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

Teaming up with DonorsChoose to bring Earth Science to schools

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Anne Jefferson

Last October, geobloggers lead by Kim Hannula, Erik Klemetti and us raised nearly $10000 for earth science education in US public schools through a fundraising challenge with DonorsChoose.org.

This year we’re going to do even more to bring needed supplies, books, and field experiences to science classrooms around the US. DonorsChoose has created Science Bloggers for Students to inspire a little friendly competition amongst your favorite science bloggers. We’ve created a giving page where we’ve hand-picked projects related to earth science, with a particular emphasis on requests for rock and mineral specimens, tools for measuring water and weather, and other hands-on science experiences.

Before we introduce you to a couple of the projects in our challenge, let’s explain how it works. Teachers submit project descriptions and materials costs to DonorsChoose, a non-profit that promotes the projects on the web. Donors read the descriptions, give any amount of money (even $5 helps a lot!) to the project of their choice, and when the project is fully funded the supplies get delivered to the classroom and the project becomes a reality. In return, donors get to see photos of the project in action, and if they give $100 or more to a project or are the final donor, they get a packet of hand-written thank you notes from the students. Even better, during the Science Bloggers for the Schools challenge (October 10 to November 9), Hewlett Packard is matching the first $50,000 that we raise. Ready to see some highlights of projects we’ve picked for our challenge?

How about a project to give a K-8 science lab in a Chicago public school materials to let students explore fossils and geologic time through fossil casts, rock samples, geologic time charts and games to make it all fun? This project just needs $125 to make it a reality, and the world will have more students who know something about how old the earth is and how life has evolved over time. Update: This project has been fully funded! Yay!

How about a project to give North Carolina eighth graders at an urban “global leadership” academy a chance to visualize groundwater flow? As the teacher points out in her project description: “Most of them have never experienced anything to do with wells and don’t know why one would run dry. They are well versed in what happens to surface water, but haven’t a clue about ground water.” This could be a generalized statement about the population of the southeastern United States in general, so it’s great that this teacher wants to tackle the challenge of ground water in her classroom. And just $121 could make it happen, but those dollars have to appear in the next 22 days.

Or how about helping 150 students in rural Ohio study soils scientifically? The description the teacher provided of her proposed project is absolutely lovely: “Students develop skills of observation and scientific language as they become familiar with the equipment we use. They will be introduced to a problem wherein a school garden will not grow plants. They will come up with a definition of soil and what it contains. Students will research the composition of soil, with topics such as the role of particle size of weathered rocks, and organic material. Students will then be able to use scientific skills to describe the texture, consistency and color of the soils in order to identify our school soil before planting in the spring and make the necessary changes to produce the best harvest.” Want to see the students get a chance to make this happen? It takes just $276 from donors like you!

If you want to team up with us and DonorsChoose to bring Earth Science to schools, here’s what you can do. Give to the projects of your choice, and spread the word on facebook, twitter, and off-line. If you are a blogger, write a post or add a banner encouraging your readers to contribute to the challenge. Or consider picking your own projects from the thousands of possibilities on the DonorsChoose website, and mounting your own Science Bloggers for Students challenge. There’s still time to join, just contact Anne for details.

The Science Bloggers challenge will run until early November – perfectly timed to coincide with Earth Science Week, National Fossil Day, and the Geological Society of America meeting. You’ll be hearing from us again periodically as the month goes on, maybe with a few incentives to sweeten the deal.

Categories: by Anne, science education

Links, more links, and columnar basalts

Posted on October 3, 2010 by Chris Rowan

A post by Chris Rowan A post by Anne Jefferson Real life has taken both Highly Allochthonous bloggers away from the internet for much of this week, so this weeks’ link-sharing is necessarily curtailed.

New Accretionary Wedge

The latest collection of themed geology writing, focussing this month on ‘Important Geological Experiences’, is up at Outside the Interzone. If, like Chris, you’ve been starved of geoblogging for a while, it’s a good place to start catching up.

Columnar basalt meme

The latest meme to circulate in the geoblogosphere has led to a columnar basalt bonanaza: Lockwood’s post is your gateway to lots of cool pictures. We both have some (admittedly tardy) contributions. Chris saw some rather nice columnar basalt flows on his recent trip to Yellowstone: although the caldera is best known for its more explosive eruptions, some of the more minor eruptions that followed the last big explosion did produce basalt flows instead.

Columnar basalt flow near Tower Fall, Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Chris Rowan (2010).

Anne has a nice illustration of how water (of course) can interact in cools ways with volcanic landforms: here are the Toketee Falls,, in the southern Oregon Cascades.

Toketee Falls, S Oregon Cascades. Photo by Anne Jefferson.

