Highly Allochthonous | NEWS & COMMENTARY FROM THE WORLD OF GEOLOGY & EARTH SCIENCE

Wisdom from the Geoblogosphere School of Learning & Doing (Accretionary Wedge #38)

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Anne Jefferson

A post by Anne Jefferson Welcome to the Geoblogosphere School of Learning & Doing. Let’s begin with a story by one of our students, Michael Klaas of Uncovered Earth. He writes…

“On a warm evening in May of 2008 I sat upon a cinder cone along the flank of Mauna Kea and watched the silhouette of Mauna Loa fade into the darkness as the sun set. Between myself and that other summit was a sea of clouds that washed over all but the highest points of the landscape. I looked upon it with awe and I wondered.

Though I loved what I was seeing, I really understood very little about it.”

Following that sunset experience, he realized that

“in order to appreciate a thing, you must first come to know it. And the best place to go when you want to learn about something is college.”

Now he is a geology major at Portland State exploring the directions he might take his career in the geosciences.

It was for people like Michael, as well as for those like myself who are entrusted with educating them, that I decided to focus this Accretionary Wedge on the theme of education and careers. The response has been wonderful and the collective wisdom of the geoblogosphere that has poured forth is a heart-warming and inspiring thing. But in order to avoid getting to misty-eyed about what a great supportive community we have here online, I’ve decided to have a little fun with the carnival entries and organize them into school subjects…of a sort. So let’s begin our school day.

Potions

Are there some absolutely critical skills or pieces of knowledge that provide a recipe to success in geosciences classes or careers? No geoblogger attempted to give an exhaustive answer (and I doubt a single answer exists), but a few brave souls offered their advice on how to brew a successful potion.

Matt of Agile Geoscience entreats us all to learn to program, saying that scientists have a duty to understand how and why computer programs work and how to tinker with them. He says the process will even be sweet tasting: “Programming is a special kind of problem-solving, and rewards thought and ingenuity with the satisfaction of immediate and tangible results. Getting it right, even just slightly, is profoundly elating.” Speaking as a low-level tinkerer with Matlab, I have to grudgingly admit that Matt is onto something there.

Dave Bressan of the History of Geology Blog reminds us that while academics can get lost in abstract concepts, in the real world, when a landslide has destroyed a bridge and threatens buidlings on the edge, “who you gonna call? APPLIED GEOLOGISTS…” Dave writes that “Students must be aware that the private sector demands exact, however fast and cheap (…unfortunately) results. …On the bright side it is a work that demands motivation, experience and knowledge to approach various, often very variable, problems.” Ann of Ann’s Musings on Geology and Other Things offers another example in which a traditional geology education is sometimes a mismatch with the real world, as she makes a good case for taking some business classes alongside those fun geology electives. Newly-minted graduate Emily advises using internships to “figure out what you DON’T want to do”, and reckons that you should have GIS is in your transferable skill-set.

Silver Fox of Looking for Detachment offers advice from the minerals exploration industry. She’s got a fantastic set of recommendations, but the last point deserves special attention: “So, I say, learn the basics, which include rocks and minerals, and learn basic field mapping skills. Especially learn how to find out things you don’t know. Ask questions, try to find answers.”

The quest for knowledge brings us to our next class of posts…

Transfiguration

Maitri of Maitri’s VatulBlog takes Silver Fox’s theme one step further, arguing that the most important thing a scientist can do is learn how to learn. She says “knowing scientific results is important, but how to arrive at those and new states of knowledge is most critical.” Well said.

Denise Tang of Life as a Geologist echoes Maitri’s sentiments by encouraging us to always be prepared to learn new things, and that further we must be prepared to challenge the conventional ideas when we have reason to do so. That’s a bold statement coming from someone in the Chinese culture, but Denise writes “Daring to challenge others, and be able to defend your own idea, to me, is a paramount important thing here.” On the other hand, I make a plea to let mentors help you learn by having data-driven discussions early and often.

My co-blogger at Highly Allochthonous, Chris Rowan, reminds us not to let ourselves get too pigeonholed into a single nipple of knowledge and to fight the intellectual narrows.

Learning how to learn will prove particularly effective when confronted by the menacing shadow of chalk boards filled with formulae and definitions.

Defense Against the Dark Arts (of Dull Lectures)

Dear students, if you didn’t retain very much of that brilliant lecture your professor just gave, it’s not your fault, we need be more effective teachers, not just lecturerers, explains Narnian Rockhound of Earth-like Planet. Part of the problem, as Jessica Ball of Magma Cum Laude points out, is that grad school usually does very little to prepare people to be good teachers.

