The problem we currently face is not just about the possible impact of rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. The more fundamental issue is our species’ mad dash to consume the energy and mineral resources produced by hundreds, if not thousands, of millions of years of geological activity in a mere century or two. Much of the impetus behind geoengineering seems to be an attempt to cling to what could be referred to as “business as abnormal,”

Go read the whole thing now, and while you are over there, check out James Wilsdon’s inside scoop on the report issued September 1st by the Royal Society on “Geo-engineering the climate: science, governance, and uncertainty.”

Categories: by Anne, climate science, links

Some opinions on geoengineering

Posted on September 14, 2009 by Chris Rowan

A post by Chris RowanIt seems that you can’t look anywhere at the moment without seeing a report discussing the potential of ‘geoengineering’ our way out of climate change. Perhaps the most media impact was made by the Royal Society’s largely sensible analysis, which has been nicely summarised for SEED by James Wilsdon.
As one of SEED’s tame geobloggers, I was also invited to respond to this commentary , and you can read my thoughts here. You’ll see that I worry that the whole debate has become a bit of a distraction what must be our long-term goal of creating a truly sustainable civilisation.
I’ll use my soapbox here to add that some of the proposed options, particularly those that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, might potentially play a role in the medium to long term if we stabilise atmospheric CO2 levels too close to a potential tipping point for comfort. In the short-term, though – by which I mean the next couple of decades – we really should turn our eyes away from the shiny technological “fixes” being dangled before us.

Categories: climate science, environment, links