More exoplanetary excitement

Yet another planet has been found in the Gliese 581 system, and has caused some excitement: it is not only quite small (3-4 times Earth mass), but it is found at the right orbital radius for liquid water to possibly exist on it’s surface. Inevitably, this has led to some rather breathless headlines about ‘new Earths’. Brian Romans nicely explains how ‘in habitable zone’ does not necessarily mean ‘habitable planet’, while Chris Town runs through the depressingly long list of media outlets that have failed to grasp this point.

Stuff we linked to on Twitter last week

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Anne Jefferson

A post by Anne Jefferson Chris, who holds the keys to the magic scripts that make our Twitter link fest something less than an all-day HTML formatting slog, is traveling at the moment. So forgive the leaner linky goodness this week, and savor the best 9 things I linked to on Twitter in the last 7 days.

Blogs in Motion

A new hydro- blog with a great name: Hydro-Ecstatic! Check it out: http://shendri.wordpress.com/ (h/t @callanbentley)

Water

Humoring me with some pictures of flooding in my native neck of the woods, planelight has posted pictures of flooding of the Minnesota River around St. Peter: http://lifeinplanelight.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/flooding-of-the-minnesota-river-around-st-peter/ [My inspection of the USGS gage records at ~10 pm Saturday evening suggests that smaller streams have crested, but big rivers like the Minnesota and Mississippi are still rising.]

Through the Sandglass has fantastically awesome post about Indus River, flooding & climate science http://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/2010/09/a-climate-science-recommendation-the-pakistan-floods-and-of-course-sand.html (via @clasticdetritus)[This is the sort of post I meant to write about the Pakistan floods but never managed to pull together. Now Michael Welland has done a much better job of it.]

A nice exploration of two new papers on increasing rates of global groundwater depletion & its relationship to food exports http://blog.agu.org/geospace/2010/09/23/dangerous-dependence-on-virtual-water-deepens/

New blog post at Ordinary High Water Mark: Culverts 1: A case of the F***its Be sure to check out that picture at the top before you read the text! http://ohwm.blogspot.com/2010/09/culverts-1-case-of-fits.html

A powerful story of poverty, politics, and lack of access to clean water in Lima at Wandering Gaia: http://wanderinggaia.com/2010/09/20/the-business-of-migration/

Climate

READ THIS Excellent introduction to climate feedbacks from RealClimate (via @AGW_Prof): http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/09/introduction-to-feedbacks/

Journalism professor Jay Rosen on why climate science reporting is so bad – http://climateprogress.org/2010/09/20/jay-rosen-on-climate-science-reporting-journalism/ (via @geographile @ClimaTweets)

Volcanoes

Great post at: Magma Cum Laude Distinguishing deposits from andesitic eruptions http://magmacumlaude.blogspot.com/2010/09/distinguishing-deposits-from-andesitic.html

Categories: Uncategorized

Flood! In the middle of Australia’s Outback?!

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Anne Jefferson

Without question, the most important geologic experiences in my career have been floods. I grew up on the Upper Mississippi River in southern Minnesota and decided I wanted to study rivers during the Great Flood of 1993. Four years later, when I was a senior in high school, the Mississippi River flooded again with an even higher crest in my area, but it was overshadowed by the record-breaking floods on the other side of the state. In 2001 when I moved back to Minnesota to study for my Water Resources Science MS degree, the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers flooded again – just to make sure I was paying attention. Days after I moved to North Carolina in 2007, my hometown got up to 43 cm of rain and there were devastating floods on every creek in the area. And as I write this post, southeastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin are flooding again – thanks to up to 25 cm of rain on already saturated soils. So you could say I’ve grown up with big floods, maybe even gotten used to them as a fact of life. But I never expected to experience one during a trip to one of the most arid regions on earth – Australia’s Great Red Centre.

Early in the year 2000, I was studying abroad in Wollongong, Australia and some friends and I made fantastic travel plans for the Easter holidays. We were going to fly into Alice Springs, see Uluru, Kata Tjuta and then head north to Darwin and Kakadu. We flew into Alice Springs on 20 April – and much to our surprise when we got off the plane, it was raining. And raining. And raining. It proceeded to rain for at least the next 3 days – maybe longer. My memory blurs a bit from endless hours being trapped in a soggy hostel with hundreds of other stranded holiday-makers in a town that was not equipped for tourists to do much more than pass through. And a town that was in increasing danger of going under water.

But let me back up a bit. Alice Springs is in pretty much the dead center of Australia. It gets, on average, less than 30 cm of precipitation per year. The Todd River flows through the center of town. Though flows might be too generous a word for a river on which there is a famous boat race that has to be canceled if there is water in the river. Participants run down the river channel in bottomless canoes. Seriously. The river is dry more than 95% of the time.

