{"id":909,"date":"2013-04-15T13:02:48","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T12:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/?p=909"},"modified":"2013-04-15T13:02:48","modified_gmt":"2013-04-15T12:02:48","slug":"egu2013dirty-volcanic-hail-geology-blogging-open-source-science-and-fracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/2013\/04\/egu2013dirty-volcanic-hail-geology-blogging-open-source-science-and-fracking\/","title":{"rendered":"EGU2013: Dirty volcanic hail, geology blogging, open source science and fracking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some of my highlights from last week’s European Geoscience Union conference<\/a>.\u00a0 These were presentations dirty hailstones formed in subglacial volcanic eruptions, a workshop on social media and blogging in geosciences, a splinter meeting on open source software in geoscience and The Great Debate on shale gas\/fracking.<\/p>\n

Dirty volcanic hail<\/h3>\n

\u00de\u00f3r\u00f0ur (Thordur) Arason<\/a> presented the first detailed study of volcanic ash-filled hailstones.\u00a0 These are closely related to subglacial volcanic eruptions, such the two most-recent Icelandic events. \u00a0 He studied examples from the deposits of the May 2011 Gr\u00edmsv\u00f6tn eruption that he collected, still frozen, from layers between the pumice and ash deposits that formed during the eruption, high on the Vatnaj\u00f6kull glacier<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

These ice-cemented spheres of volcanic ash formed during the Gr\u00edmsv\u00f6tn eruption in Iceland in May 2011, and are similar to the hailstones described at EGU 2013. I took this photo when I visited the crater area three months later. It was an adventurous trip, involving monster trucks and crevasses. Click the image to read more.<\/p><\/div>\n

Arason measured the sizes of the hailstones (mostly 1-2 mm) from close-up photographs.\u00a0 He weighed a big rectangular block of them, then allowed it to melt so that he could collect that ash grains inside.\u00a0 The hailstones contained 15-40% ash, with grains from a few microns to over 1 mm in diameter.<\/p>\n

Quantifying the contents of the hailstones is important for a number of reasons.\u00a0 Firstly, by mixing ash grains with ice, you change the particle size and optical properties of the grains.\u00a0 Arason demonstrated how this can lead to huge errors in measurements of ash plumes made by radar, and ice-covered ash is a problem for satellite measurements, too.\u00a0 Secondly, by trapping very fine ash, the hailstones stop it drifting off downwind towards Europe.\u00a0 These processes will be included in the next generation of computer models for ash dispersal.<\/p>\n

It must take a lot of water to make so many hailstones.\u00a0 Thanks to Magn\u00fas Tumi Gu\u00f0mundsson<\/a>, we have a pretty good idea of how much.\u00a0 In his talk, he described\u00a0 changes in the Vatnaj\u00f6kull glacier around the eruption site.\u00a0 There is a permanent subglacial lake at Gr\u00edmsv\u00f6tn<\/a> that periodically releases meltwater floods (j\u00f6kulhlaups) out onto the lowlands, so Icelanders have detailed maps of the ice surface and of the bedrock beneath.<\/p>\n

In this case, the volume of missing ice is equivalent to the water that went up with the plume, because there was no j\u00f6kulhlaup during the eruption.\u00a0 Gu\u00f0mundsson found this volume was around 0.1 km3<\/sup>, which is about one seventh of the volume of tephra<\/a> (pumice, ash and rock debris) that were produced during the eruption.\u00a0 Averaging all this water over the 4 days when the eruption was most powerful gives a discharge of about 290 m3<\/sup>s-1<\/sup>.\u00a0 This is equivalent to a fountain with 10% of the discharge of the Nile, shooting straight up into the air.<\/p>\n

Social media and blogging workshop<\/h3>\n

The social media and blogging workshop panel included the geobloggers and tweeters Jon Tennant (@protohedgehog<\/a>), Laura Roberts (@LauRob85<\/a>), James King (@DrAeolus<\/a>) and Dave Petley (@davepetley<\/a>) and was chaired by EGU social media officer Sara Mynott (@EuroGeosciences<\/a>).\u00a0 They discussed the advantages of Twitter (finding breaking news first; access to well-informed people on any topic; making contacts from all over the world), and of blogging (explain things in more detail than traditional media are interested in; raise your academic profile; become a contact point for journalists interested in your subject).<\/p>\n

I was interested to hear that some PhD student bloggers are writing on blogs that their supervisors had set up but didn’t have time to write themselves.\u00a0 It was also interesting that some climate scientists are discouraged from blogging by the abuse that they receive in their comments from climate change deniers.<\/p>\n