So what can the teachers do better? Narnia and Jessica offer up some suggestions, and a few other bloggers have great specific examples. Maybe your professor just wants you to take away the scaffolding and conceptual structure that has more long-term utility than a head stuffed full of disconnected facts. At least that’s what MK at Research at a Snail’s Pace thinks. Shawn of Vi-Carius, who has both the student and the teacher’s perspective as a grad student teaching assistant, begs professors to remember to teach with real-world applications, because that’s what helps students understand complicated theories. In a similar vein, Abdelrhman, author of the GeoSelim blog, thinks that professors should focus on application over narration, arguing “Don’t tell your student the story, teach them how to tell a good story.”

Julia at Stages of Succession reminds us that doing data collection in the field is the best way to teach students about the real process of science. Ryan of Glacial Till says its not just up to the teachers to teach the process of science; students should also seek out opportunities to do research and get hands-on experiences. He hopes that such experiences will help him find a good job that matches his interests when he is done with school.

But even if you’ve never set foot on the grounds of a university campus, there’s still a world of geology waiting to be learned about, and the geology enthusiasts who embrace informal education are among the most valued members of our school.

Care of Magical Creatures

Ron Schott of the Geology Home Companion Blog writes that “there’s more to teaching and learning than exists on a campus or in a classroom.” After 10 years of university teaching he’s left that classroom, and he will be devoting some more of his time to exploring online communication tools as a vehicle for teaching geology. Hollis of In the Company of Plants and Rocks would urge Ron to spend his time creating virtual field trips. He says “What stokes my enthusiasm? — locations with photos, maps and explanations, the more the better. Whenever I find information about an intriguing geologic feature in western North America, I make note, and I design my vacation road trips around these places!”

Dana Hunter of En Tequila Es Verdad gives Ron some more good guidance for the sorts of non-classroom teaching we can do and how that can reach someone like her, who has no formal training in geology but has nonetheless fallen in love with the earth sciences. Her enthusiasm for geology shines through in her post “Adorers of the Good Science of Rock Breaking” and for professional geosciences teachers it should be required reading for renewing our inspiration. (Note also that Dana has recently changed her web abode. She can now be found on FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Of course, Geoscientists shouldn’t limit ourselves to only sharing information and resources with the magical creatures who have already fallen in love with geology.

Charms

As Nahúm Méndez Chazarra of Un geólogo en apuros writes, geology is all too often an invisible science, and we need to popularize it, because after all we are all sitting on the Earth’s crust. Ryan of Educated Erosion shows us first-hand the impact of Nahúm’s “invisible science” observation. Ryan writes: “I wish somebody would have told me in High School that you could study Geology in college and what you could do with that education. I honestly didn’t even know that Geologists did actual science. I thought they were more technicians in mines or the oil fields…” Now he is a geology major in New Mexico with aspirations to work in planetary science.

Flying

We’ve mostly concluded our tour of the Geoblogosphere School of Learning & Doing for today, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the class rosters. Now it’s time to get onto the doing part, and I hope you are feeling inspired by all of the good advice and stories you’ve just read, because we need to help more students fall in love with geology. It’s October and time for the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students Challenge, when we generously give money to help US schoolchildren get hands-on science education. While I’m too overwhelmed to set up a challenge myself this year, I’d like to encourage you to donate to the several geobloggers who have set up challenges. Take a look at the great projects picked out by Maitri Erwin, Jacquelyn Gill, Dana Hunter, and the folks at The Gam and Deep Sea News.

Right, now who’s up for some flying?

Categories: academic life, geology, science education

Proof of earthquake triggering in Christchurch? Not so fast…

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Chris Rowan

A post by Chris Rowan When a magnitude 6.3 earthquake scored an almost direct hit on Christchurch in February, I discussed the possibility that rather than being a simple aftershock of example of the earlier quake triggering activity on an already loaded adjacent fault. However, although I thought that this explanation was more consistent with the wider tectonic picture, it was a hypothesis – an informed guess – rather than a definitive statement. Without much better knowledge of the structures involved, and how much stress they had accumulated prior to the Darfield earthquake, it is difficult to say anything more definitive. So when Twitter pal shortstack81 pointed me to a recently published paper in Nature’s online Open Access journal, Scientific Reports, which concludes “that the Darfield earthquake contributed to promote the rupture of the Christchurch fault [their name for the fault that ruptured in February – NZ geoscientists seem to commonly refer to it as the Port Hills Fault]”, I had to take a closer look. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this paper provides any more information than we had already about the linkage between the two earthquakes.