Alice Springs and the receding Todd River, 23 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

Alice Springs and an unusually wet & receding Todd River, 23 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

Alice Springs is also a major place for tourists who want to visit Uluru (Ayers Rock) to fly into before taking a 400+ km bus ride to the rock itself. There is one road to the south, towards Uluru. There’s one road to the north, toward Darwin. As far as I know, there are no roads toward the west, because in that direction lies nothing but desert. And there’s one road to the east, toward the Alice Springs airport and points beyond. After our first night in Alice, every road except the one to the airport was underwater. Planes kept bringing in hapless tourists like ourselves, but there was no way for any of us to get out.

Because the waters kept rising. For you see, on 20 April, Cyclone Rosita had made landfall near Broome, on the northwest coast of Australia, as a Category 5 storm. It then tracked across the Great Sandy Desert and towards the headwaters of the Todd River and Alice Springs itself. And when large amounts of rain fall in a short time in an arid environment, boy do the rivers run.

Todd River in Alice Springs, 21 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson, from the only above-water bridge in town)

Flooded roadway in Alice Springs, 21 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

My recollection is that the photo above was taken about the time of peak flow on 21 April 2000, and it shows that the buildings in town were largely spared. However, I don’t have any photos from 22 April, which I remember as a miserably wet day during which my friends and I huddled in the hostel and played a lot of Uno.

A riverside park in Alice Springs, 21 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

The same riverside park after the flood had receded, 23 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

Once the rains finally dwindled, sometime on early on 23 April, the Todd rapidly receded and by mid-afternoon I got the above and below shots of areas that had been underwater just a few hours before. I particularly like the picture below because it nicely illustrates differential deposition and erosion associated with flow obstructions.

Scour around a riparian tree with the receding Todd River in the background, 23 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

Finally, on 24 April, we were able to get out of town and head south to Uluru. But while the floodwaters had passed in Alice, there was still LOTS of water in the desert. As desert roads aren’t always equipped with bridges, there were several places where the vehicles had to ford slow-moving or ponded water. Even in college, I was enough of a river rat to know that driving across a flooded roadway is a great way to get yourself killed and I remember lots of consternation at the prospect of the water crossing pictured below. But we were literally in the middle of nowhere so my options for abandoning the trip were limited and after watching at least a dozen other vehicles ford the water, my friends and I got back on our bus and safely made it across the remnants of Rosita’s rain.

Flooding crossing on the road between Alice Springs and Uluru, 24 April 2000 (photo by A. Jefferson)

Categories: by Anne, geohazards, hydrology

The science of streams in the city

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Anne Jefferson

Urban stream, Charlotte, NC (photo by A. Jefferson)

It’s not as breathtakingly beautiful and soul-cleansing as crystal clear springs in forested mountains, but this is the present and future of many of the world’s streams, and the way that most people interact with their local stream and watershed, if they even think about it all. With over half of the world’s population now living in cities, and with streams serving simultaneously as water supply and wastewater disposal system for that population, there is an urgent need to understand how streams, groundwater, and ecosystems survive, adapt, or are extinguished by urban development. In a sense, urban watersheds are the future of hydrologic science, aqueous biogeochemistry, and stream ecology.

It took me moving to a rapidly-growing, sprawling southeastern city before I saw the light of urban hydrology, but the more time I spend looking at the waters around me, the more intriguing and applied questions I find myself asking. Do stormwater ponds serve as point sources of groundwater recharge? What happens to stream temperature with different styles of development and stormwater management? And what difference does that make for stream ecosystems? Does stream restoration change hyporheic exchange and surface water storage in an ecologically beneficial manner? Fortunately, not only has North Carolina piqued my interest in urban watersheds, but it has provided me with a set of like-minded colleagues and collaborators with whom I am developing new projects. This month the first two of those projects have begun to bear fruit, in the form of a new paper and a new research grant.

In an open-access paper published in the journal Water, my colleagues and I review the state of the science and identify the open questions in watershed hydrology and in-stream processes in the southern United States. We conclude that while we understand some hydrologic impacts of urbanization reasonably well, there’s a lot we don’t have a great handle on. For example, we call for more research on developing comprehensive water budgets for urban watersheds; evaluating the combined impacts of land-use and climate change; understanding how pre-urbanization land-use history affects stream response; integrating hydrologic connectivity with biogeochemical cycling; and developing a clearer understanding of the complex interactions between catchment and in-stream processes in urban systems. You can read the whole paper by O’Driscoll et al. (2010) in the open-access journal Water.

Along with colleagues Sara McMillan and Sandra Clinton at UNC Charlotte and Christina Tague at UCSB, I’ll be looking at the effects of stormwater management practices on urban headwater streams. We’re taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines hydrology, temperature, water quality, nutrient processing, and macroinvertebrate assemblages through field measurements and modeling. We’re interested in whether the flow and water quality benefits of stormwater management that are seen by comparing pond inflow and outflow actually translate into differences in ecosystem function in the receiving streams. And we’re looking for graduate students to come work with us and help us find the answers. If you are considering graduate school and are interested in hydrology, stream ecology, or biogeochemistry, check out the project description and application instructions here.

Categories: by Anne, hydrology