A geology geek to the core (Accretionary Wedge #18)

Sitting here in Zion National Park, one of the last spots I visited on my first geology field course, I feel like I'm coming full circle to some of the reasons that I'm still doing geology. (I also feel like I could receive wifi through my teeth. Twenty plus wifi points? Really?) Anyway, it's a perfect chance for me to answer Volcanista's question:

So July’s topic is about your inspiration to enter geosciences. Was it a fantastic mentor? Watching your geologist parents growing up? A great teacher, or an exciting intro field trip? How did it happen?

I first became interested in geology as a little kid - that rock and dinosaur phase that so many of us go through. Fortunately, living in the DC area meant that I could go see the Smithsonian Natural History Museum pretty much any time I wanted to, and I did. I remember my dad lifting me up over the rail so I could pet the fake tyrannosaur skull, and driving the video camera that looked in on the fossil prep lab, and peering at the fluorescent minerals in the gem and mineral exhibit. My parents let me dig giant holes in the backyard, and the one time I found a fossil (a shell mold), I remember asking if the Smithsonian might want it for their collection.

I pretty much knew I wanted to do geology all through primary and secondary school, and especially volcanology. Some Saturdays I would watch tapes of the old Planet Earth series (the one narrated by an Attenborough, not this Sigourney Weaver stuff they redid recently), and I would always skip to the plate tectonics and volcanoes episode. (Yes, I was pretty much an uber-geek from the start.) When I got to high school, the "geosystems" class was mostly meant for non-AP-track students, so I took AP Chemistry and, somehow, found out about a volunteer position at the Smithsonian instead, helping edit the Bulletin of the Global Volcanism Network . Two summers of that and I was hooked on volcanoes for good; I literally couldn't imagine having any career other than geology, and volcanoes were especially fascinating.

When I went looking at colleges, the geology program was a big factor, and I pretty much knew that I was going to go to William & Mary the moment I set foot on campus. When I started classes, I was so excited to be taking intro geology that I sat front and center the whole semester (although the instructor, who was a visiting prof, didn't even recognize me when I met him at GSA a year or so later). I was lucky enough that my freshman advisor turned into my permanent advisor, and that he took a chance on letting me into his Regional Field Geology course with nothing more than Intro and Historical Geology under my belt.

And that's how I ended up in Zion, and a lot of other places on and around the Colorado Plateau, after my freshman year. I didn't know much about minerals, or field mapping, or structures, or petrology, or pretty much anything at the start of that trip - but boy, did I learn. After three and a half weeks in the field I was pretty much hooked for life, even though I spent a good chunk of it being sweaty and tired and sleeping on rocks and generally being upset with my own lack of experience.

I was also hooked on the field work, which turned out to be a good thing - my senior research project, and some mapping I've been helping with the last couple of years, grew out of one stop on that first long field course. My advisor played a huge part (and I've written about it before), and the fact that he pushed me to work hard and take risks is one of the reasons I'm still in the field. It's invaluable to have someone who believes in you, after all. (He's also one of the reasons I became a better writer, and boy, has that paid off!)

I think the moment that I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a volcanologist was when I scooped a blob of molten rock out of a Kilauea lava flow and watched it cool. My field notes for that hike say "BEST DAY EVER!" even though I know I was tired and hot and had a twisted ankle at the end of the hike. Handling the lava - seeing it up close for the first time - was just addictive, and every time I see a volcano I get the same sort of rush, to varying degrees.

So, I guess my answer is a mixture of things. I feel like to some extent the geology just got hardwired in there, although I have no idea how. But experiences and mentors were a huge part of it as well - and now that I'm in grad school for volcanology, and have even more great mentors to work with, I hope I'll want to stick with it for a long time to come.

Not dead yet...

...and finally back in range of wireless. I've gone from Italy to Utah in the past couple of weeks for a field course and research, and I'll be back in WNY after a bit longer in southern UT. There will be lots of awesome photos. Stay tuned!

On break...

Magma Cum Laude will be taking a break for a few weeks - I'll be globetrotting on and off until July. Enjoy your summers!

2009 AGU Joint Session in Toronto: Sightseeing

Whoops! Guess I promised some Toronto photos - here they are, full of things I saw when I wasn't at the meeting trying to stuff my head with talks and poster sessions.

