Auroras

One of the first twitter accounts I started following was @Aurora_Alerts, and it is still only one of two accounts that I have pushed to my phone as text messages.  In the last couple of years, there have been very few times when everything is aligned to see the northern lights from Calgary (51.0775° N): geomagnetic activity needs to be at least "Very Active,"  or close to "Storm"  levels, it needs to be dark, and the sky needs to be clear.

It's not that I've never seen them before. Growing up in Medicine Hat (51.0775° N) we used to see them several times a year. And when I lived in Edmonton (53.5472° N) during my undergrad they were even brighter, and once I even heard them.  One of the first years I lived in Calgary, I saw them dancing away behind the downtown skyline. The thing is, all of this was before I had the right equipment to even attempt to photograph them.

One night, in early March, I was heading to bed around 1am when I got a text about an approaching "storm"  (this was actually a few days before the big magnetic storm that was all over the news). I checked the forecast and looked out the window at the crystal clear skies.

I did what any normal person would do--I bundled up, collected my camera gear, and headed to the park a couple of blocks from home. The park is on a ridge, facing north, and it turned out to be a really good place to watch and photograph the northern lights. Even a coyote thought so (although he didn't appear to have any camera gear with him).

Considering this was my first time photographing the northern lights, I'm happy with the results. For next time, I'll remember that I can't see properly in the dark and I need to find a better way to focus the camera so I don't have a blurry foreground. Even with a tripod and a cable release I should probably stand stiller than I actually did. Lower ISO would probably help too.  But I'll get there (if all the conditions align again before I move too far south to see the auroras).

GeoREX

My laptop died on Monday. It was quick, and unexpected, and it happened in its sleep. The good news is that I have become almost fanatical about backing up my MSc research and thesis lately (I must submit my corrections by the end of this month to graduate and stop paying tuition) so I was only missing one day of work on my backup.  Even better news is that only the motherboard is dead--the hard drive is in good shape and has been converted to an external usb drive.

This morning I picked up my old laptop, which my parents shipped up to me as soon as I knew my laptop would not recover. It is a temporary fix; I've already ordered a replacement laptop, and it should ship in ten days.  I've spent most of today installing software on the old laptop, transferring my files from my external hard drive, and creating more backups of everything.  This is still going on in the background, so it gives me time to post about GeoREX.

GeoREX was the initiative of myself and three other graduate students in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary. It was a one-day research symposium where graduate students gave talks about their research. In a department of nearly 200 grad students, it's hard to know what kind of research other people are doing, and we wanted to facilitate that. We also wanted grad students to have an opportunity to give a talk in front of an audience of peers. GeoREX is short for "Geoscience Research EXchange."

The event ran on Tuesday, and it was a successful day. Even without a computer, I managed to live-tweet from the @Geo_REX twitter account (although it was challenging to keep up from a smartphone with not many geology words in its dictionary and no full keyboard). There were only a few times during the day when I tweeted from my personal account instead of the GeoREX one, but I pulled them all together in storify below:

I'm not going to lie--even with four of us working together this was a lot of work to organize. But it was worth it. I loved seeing people from different research groups learning about what each other does. I  loved seeing people who have been in the department for several years giving a talk about their own research for the very first time. We had a great "keynote address" from Dr. Phil Simony, a Professor Emeritus in our department. I really hope that this will continue on next year, even though half of our committee are graduating this spring.

I'm on a volcano!

First, let me start with a disclaimer: I am not a volcanologist. I do, however, think volcanoes are cool. And you don't have to be a volcanologist, or even a geoscientist, to have an awesome and amazing time on the day-trip out to White Island.

White Island is in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty, shown on the left side of this image. 

It was a gorgeous September day in the Bay of Plenty when I went on my tour. It was the off-season, so the boat wasn't full and there was no rush to get back so they could run two tours in one day.  Which was awesome because on the ~80 minute boat ride from Whakatane to White Island, just as we were tucking in to morning tea, we saw a small pod of orcas. The boat stopped, and we got to spend about 20 minutes watching them. At first there were three (mum and two little ones), but then the bull came up. Instead of herding his family away from the boat they stayed. Probably because we were right over a reef where there was good food. In fact, every once in a while one of them would come up with a fish in its jaws.

This one just caught something to eat.

Once we left the orcas behind, I started focusing on the volcano on the horizon. It was steaming, as it always does. In fact Captain Cook named it White Island because it was always surrounded by clouds. He never got close enough to see that it was actually a volcano.

We anchored in a little bay, were handed our hard hats and gas masks, and were ferried to the dock on a zodiac. The colours on White Island are spectacular, especially in contrast to the water and the sky behind.

