"There... That wasn't so good now, was it?"

Accretionary Wedge #7: Geology in the Movies

The portrayal of science and scientists in popular culture is always a rich topic, as Hollywood loves stereotype and simplification almost as much as it loves money and giving itself awards (see? I can stereotype with the best of ‘em!).

When this topic was announced my first thoughts went to The Core, which is a whole dissertation topic of its own (though it was amusing watching Hilary Swank land a Space Shuttle in the LA river). I saw this film movie flick the weekend it was released, you know, because as a geology teacher it's part of my job -- like watching South Park.

In my first semester of teaching I got a call from a guy who said that he was researching what he described to me as a “disaster movie about a group of scientists trying to save the Earth when something goes wrong with the core.” He wasn’t sure at the time from what they would be saving it, and he was calling geologists to figure out the “technical stuff.” He had some ideas but wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to write a movie with some real science scattered across a fantasy landscape (Dante’s Peak, Deep Impact) or a movie whose only connection to the real world is that the cast is predominantly bipedal (Volcano, Armageddon).

We talked for about 20 minutes about angular momentum and rotation, the dynamo effect and the magnetic field, cosmic rays and the aurora, the geothermal gradient and pressure (I recall describing a diamond anvil cell and may have defined gigapascal). By the end of the call he had concluded that he would be writing a completely fantasy movie.

I never got the guy’s name, so I’ll never know if it was one of the credited writers, an uncredited writer, or if it was even someone associated with the same project. The phone call may have been entirely a coincidence and had nothing to do with the movie.

The plot is pretty simple: the military has developed an “earthquake weapon” that somehow draws energy from the rotational velocity of the Earth’s core. Since the core contains (I believe) 10-20% of Earth’s angular momentum, I can’t imagine what the quakes would be like…

If my math is right, the rotational energy in the core is ~10³⁵ ergs. If we could draw energy from the rotation of the Earth, we could power the entire human race and have no more effect on the planet's rotation than the Voyager did on Jupiter's orbit when it stole a bit of angular velocity to boost itself into the outer solar system...

Somehow just the testing of this weapon leads to a significant loss in rotational velocity within the core, exposing the planet to laser-like beams of microwave energy from space that slice the Golden Gate Bridge in half, giant lightning bolts that destroy the Colosseum in Rome and causing a flock of pigeons in Trafalgar Square to go all Hitchcock on the tourists.

It was interesting that the lost of 10% of the planet’s angular momentum had no discernable effects on the rotation of the surface, as the people at the surface being fried by laser beams from the sun seemed to be experiencing 24 hour days. What really struck me though was that the kick-start the core needed to get spinning again came from setting off a series of nuclear bombs.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, nuclear tests and radiation served the same purpose that toxic waste did in the 70’s and 80’s and genetic engineering does today: turning animals and human beings into monsters and/or superheroes. Today, the minds that can’t imagine entertainment greater than The Hills Have Eyes II, 10,000 BC and Semi-Pro also cannot conceive of a problem that a strategically-placed nuke can’t solve.

Besides jarring the core back into motion, nukes can be used to start earthquakes (both in the 1978 version of Superman and in A View to a Kill) and stop earthquakes (10.5 – to quote Leonard Pinth-Garnell again: “Exquisitely awful”). A nuke planted 100 meters beneath the surface of an asteroid or comet will break it cleanly in two (both Deep Impact and Armageddon) and change the trajectory of the fragments enough that they miss the Earth entirely, even if the bomb is not detonated until the bolide is within a few hundred thousand kilometers of the Earth…

Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that the only flick in which a nuclear bomb wasn’t up to the job was Independence Day (starring Bill Pullman, who I always get mixed up with Bill Paxton, the swashbuckling meteorologist from Twister) – but why send a few hundred kg of enriched uranium to do a job that can be accomplished with a virus written on a late 90’s vintage Apple Powerbook?

Friday Rock-Blogging: a (chemistry) teaching moment

I haven’t rock-blogged in a while, and while putting together a lecture on stratigraphy I came across this photo from a field trip to the southwest last summer.

This was taken at the beginning of a hike along the Frying Pan trail (well-named if you walk it in late June) in Capitol Reef National Park and shows the contact between the Chinle formation and the Wingate Sandstone (above). The photo scale is Rachel, a former student who came along on the trip as a volunteer/TA. The Owl Rock member of the Chinle in this region consists mostly of slope-forming siltstones and shales representing an inland delta.

Utah, especially in the southern deserts, is known for the bright red colors of certain formations, a result of deposition in highly oxidizing terrestrial environments. The upper member of the Chinle here is no exception, and I had spent part of the previous evening explaining to several students about the oxidation states of iron. Imagine my surprise and delight when we climbed up to this contact and found these green veins extending several feet into the mudstone.

