Mountain musings 1: The hard climb of science

Posted on March 22, 2008 by Chris Rowan

I’m on holiday for a few days on the coast, where I’ll hopefully be chilling out and seeing some cool scenery and wildlife. While I’m away, I thought I’d repost a couple of articles inspired by a walking trip in the Alps I went on back in the unread days of ye olde blog.
I’ve just spent a week hiking in the Vanoise National Park; we did a five day loop around the main glacial massif. On the whole, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience; after an unpromising start the weather was fabulous, the scenery fantastic and I had the unforgettable experience of a golden eagle flying 10 feet above my head, close enough to pick out individual feathers on his underbelly. I’m glad I didn’t look like lunch, although his long stare indicated he was thinking about it.
The hike was no without it’s challenges, however, and the second day was particularly hard work. On paper, it was difficult enough; 1200 m of ascent, including a stiff climb to 2916 m to get across the Col d’Aussois. In reality, we proceeded to make it even tougher for ourselves by getting un peu perdu. As we approached the Col, we lost the trail, but we could see a track going up the hillside across the river and decided that must be the route. We persevered with this belief even after we discovered that the bridge promised in our guidebook had apparently vanished; it was only when we’d spent an hour struggling up it – and reached a much lower col on the wrong side of some rather hefty mountains – that we realised that we’d gone a bit wrong. When we looked back into the valley, we could see the actual track, heading upwards into the next valley. Merde.

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Categories: academic life, general science

Geologists in the movies: the myth of the maverick

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Chris Rowan

[submitted for The Accretionary Wedge #7]
It’s a fact of life that scientific accuracy is not generally at the top of Hollywood’s to-do list when making a movie. Any scientist can no doubt recall multiple occasions when their ability to suspend disbelief has been compromised by the screenwriters’ arbitrary (in the sense that the breach seems to be more due to ignorance and intellectual laziness than the fundamental demands of the plot) suspension of the laws of reality. I can’t deny that this sometimes gets a bit annoying, but it also has a certain entertainment value if you’re in the right mood, and given that basic narrative logic is also an early casualty in many big movies, it’s really no surprise that annoying scientific facts are not allowed to get in the way either. In fact, when it comes to science in the movies, I’m usually most vexed by something else entirely: the way that scientist heroes are almost always mavericks, working outside of the big bad scientific establishment, and they always end up being vindicated.

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Categories: public science, ranting

Sometimes you just have to plot the data yourself

Posted on March 19, 2008 by Chris Rowan

ResearchBlogging.orgOver the weekend I finally got around to reading Polyak et al.‘s recent Science paper, which claims that at least part of the Grand Canyon is up to 10 million years older than most people have previously thought. Andrew, Callan, Brian and the newly resurrected Dave Schumaker have all discussed this, and the paper is also the subject of excellent articles in Wired and the Washington Post. But, as ever, I’m not going to let all this previous commentary prevent me from sticking my oar in, especially since it looks to me like the main conclusion of this paper is far from the only way that you can interpret the authors’ data.

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Categories: geology

635 days later

Posted on March 19, 2008 by Chris Rowan

It seems a long time since I first submitted my grand opus on the recent tectonic evolution of New Zealand to the Journal of Geophysical Research. 21 months, some crushing reviews, and a major rewrite later, it is finally being presented to the world:

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, B03103, doi:10.1029/2006JB004594, 2008

Widespread remagnetizations and a new view of Neogene tectonic rotations within the Australia-Pacific plate boundary zone, New Zealand

Christopher J. Rowan and Andrew P. Roberts

Abstract

Large, clockwise, vertical axis tectonic rotations of the Hikurangi margin, East Coast, New Zealand, have been inferred over both geological and contemporary timescales, from paleomagnetic and geodetic data, respectively. Previous interpretations of paleomagnetic data have laterally divided the margin into independently rotating domains; this is not a feature of the short-term velocity field, and it is also difficult to reconcile with the large-scale boundary forces driving the rotation. New paleomagnetic results, rigorously constrained by field tests, demonstrate that late diagenetic growth of the iron sulfide greigite has remagnetized up to 65% of sampled localities on the Hikurangi margin. When these remagnetizations are accounted for, similar rates, magnitudes, and timings of tectonic rotation can be inferred for the entire Hikurangi margin south of the Raukumara Peninsula in the last 7-10 Ma*. Numerous large (50-80°) declination anomalies from magnetizations acquired in the late Miocene require much greater rates of rotation (8-14° Ma-1) than the presently observed rate of 3-4° Ma-1, which is only likely to be characteristic of the tectonic regime established since 1-2 Ma. These new results are consistent with both long- and short-term deformation on the Hikurangi margin being driven by realignment of the subducting Pacific plate, with collision of the Hikurangi Plateau in the late Miocene potentially being key to both the initiation of tectonic rotations and the widespread remagnetization of Neogene sediments. However, accommodating faster, more coherent rotation of the Hikurangi margin in Neogene reconstructions of the New Zealand plate boundary region, particularly in the late Miocene, remains a challenge.

Received 23 June 2006; accepted 14 September 2007; published 19 March 2008.

I’ll probably write more about this in the next couple of weeks – both the research itself, and my experience of getting it through peer review – but right now, I’m just savouring the fact that I can now stop having to add “which will hopefully get published soon” to any sentence where I talk about my PhD research.
*Ma = million years.

Categories: academic life, geology

Lusi in Time

Posted on March 18, 2008 by Chris Rowan

The latest from Lusi
I’ve just come across an excellent article in Time about Lusi, the mud volcano currently engulfing eastern Java. Entitled ‘A Wound In the Earth’, it’s a good summary of the human impacts, the attempts to contain the mud, and the wrangling over whether it was the result of natural causes or human incompetence. This seemed like a good prompt to seek out the latest satellite photo from the University of Singapore’s Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (shown together with some older ones from the same source):

Lusimontage.jpg

It seems that the ever-higher holding dams are largely keeping the eruption contained – for now, anyway. But as the Time article mentions, past experience suggests that even after almost two years, this operation is only just beginning:

In 1979, the oil company Shell set off a similar eruption while drilling off the shore of Brunei. That mudflow took 20 years and 20 relief wells to halt.

Categories: geohazards, Lusi