Italian seismologist Salvatore Stramondo and his colleagues mapped the deformation of the landscape around Christchurch in response to the Darfield earthquake in September 2010 by comparing before and after radar images, and calculated how stress was redistributed in the crust as a result of this deformation. Their calculations indicate that some of the largest stress changes occurred close to the rupture point of the Port Hills earthquake, and that these stress changes would have pushed the fault that generated it closer to failure. Whilst this is an interesting observation, apart from the technical details of the model used, this is not exactly a new result. Very similar stress calculations had already been made even before the Port Hills earthquake, and I included a figure that showed a stress increase near the rupture (from here) in my original post about the Port Hills earthquake in February.

Changes in crustal stress due to the Darfield earthquake as calculated by Stramodo et al., with areas of increased stress in red, and decreased stress in blue. Black dots are aftershocks; the yellow star on the right is the epicentre of the Port Hills Earthquake.

Aftershocks and changes in crustal stress due to the Darfield Earthquake in September 2010, calculated prior to the Port Hills Earthquake. Source: Stuff.co.nz

In order to really nail causes-and-effects, though, we need more than this. Essentially, there are three possible hypotheses about the link between the Darfield earthquake and the Port Hills earthquake five months later:

There is no link: the Port Hills earthquake would have happened as it did regardless of whether or not the Darfield earthquake had happened.
There was triggering: the Port Hills earthquake would have occurred at some point, but the Darfield earthquake altered its timing
The Port Hills earthquake was an aftershock: it would not have occurred at all without the stress change imparted by the Darfield earthquake.

The fact that the Darfield earthquake did change the stress in the crust around the Port Hills rupture probably rules out hypothesis 1, but as I just said, we knew that already. The more important problem is distinguishing between hypotheses 2 and 3 – and this new paper does not really try to do that. Their modelling assumes there was a previously loaded fault just south of Christchurch and then calculates that the stress changes caused by the Darfield earthquake would have pushed it closer to failure. At best, this confirms that triggering is a plausible hypothesis, but arguably we knew that already as well: the idea that stress changes due to deformation following an earthquake can significantly increase (or decrease) the likelihood of earthquakes on adjacent faults is pretty well established. But it being purely an aftershock is also (just about) plausible, based on the statistical expectations of aftershock behaviour after a large earthquake.

It seems to me that what we really need is modelling that shows that the stress changes resulting from the Darfield earthquake were insufficient to produce a magnitude 6.3 aftershock. But sadly we are lacking a few important bits of knowledge before we could run such a test: the detailed subsurface structure of the faults near Christchurch, an idea of how much strain was loaded across them prior to the Darfield earthquake… and, oh yes, an accurate physical model of how faults fail in earthquakes. Given such formidable gaps in our knowledge, you can hardly blame the authors of this paper for not being able to prove triggering or not; but the fact remains that despite its publication, we’re left pretty much where we were in March.

For more informed commentary on this paper, New Zealand’s Science Media Centre has collected a number of responses from Kiwi geoscientists.

Stramondo, S., Kyriakopoulos, C., Bignami, C., Chini, M., Melini, D., Moro, M., Picchiani, M., Saroli, M., & Boschi, E. (2011). Did the September 2010 (Darfield) earthquake trigger the February 2011 (Christchurch) event? Scientific Reports, 1 DOI: 10.1038/srep00098

Categories: earthquakes, tectonics

Show me the data!

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Anne Jefferson

A post by Anne Jefferson Some of my favorite memories of interacting with my Ph.D. advisor involve long sessions at our conference table, looking at data. I’d come to these sessions armed with many graphs showing data I’d collected and different ways of displaying relationships between them. My advisor came armed with years of experience in looking at data and no paternal attachment to any particular data point. I’d talk him through my data and he’d ask questions. He’d say “Have you thought about this…?” and I’d either scribble furious notes about new ways to explore things, or, in my prouder moments, I’d unveil a graph that showed him exactly what he’d just thought of. Sometimes we’d diagram things or write equations on the white board and I’d leave the meeting filled with ideas and with a few things on the to-do list. Our discussions were incredibly productive, and looking at new data in new ways was clearly the most exciting part of science for both of us.

Whiteboard with notes for Galapagos talk

Whiteboard screen grab, July 2011. This is about 1/4 of my total whiteboard. Plus, I've got a much larger one in my lab.