The St. James Anglican Cathedral at sunset. I haven't seen so many pretty cathedrals since I was in Paris - not something you expect in a North American city!

The CN Tower was right next to the conference center, which meant I spent a lot of time looking up. Too expensive to go to the top, though.

The Toronto Metro Conference Centre. If it looks a little small, that's because most of it is underground. I guess that saves on the heating bills?

A flatiron building on Front Street. I love the juxtaposition of old and new architecture in Toronto - it's much more interesting than just a bunch of modern skyscrapers. Toronto is also really walkable when the weather is nice, and they've got a pretty good public transit system as well. I love watching the trolleycars go by, although I didn't brave the subway on this trip.
Look really carefully at that building...

The Old City Hall, which has some really beautiful sandstone carvings.

It's a little hard to read, but the sign basically says that this is a Speaker's Corner, where you can say/argue/debate/shout anything you want, although the City isn't responsible for what other people do to you if they don't like it.

Lest you think that Toronto is all urban, there are some very nice parks within walking distance, and some of them even have wildlife (in the form of black squirrels - weird - and some really big woodpeckers).

So true

As a followup to my AGU posts, an offering from Surviving The World (my new favorite webcomic):

An interesting field trip at the Portland GSA

While I was at the Toronto AGU, I happend to be looking at GSA's website for their annual meeting, which is going to be held in Portland this year. Naturally, I'm excited for the chance to get closer to some volcanoes (which are noticeably lacking in Toronto), and I was even entertaining the idea of going on a field trip. So when I saw this title, I perked up a bit:

425. Breached Dam Overlook at Mount St. Helens
Sat., 17 Oct. US$95 (L, R).

It's even affordable for a poor grad student. Then I looked at the field trip leader:

Leader: Steven A. Austin, Austin Research Consulting.

Usually, I expect to see people from the USGS or local universities leading a field trip - although the name sounded strangely familiar. So I did a little research...and all the hits that came up were from creationism websites. Namely, the Institute for Creation Research.

It appears that Steven Austin has degrees in geology (they're listed as B.S. Geology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA,1970; M.S. Geology, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, 1971; Ph.D. Geology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 1979), but that he is also the person who introduced the Mount St. Helens/Grand Canyon/Flood and Mount St. Helens "old" lava dome dacite arguments for the Flood and a young Earth. (Links to the debunking of these arguments can be found here and here on the Talk Origins website.)

Stuff like this just makes me twitch. I can't say whether or not Austin knows the recent geologic history well enough to lead a good trip. But what I do strenuously object to is the fact that the field trip description very carefully gives no indication that Austin works for the ICR, and that he has been very vocal in promoting what many geologists would consider to be extremely bad science.

Here's the trip description:

This six-hour hike follows a 13-kilometer-round-trip route to an extraordinary geologic location called “Breached Dam Overlook” just seven kilometers north of the crater of Mount St. Helens. The trail leads us from the Johnston Ridge Observatory onto the largest landslide deposit to have accumulated during human history. This debris avalanche deposit of May 18, 1980, forms one of the earth’s newest landscapes of 45 square kilometers area within the headwaters of the North Fork of the Toutle River. The objectives of the field trip are (1) to identify, classify and name individual landforms within the upper North Fork Toutle River landscape, (2) to relate the landforms to the sequence of events and processes that have occurred next to the volcano, and (3) to ponder questions about how the landscape at a volcano changes through time. Landforms on the debris avalanche landscape are relicts that have been impacted significantly by geomorphic processes that exceed a certain minimum energy threshold. Following the debris avalanche of May 18, 1980, the most significant event was the mudflow of March 19, 1982. That mudflow event breached the natural debris dam, caused adjustment within the drainage basin, and derived the present landscape. Now that the power of geomorphic processes has diminished, finer sediment is what is being moved. Channels are incised and armored with coarser clasts, and valleys are now plugging with sediment. Hikers can observe the new landscape from two selected overlooks. Johnston Ridge Observatory on the west side of Mount St. Helens Volcano National Monument is the staging area this roundtrip hike of 13.6 kilometers (8.4 mi).

Knowing Austin's background puts this into an entirely different light, and it's not one that I like. I'd say the odds are pretty good that his Grand Canyon and argon arguements are going to pop up on the trip, and unless the attendees know what they're getting into (and like to debate creationists for fun), people will probably be shocked and disappointed that they spent money and time only to be a captive audience for someone's bad pet young Earth theories. It's a pity; I would have liked to spend some time at St. Helens with a legitimate geologist (someone from the CVO, say; why aren't they leading any MSH field trips?)