On the horizon you can see the mountains of the Eastern  Bay of Plenty

White Island is an andesitic stratovolcano, and it is New Zealand's most active cone volcano. It has recorded continuous activity for 150000 years. The most recent eruption was in 2000. It is continuously monitored, and the tourists can't go out there if there is any risk of an eruption. In fact, one of the first things you see when you start the walk around the crater is the wire coming over the crater rim that leads to a drum containing a seismic monitoring station:

Arrows are pointing to the cable, and the drum is circled.

White Island has two overlapping craters.  There is a lake in the center of the central crater. The crater lake appeared during an extensive period of eruptions in the 1980s, and moved during the 2000 eruption.

The overlapping craters. The boat lands in the little bay where the anchor is, on the edge of the older, eastern crater. The central crater is sometimes subdivided into sub-craters.

The tour goes around the west side of the smaller crater, and a little bit into the central crater before crossing to the east side and coming back.  The crater walls are a bit unstable, due in part to the fact that they are hydrothermally altered. The water on White Island has no connection to the sea, so no other water gets in or out. Instead, the water is recycled over and over again. This means that everything on the island is very corrosive--the tour guides "burn through" about one pair of shoes per season. Unfortunately, this makes it really hard to put objects for scale into the photos.

There are several mounds on the crater that look like they would be fun to climb, except they are fragile and hollow. Underneath them are steam vents and/or boiling mud--not something I'd like to fall into!

One of the mounds on White Island

A close-up of one of the vents on the mound pictured above

The kind of thing that is underneath the mounds

Over time, these holes get bigger and bigger...

White Island contains a few fumaroles. As you can tell from the colour, there's sulphur here!

Close-up

A bit further back, but still the same fumarole as above

A wide-angle shot of the same fumarole

The crater lake isn't always visible when you're on White Island. Whether or not you can see it depends on which direction the wind is blowing all the steam in. We waited for at least five minutes and were lucky enough to get a quick change in wind direction--enough to see part of the lake. The pH of the lake is about 1, and the temperature of the lake is about 50C.

Approaching the crater lake.

The view at the rim of the crater lake.

The crater lake.

Tours only go if the weather is good enough to hike around the crater for a few hours, and to get to and from the island safely. Sometimes three, four, or more days will go by between trips to the island, and the guides never know what changes will have happened in the meantime. New holes can open up on the crater floor, requiring that the path be moved.

A new hole, right in the middle of the former path.

I'll have at least one more post about White Island coming up...

Slipping away in New Zealand

When I arrived in New Zealand in September 2011 for a visit, the first place I went was to spend a few days visiting one of my sets of host parents (there were four altogether) from my exchange 17 years ago.  I spent Christmas 1994 with them at their bach at Omaio. As we passed through Ohope, they pointed out the land they'd bought to build their retirement home on--this is the home I visited them in.

Whakatane, on the North Island. Ohope is over the hill from it.

Whakatane and Ohope are in the Bay of Plenty, a gorgeous part of New Zealand with a great climate. The two are separated by a headland.  From the top are fantastic views, but like many headlands, the tree-covered slopes drop pretty steeply down to the beach. And this is the problem.

Whakatane

Ohope Beach

The headland separating Whakatane (left) from Ohope (right).

For some reason unknown to me, the land at the base of the headland, and at the base of a lot of the cliffs in the area, is zoned for housing. People want waterfront property, and they pay big money to build homes here.  Which is all very well, unless it's a wet year. Because in a wet year (and there have been a few of those lately) the cliffs become very unstable.  This has had disastrous results. Homes have been destroyed, and in 2011 a teen was killed in his home by a landslide.

Scar from a recent slip in Whakatane

One afternoon my host parents and I went for a walk along the beach, past several scars from landslips. (Thankfully, their property is not at risk of being buried). It was devastating to see the damage to some of the homes. I didn't have the heart to photograph the homes, because at least one of them belongs to friends of my host parents.

Cliffs behind Ohope Beach. Anything not green is the site of a landslide.

Just out of this photo, to the left, a house was destroyed by a landslide. Fortunately no one was hurt. You can see the big scar at the end of the beach, and another smaller one behind the house.

A big slip at the end of Ohope Beach. Fortunately, the only thing wiped out was a  footpath. My host father is standing at the base of the cliff just left of center.

Besides the fact that the slopes are unstable, from what I can tell the hillsides are loosely consolidated sands and/or paleosols (I wasn't about to go digging around at the base of one of the slips). This is obviously a huge problem, made worse by the pohutakawas (the beautiful North Island "Christmas tree" that blooms red in December). Their gorgeous blossoms don't make up for the fact that they are a bit of a nuisance plant. Their roots don't go deep, they spread out, so that instead of stabilizing the slope they weaken it close to the surface. With heavy rains/runoff, it's a deadly mix.  Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to be at the base of one of these cliffs during an earthquake either.