Now I’m the one in the advisorial seat. The conference table is a bit smaller, the white board is a bit bigger, and my years of experience are not quite so numerous, but still my role is to make sure that students are collecting good data, analyzing it appropriately, and understanding what it means. But I can’t fully play my role if I don’t get to see the data until months after it is collected. Plus, I don’t get to do my favorite, exciting part of science, nearly as often unless students bring me offerings of new data on a somewhat regular basis.

My plea to students, both proximal and distal, is to show your mentors the data. It doesn’t matter if the data aren’t completely polished or that you don’t have everything figured out yet. We want to see it anyways. And showing us the data early and often is a huge benefit to both of us. As I’ve already said, looking at data with students is my favorite part of the job, surely much more fun than writing proposals or, ugh, grading papers. But bringing data offerings to your mentors does more than make us happy; it should help you be a better scientist and a more efficient graduate student.

I know that field work is utterly, obliteratingly exhausting, and that is tempting to shove off the data analysis to some mythical point at which you have bigger chunks of time to make sense of the numbers. But scribblings in your notebook, or points on a datalogger, will never make more sense than when they are freshly collected. Taking some time to translate those scribbles and data points into graphs, coherent tables, or conceptual diagrams, and then taking them to your mentor will allow you and her to catch any problems early on, while there might still be time to go back and collect better or more complete data. You will undoubtedly catch many of these errors yourself, just in the process of making sense of your field notes, and your advisor may spot a few more, particularly errors of omission – data that you didn’t collect that might lend support to what you’ve already done. If you leave all that data analysis to the final months of your schooling, you’ll be far less likely to make right what went wrong and you might find yourself back in the field exactly when you thought you’d be in full-time writing mode.

Which is it? Two brains are better than one in cases like this.

In addition to error-catching, looking at data early and often with your mentor will help the two of you develop new ways of thinking about your project. For example, my student Ralph and I noticed that some of his downstream sites seemed to have smaller flood peaks than sites farther upstream. This lead to more field work for him, but also the realization that scour holes and log dams in his tiny streams could be major water stores, reducing peak flows in a downstream fashion. It turned out to be a big point in the discussion section of his thesis, and if we hadn’t been looking at the data early on we might not have been able to put the story together.

Finally, talking regularly with your mentor, in the context of the data you are collecting, is a great way of filling in your understanding of where a particular piece of research fits in the big picture and historical context of your field of study. You should definitely have some sense of this from regularly reading the literature (which you are, of course), but your mentor probably has a richer vein to mine for thinking about how your new results fit in with what other people are scientists are finding now (or found a century ago). It’s not that your mentor is any smarter than you, she’s just had longer to read the literature, go to conferences, and think about how all the pieces fit together.

While what I’ve written above is aimed primarily at graduate students, it is still true for undergraduates with class projects and labs. Most of us professors would much rather talk over your assignments with you and make sure you understand what is going on *before* you turn the assignment in, than have to give you a lousy grade and explain why afterward.

Making use of your mentors and showing them the data is also true for those of us in the post-PhD ranks. Sometimes we’re talking through data with collaborators, rather than people in more senior positions, but the aim is the same…”Am I forgetting anything? Does this result make sense? “What happens if we think about it this way?” And sometimes I still call my old advisor: “Hi Gordon, I’m getting this really weird result, and here’s what I think is going on. What do you think?”

Categories: academic life, by Anne

Scenic Saturday: the remnants of volcanism past

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Chris Rowan

A post by Chris Rowan When you live in Edinburgh, you can’t ignore geology even if you were foolish enough to want to: the summit of Arthur’s Seat is visible from virtually every decent vantage point in the city.

Arthur's Seat viewed from the south of the city. Photo: Chris Rowan, 2009.

The guidebooks will tell you that Arthur’s seat is an extinct volcano that erupted during the early Carboniferous, around 350 million years ago (that’s the Mississipian for you American geologists). This is true in a sense, but although it might be easy to picture lava spewing from today’s summit, the landform we see today is but a pale shadow of the volcano-that-was. One big clue is the Salisbury Crags, a volcanic sill that must have been originally intruded some distance below the surface, and has since been excavated by erosion.

Arthur's Seat with the Salisbury Crags in the foreground (click for a larger version). Photo: Chris Rowan, 2009.

The summit of Arthur’s Seat is in fact formed around a couple of volcanic pipes, yet more volcanic intrusions that formed in the shaft leading to vents of the original volcano (like the peak Edinburgh Castle is built on). Thus we are again seeing rocks that were nowhere near the top of the mountain when they formed.