These veins represent mudcracks that formed as the shales and mudstones dried. As they opened up they were filled with organic debris that, as it decayed, created a highly localized reducing environment and turned the red clays green. Some of the cracks also contain veins of gypsum.

The image below is a view of mudcracks in the same (or a similar) surface from above. It's not as pretty or instructive as the image at the top, but it is clearly the same effect, and a student spotted it first. It's always a nice feeling when a student notices and points out the geologic features to me...

Women For President Meme

To begin with, I'm a supporter of John Edwards for president. Barack Obama is my second choice. That said, I don't believe that there are serious objections to Hillary's candidacy based on sexism. I actually haven't heard anyone claim that this is true.

Those on the left of the party don't support her because she is the most conservative Democrat still in the race. I've no idea why the right dislikes her so vehemently. Ultimately her husband's greatest successes in office came from co-opting Republican ideas.

That said, I'm kind of amazed at the willingness of various commentators, male or female, to make blatantly sexist comments about Hillary. A female McCain supporter felt free to call her a Bitch on camera, and Mike Allen of the Politico commented "What voter in general hasn't thought that?" Chris Matthews has referred to her as "Nurse Ratched" and to her male supporters as eunuchs and castratos.

I don't expect that the folks in New Hampshire following her around with "Iron My Shirt" signs were supporters of any of the major Democratic candidates. Try to imagine signs with a roughly equivalent insult directed at Obama or Bill Richardson, and then imagine photos of the incident showing up on the front page of national newspapers, or TV commentators giggling and joking over a videotape of the incident.

OK, I got that off my chest. Women I would support for president if they were running:

1. Barbara Boxer
2. Christine Gregoire
3. Janet Napolitano
4. Hillary (as I said, not my first choice among present candidates but at least she hasn't suggested staying in Iraq for hundreds or thousands of years).

Energy and environment in the new millenium

One of our newer geobloggers, Callan Bentley, posted recently about his new Toyota Prius. Energy use is a pretty hot topic in all of my classes, as it relates to discussions of fossil fuels and peak oil and to climate change. For what its worth, here’s my first 18 months worth of Prius ownership (I picked it up on the June solstice in 2006):

I used about 250 fewer gallons of gasoline in my first year of ownership, compared to the mileage I got in my Nissan pick-up (my average mpg over the last four years for the pick-up was 20.5). That said, on my Death Valley field trip last October we used more gas (34 students, two instructors, four Ford vans) in 3 days than my Prius used for the first year. Of course a geology field trip is infinitely more justifiable than my daily commute…

I’m personally convinced that the kind of changes we need to be making as a culture are going to require some fundamental changes in our attitudes about the energy we use. While we are encouraged to switch to more energy efficient light bulbs we are paying a couple dollars/liter to drink tap water that has been forced, at huge energy expense, through a reverse osmosis system before being recharged with the calcium and magnesium removed by the RO and then packed into PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) bottles that, per kilogram of plastic, consume about 6.5 kg of oil and release 4 kg of greenhouse gases. Or, if you prefer bottled spring water you can (usually) skip the RO process and spend the energy shipping the water from France or Fiji…

One of my resolutions this year is to start commuting by bus a couple of days a week (I’ll keep you updated on how this works out…). It’s 45 minutes to an hour of additional inconvenience per day, but a partial acknowledgment that the use of the automobile for regular commuting is one of the conveniences we need to give up.

But I’ve never believed that the solutions to our problems lie in individual choices. The environment is the commons, after all. The more people use public transportation, or buy cars that get high mileage, the better. But decisions to expand public transportation, or to require that passenger cars get better gas mileage, are made collectively. The free market doesn’t respond to consumer needs, it attempts to manufacture consumer desires (see water, bottled).

I’m going to write more about this in the next few months. If we are indeed successful in lobbying for a presidential science debate this year I can’t imagine energy and environment not being the most important topics.

Pale Blue Dot

Phil Plait reminded me that Carl Sagan died 11 years ago today. I'm too old for this to be true, but Cosmos was what inspired me to a career in science. Better late than never.

In February 1990 the Voyager 1 spacecraft, by then 12.5 years and four billion miles from home, spun around to take a “family portrait” of our Solar System from about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. The image above is of Earth, a few pixels of blue against the blackness of space. The light streak is a ray from the sun, just off the image to the right.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan in a commencement address, May 11 1996

The Reason for the Season

It's been a week since Phil Plait posted this link on his Bad Astronomy blog. It made me very angry, that I didn't think of it first. Nonetheless, it will from this year forward be my Christmas card...


Merry Christmas, y'all!

Where On (Google) Earth? #80

Well I managed to win my first northern hemisphere WOGE challenge, though it looks like Ron may have had a better claim had he signed on a few minutes later, after Joe re-posted the image.

It only seems fair to stay with the recent trend and not invoke the Schott Rule this time.

However to add to the challenge this time I won't remind you to look at the north arrow.