Bottom line? I'm kind of surprised that GSA is allowing someone who so blatantly goes against their position statement on evolution and creationism to lead a field trip. I don't know what the vetting process is for field trip leaders, but if I were a GSA official, I wouldn't allow someone like Austin to potentially use GSA as an avenue for promoting theories that directly contradict the geological science that GSA works so hard to promote. (Then again, this may be a recurring thing - does anyone know if Austin has led other GSA field trips? Perhaps GSA just doesn't care.)

If you know of anyone who's thinking of attending the Portland GSA, please let them know about the background of this particular trip leader before they sign up and fork over their money - if they don't already recognize him.

2009 AGU Joint Session in Toronto: Days 3 & 4

Having hit conference overload about halfway through the day on Tuesday, I neglected to blog about what I'd been seeing, so I'll be combining two days. Tuesday was definitely talk day; I attended volcanology and kimberlite sesions in the morning and afternoon, in which I heard about:

• How melt inclusions in olivines and glass from eruptive products on Procida Island, Italy could be used to trace the volatile evolution, and thus melt movements into/out of the island's magmatic reservoir (Esposito et al.).
  
• An interesting pyroclast from the Sept. 1997 Soufriere Hills dome collapse. The pyroclast contains shattered feldspar and quartz phenocrysts (with really cool little 'pipes' where melt inclusions erupted out of the phenocryst fragments). Ben Williamson suggests that the pyroclast may have started as an injection into the base of the lava dome, sat there for a bit crystallizing cristobalite (also present), and was then ejected in the dome collapse while still somewhat viscous.
• Roger Mitchell and Steve Sparks (and a number of other folks) sparring over kimberlite origins and evolution (and even over whether some deposts are kimberlites). This was particularly amusing, because there was much implying that the volcanologists who were involving themselves in kimberlite geology didn't know as much about the subject as the petrologists who'd been working on it, and vice versa. I get the feeling this has been going on for a while.
• An example of a sub-glacier eruption in Iceland a few tens of thousands of years ago that created eruption ridges of pillow basalts, fissures similar to Hawaiian spatter ramparts on Kilauea, and possible sub-glacial ponding of water from the melted ice (which could have affected glacier dynamics).
  

My non-conference time was taken up by a visit to the St. Lawrence Market, which is in the Old Town portion of the city. I love these markets; I've been to the Reading Market in Philadelphia and a similar market in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and I'm always excited to see all the different fresh foods. In the St. Lawrence Market, I discovered custard tarts, a fantastic Portuguese dessert that seems to be pretty popular in Canada, as well as cheese curds (a favorite treat from my field work in Utah); I also got to peruse whole sides of beef, giant king crab legs and tiger shrimp, and quite possibly one of the best crepe combinations I've come across (strawberries, Nutella, and mozzerella). (Did I mention at some point that I thought I would lose weight at this conference? Scratch that.)

Wednesday was fairly relaxed - in the morning, I listened to a talk by Don Dingwell entitled "When melts start behaving like rocks (very bad things can happen)", which focused on the brittle-ductile transition at magma/lava fragmentation. I'm not sure I totally agree with Dr. Dingwell that the "essence of eruption is decompression" - there are certainly other factors involved - but it's an interesting point. I also listened to a talk about Mount St. Helens dome rock by Rosanna Smith, whose study results show that high-frequency earthquakes caused by brittle fracture of rocks is possible in the interior of lava domes, and a discussion of the effects of volcanic edifice collapse on hydrothermal systems and ore-grade mineralization.

It's good to be back in Buffalo, even if it was a slow trip getting out of Toronto, and we had to stop at the border because my car was full of foreign people and still has VA plates. This is apparently a cause for alarm, despite the fact that it also has several decals that someone could use to figure out that I came from a different state than I now attend school in. (Mostly it was a cause for fingerprinting and for the Department of Homeland Security to charge my French passenger to take the electronic fingerprint scans. Talk about moneygrubbing!) I'm also convinced that DHS guards are chosen for their ability to look surly and hulking.

Photos to follow as soon as I can find the right camera cord...