Part of the problem--the pohutakawas

An open letter to undergrads

This morning I saw the link to this story, about the girl who sent her MIT admissions letter into space, and I was amazed. And then a random undergraduate student came to my office and called me a name because I wouldn't let him use my stapler. I wasn't trying to be mean, I was being frugal. But it got me thinking about the things I wish I had known when I was an undergrad:


Dear undergrads:

I was one of you once. I was not perfect. I'm still not perfect. But I have learned a lot in the intervening years, both in the workforce and since I returned to university for a graduate degree. I want to share some of those lessons with you.

University education is a wonderful thing. It is hard, but rewarding. Your university years will  be a mix of a lot of fun and a lot of learning (some of it will even be in lectures and labs). It is not, however, a right. It is still a privilege, and there are responsibilities that come with it. If you want to fast track to a good job and only learn the minimum you need to get and keep that job, you are in the wrong place. But if you want to learn how to learn, and how to think critically then you will excel here.

Even though it is a privilege to be here, you are just one of many. Take responsibility for your own education, and don't expect anything to be handed to you. What will you do to make yourself stand out among your peers? Intelligence alone isn't enough--it must go hand-in-hand with hard work, curiosity, tenacity, and above all, integrity. It is not unreasonable for you to be expected to work hard for your degree, but if you have all of these traits, other people will work hard to help you in return.

Don't be afraid to speak out against injustice, but choose your battles, and your weapons, wisely. Like it or not, your success in life rests on your reputation. How you treat each person you deal with matters. It matters because nothing goes unseen anymore, and it matters because in this world, anyone can rise up to become someone whose support you need.

Don't be afraid to be wrong. That is how you learn and how you grow. Seize every opportunity you can to be better: a better student, a better friend, a better citizen. Know when to admit that you need help. Know when to apologize for your actions and words. Know when to keep your mouth shut.

I speak from experience when I say that there is no reward for anger and nothing to be gained from passing the blame. There is no luck. It is up to you to make the best life you can for yourself, and when your dreams start coming true, at no expense to your own integrity, there is no greater feeling.

Sincerely,
Me.

My Earthquake

I was happy to see Ron's call for posts Accretionary Wedge #41, and I knew right away what my post would be about, but I've had to wait until my thesis was submitted (done) before I could write it up.

When I was an exchange student in New Zealand in 1994-1995 I kept a diary every day. A lot of it is teenage rubbish, but some of it records an amazing year of experiences. Here is an excerpt from March 23, 1995:

There was an earthquake this morning. It lasted 20 seconds, most of which I spent shaking (because I was terrified) in a doorway. About halfway through, it got worse. Apparently it was centered about 75km down beneath the Marlborough Sounds and measured 5.9 on the Richter Scale. It was felt as far away as Auckland and Dunedin though!

It's scary, an earthquake. I hate them. I remained pretty calm today, though afterwards I shoved a whole piece of toast in my mouth at once. That's how bad my nerves were. After school when I was in the kitchen where I was when it hit, I felt scared again. I'll never forget this morning. I think I heard it coming before it hit, but I'm not sure. I do remember standing at the bench [Kiwi-speak for kitchen counter], looking all around me, and wondering when I should move into a doorway.

I hope and pray  that the predicted 'big one' never hits New Zealand, especially while I'm here!

Hanging on the wall of my apartment, beside my undergraduate degree, is a fading printout of the earthquake report. Not that I need a reminder -- I've never forgotten that morning. From what I can recall, there was no significant damage from that quake--things fell off the shelves in some shops, but that was about it.  My friends who were already in cars or buses on the way to school didn't feel it. I don't remember being as terrified as my diary said I was. I do remember hearing it, and thinking it was an awfully big truck driving up the street to make that rumbling noise. I remember the toast too.

I did a search on GeoNet to try to find "my earthquake" and there it was, listed as the Cape Jackson earthquake (ID 136357).  The magnitude and depth in the records have both been upgraded since the original report: it was magnitude 6.449 at a depth of 87.08km.

1995 was a big year for earthquakes in New Zealand--not for big quakes, necessarily, but lots of little ones which I'm guessing were related to the eruption of Mount Ruapehu in October of that year (after I was already back in Canada).

Geology photo of the day - Friday

For the final day of geology-photo-of-the-day week (this has been a fun week Evelyn, and I may start posting photos more regularly too!) I'll leave you with this photo from White Island, in New Zealand. My first exposure to this island was in December 1994, when I spent Christmas holidays with my host family at their bach in the Bay of Plenty. Back then, it was just a fascinating, steaming island on the horizon.

In September of this year, I spent a few days with the same host family at the home they built in the Bay of Plenty, and I decided to treat myself to a day trip out to White Island. It was well worth it--besides beautiful weather and orcas on the way to the island, it was really cool to be on/in a volcano!