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!

Geology photo of the day - Thursday

Today's photo of the day (see the beginning of the meme) is from the Bolivian Altiplano. This is the Puchuni Valley, near Estancia Palluma. We were there to map some Cenozoic beds, but I believe these ones are Jurassic (or older).

Wednesday Picture of the Day

Since this whole meme was sponsored by Evelyn Mervine, and she posted a photo of coral today, I was inspired to post a photo of modern carbonates. This one is from the Great Barrier Reef. If I was a carbonate sedimentologist, I would probably spend more time than necessary studying modern analogs.

Tuesday Geology Photo

As part of the geology-photo-a-day week, here's my photo for today. This was taken en route to doing some field work in late August 2010. It is of the Cardium Formation (one of Alberta's most prolific reservoir formations) at the spectacular Ram Falls in the foothills of west-central Alberta.

Monday Geology Photos

Evelyn at Georneys invited us to join her this week in posting a geology photo a day. It's a busy week for me, trying to finish the final chapter of my thesis before I settle in for some thorough editing. I can't promise that I'll get around to finishing the blog posts I have in the works, but a photo-a-day seems manageable, especially since sifting through them to find especially cool ones makes for a nice break.

Today's photo is from my visit to Australia in September. It's from the top of a red sand dune, between Lake Amadeus and Mount Connor, in the Northern Territory. I forgot to take a close-up photo of the sand, but it was hot and fine-grained and felt silky smooth on my bare feet.

The pinkish haze on the horizon is the smoke from the bush fires that were a dominant character during my time in the Northern Territory.

It's kind of cheating on the photo-a-day theme, but here's another photo, showing a different dune in the background, giving a sense of how big these things actually are.  In fact, many of the viewing areas at Uluru and Kata Tjuta are on top of dunes.

If you fly to Alice Springs from Sydney, as I did, you fly over the Simpson Desert, which is a "sea" of dunes.

All Geology Is Connected

Yesterday, after attending a talk that got me thinking, I tweeted this: 

At a talk about how/where diamonds form I heard about "diamonds" that plug gas wells #AllGeologyIsConnected

The talk was part of the colloquium series in the department where I'm a grad student. A couple of the faculty work very hard to bring in guest speakers every two weeks to give talks about various aspects of geoscience. The room is never full for these talks. I know not everyone can make it to every talk, but I also suspect some people don't come to these the talks if they are not "relevant" to their own research. They're missing out.

I have geologic interests outside of my own research. I want to learn about other aspects of geology. Besides which, I find going to "unrelated" geology talks sparks my thought process, and I sometimes get new ideas for how to present/explain/display something I'm working on.

More importantly though, all geology is related, in a broad sense, and you never know what background info you are going to need to call on to solve a problem.  Today's colloquium talk, or rather the discussion at the end of it, was a really good example of this.

The title of the talk was "Diamond: Deep Carbon from a Shallow Source." The abstract can be found here. It was about isotopes and eclogite and peridotite and diamonds and inclusions. I'll admit, most of the details were beyond me, but I still learned something from it, and I was surprised at how much I could follow (it seems going to talks "unrelated" to my research is paying off, and I'm learning new stuff).

The questions at the end were really a discussion on the still-unknown stages of the formation of diamonds. But someone in the audience had insight that yielded a "wow" from the speaker. It was a petroleum geochemist who specializes in carbon sequestration and biodegradation and other important stuff like that. It might be a bit of a stretch to say that these two researchers, although both geologists and both geochemists, don't have overlapping research (but let's pretend they are completely "unrelated," for the sake of my argument). The petroleum geologist suggested that diamondoids, which are found in petroleum and actually clog up gas wells, might have clues about some of the unknowns.

Wow.

Most of us were chuckling over the idea of "diamonds" clogging up gas wells, but we could still see the wheels turning as the speaker thought about this new approach to his research and the possibilities it might yield.

My point in all of this, besides the fact that it's kind of cool that there are diamonds that plug gas wells, is that all geology is related and doesn't have to be directly connected to be relevant. And that's pretty cool.

Thinking about not looking up from the path you're on reminds me of something that happened when I was in Bolivia doing field work...

Coming around the bend towards the end of a day in the field, we were so focused on the path in front of us that we almost missed this biotite-bearing outcrop that provided age constraints on the beds we were mapping.  

That's right, we almost missed this outcrop.

Now as it turns out, even if we'd missed the first one, there was still lots of ash around to collect samples from.

But this one is so cool...

In so many ways.

Rugby distraction

I've been distracted for the last two months, partly because I was away for 5.5 weeks, and partly because the Rugby World Cup was on, and I'm a huge (All Blacks) fan.  In fact, my overseas trip was so that I could catch a bit of the rugby in New Zealand, which is like home to me.  I did mix in some geology with my travels: I was on a volcano, I visited some ancient clastics and some modern carbonates. I even did some work on my thesis and a manuscript my supervisor and I are working on. And I watched a lot of rugby, on TV, and in the stadium. I went to five games: three pool matches and two quarterfinals.

When I came back to Canada, I struggled to get over the jet lag, because the rugby was still on, and I was up until 4 or 5am watching the semifinals, and then the bronze final, and then the final. SPOILER: A week later, and I'm still pretty elated about the results.

Now that the RWC is over, I need to get my nose back to the grindstone and finish off my thesis and that manuscript. They're getting there. I'm struggling a bit though, because I'm in rugby withdrawal. So last night I went through some of my photos from Australia, and printed off a few from my outback trip, so that I could look at the really cool geology and be motivated to get some writing done. It also got me thinking about the things I saw that I want to blog about, so now I have a list, and a schedule. Hopefully it will be a nice distraction from writing and figure-making. Anne Jefferson's writing challenge couldn't have come at a better time.

In the meantime, here are a few teaser pictures from my time away (and if anyone knows how I can save them so that the colour doesn't sometimes get changed when they are being viewed, I'd be grateful):

Beside a fumarole on White Island

Fumaroles!

Uluru

Valley of the Winds, Kata Tjuta

King's Canyon

Standing beside the Webb Ellis Trophy, two weeks before New Zealand won it