Dave Petley is a professor in the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University and runs The Landslide Blog<\/a>, hosted by the American Geophysical Union.\u00a0 By professor, I mean in the UK senior-academic-who-runs-his-own-research-group sense of the word, as opposed to the US academic-with-a-permanent-(tenured)-position sense.\u00a0 His story was especially convincing.\u00a0 In the six years since he began his blog, he has seen traffic to the site gradually increase to over 1,000 visitors per day.\u00a0 Over the same period, he showed how citations to his papers had also risen sharply and said he now receives many more invites to meetings and conferences.<\/p>\n

Dave also described how a blog post that he wrote about a fatal flash flood in Nepal<\/a> became the global focal point for people looking for information on the event, including Nepali journalists and visiting tourists.\u00a0 An ex-Soviet military pilot provided YouTube footage<\/a> showing that the cause was a landslide from the mountain Annapurna IV, and NASA contributed satellite imagery<\/a>.\u00a0 The results of the study will be written up as a scientific publication.<\/p>\n

I’ve found a similar benefit from blogging.\u00a0 In 2011, I wrote a post asking members of the UK public to collect ash fall<\/a> from the eruption of the Gr\u00edmsv\u00f6tn eruption, and posted the request on Twitter.\u00a0 We received over 130 samples from across the country, and the results, which include a map of where ash was found, will be published in the Journal of Applied Volcanology in the next few weeks.<\/p>\n

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the Geosciences<\/h3>\n

Following an oversubscribed splinter meeting last year<\/a>, the profile of Free and Open Source Software in the Geosciences continues to increase.\u00a0 This year featured another Splinter Meeting<\/a> and a dedicated session featuring both talks and posters<\/a>.\u00a0 I made it along to part of the Splinter Meeting, which highlighted the benefits of using free\/open source software and displayed the huge and growing range of tools that are available.<\/p>\n

The panel highlighted that a great way to test some of these tools out is to download the OSGeoLive DVD<\/a>, which contains the latest versions of over 50 different packages.\u00a0 Simply fire up your machine with the disk in the drive and it will boot into a fully-functioning Linux desktop with all the software installed and ready to go.\u00a0 When you are done playing, shut the machine down and take the disk back out.\u00a0 Your original operating system will be untouched.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The OSGeo-Live DVD is a great way to try out open source GIS software<\/p><\/div>\n

The arguments for open source in science were strengthened recently by editorial in the journal Nature<\/a>, and by articles in the journal Science<\/a>.\u00a0 The Scientific Method rests on experiments being tested by different people.\u00a0 Many advances in science come from computer modelling, but if scientists do not publish their code, how can others test it?<\/p>\n

Related to this were issues about where the code should be stored.\u00a0 Ideally, the code would become citable item so that scientists get recognition when others use it. Reproducibility of results was also discussed.\u00a0 Using open source software, as opposed to proprietary code whose internal workings are a commercial secret, ensures that the exact versions of software used will always be available to those attempting to reproduce a result.<\/p>\n

The Great Debate – Shale gas: to frack or not to frack<\/h3>\n

Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, involves pumping high-pressure water into underground rocks, forcing them to crack and to release previously-inaccesible natural gas.\u00a0 It is a controversial process, and the EGU Great Debate was advertised as an opportunity for top scientists do discuss the pros and cons of getting fossil fuels in this way.\u00a0 These are summarised nicely in the session outline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was excited to watch this debate taking place in front of a technical audience, looking forward to getting into the details of charts of production rates in wells, descriptions of changes to rock properties during fracking and projections of future changes in global gas prices.\u00a0 Many others were, too, and it was standing room only.\u00a0 Disappointingly, the whole event turned out to be very thin on data.\u00a0 One guy said that shale gas would all be gone in fewer than 20 years, then another said that it would last more than 100.\u00a0 Neither presented any evidence for where those numbers had come from.\u00a0 A wasted opportunity, I think.<\/p>\n

[Since getting home, I’ve found Matt Herod’s write-up of the debate<\/a>.\u00a0 It seems that he was also disappointed by lack of hard data.\u00a0 His post contains a link to the video of the debate and some good background information on fracking in general].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some of my highlights from last week’s European Geoscience Union conference.\u00a0 These were presentations dirty hailstones formed in subglacial volcanic eruptions, a workshop on social media and blogging in geosciences, a splinter meeting on open source software in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":915,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions\/915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}