Arthur's seat viewed from its east flank. The two peaks are both formed around pipes of intrusive dolerite. The poorly exposed rocks in the foreground are volcanic ash flows (click for a larger version). Photo: Chris Rowan, 2009

So if we’re being truly accurate, Arthur’s Seat is the highly eroded core of an extinct volcano; a peek at its internal magmatic plumbing. The fact it still looks a bit like a volcano is a coincidence: the summit has formed around the original vent because the intruded dolerites are harder and more resistant to erosion than the ash flows and lavas that formed the rest of the volcanic edifice. And there has been a lot of erosion, most recently by glaciers in the last ice ages. Which brings us to today’s mind-boggling little geological observation: magma erupted over a few tens of thousands of years, 350 million years ago, is still controlling the shape of the landscape today.

Categories: geology, outcrops, photos, volcanoes

Stay broad! Why you should fight the intellectual narrows

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Chris Rowan

A post by Chris Rowan For this month’s Accretionary wedge, my co-blogger Anne is asking us to mark the beginning of a new teaching year by pondering the nature of education in the geoscience. As a post-doc, I may not be in the best position to really address this question, because I occupy a weird transitional state on the educational ladder: not really a student, but only just starting out on my scientific career, and only peripherally involved with the teaching side of university life. And yet, since I am trying to gain a long-term position as an academic scientist, I do need to identify – and then fill – any gaps left unfilled by my undergraduate and PhD training, hopefully before any future hiring committees do.

Thanks to my somewhat tortuous path into geology, I can certainly look back and wish that I’d seen the light sooner so that I had gotten more formal instruction in things like petrology and mineralogy. I can wish that I’d realised earlier that statistics is one of the more essential instruments in a scientist’s mathematical toolkit. I can definitely wish that my PhD instruction had included more insight into the arcane process of acquiring funding for your research; something which, from my anecdotal experience, is a clear weakness in the UK’s PhD system compared to, say, the one in the USA.

However, looking back on my path so far through academia, I think that the thing that I most regret in hindsight is the way I allowed my PhD to narrow my intellectual horizons. It’s an easy enough thing to understand: as you work on your thesis, your whole intellectual bandwidth becomes dominated by a single topic, and decisions about which papers you read, and what you spend your time thinking about, are entirely governed by how relevant they are to your thesis. A few years of this, and you might find that the totality of your expertise is confined to a tiny nipple of knowledge barely discernable on the broader circle of scientific knowledge.

This is the last frame of a great visualisation of this problem by Matthew Might. Click on the image to see the whole thing.

Science is more about the connections between facts and observations than the facts themselves. The more you focus on one thing, the more you lose sight of those connections, and the more you are setting yourself up for trouble in the future. If you are teaching, you will be expected to instruct future scientists on a much broader section of the circle of knowledge. And it is extremely unlikely that you will be able to spend your entire academic career endlessly repeating your studies of exactly the same problem.

Fortunately for me, the nature of geology itself helped to counterbalance the narrowing pressures of my PhD: the diverse and deep interconnections between physics, chemistry and biology that lie at the heart of earth science can easily pull you in unanticipated intellectual directions. I learnt this lesson when my research into the recent tectonic history of New Zealand suddenly required a major detour into the redox chemistry of shallowly buried sediments and electron microscopy of sulphide minerals. And yet, I would sometimes remember all of the different areas of geology that I learnt about as an undergrad and mourn a little about how much of it seemed to have been pushed out of my brain.

Since then, I have been rehabilitating myself: my different post-docs, which have ranged across continents, geological time periods, and sub-disciplines, have helped to nicely re-broaden my mental horizons. But I also think that writing this blog, and reading others, has been almost as important, by drawing my attention to interesting things from other areas of earth science.

But wherever you are in your geoscience career, I believe a little time spent fighting the urge to narrowly focus might reap valuable future dividends. Of course, most of your work time should be spent on your current projects. But try to save a little bit of time for discovering the problems that you don’t know you want to solve yet, the techniques that you wouldn’t currently imagine would be of use to you, the parts of the world or the geological timescale that you’ve never considered you might be interested in. Scan the contents of new journals, and don’t be afraid to read an interesting looking paper even if it isn’t relevant to what you’re doing right now. Never pass up the chance to talk to meet and discuss science with new colleagues and vistors. And never pass up an invitation to go out in the field if you can help it: you always, always learn something new.

So my advice to current students is: don’t get caught in the narrows! And to current researchers, don’t stay trapped in them!

Categories: academic life, geology, ranting, science education