My next self-indulgence...

...might have to be this t-shirt.

"God's Volcano Project" from BustedTees

When I saw the title, I immediately thought, "Obviously they're talking about the God from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and he's going to bust out with 'I TOLD YOU PEOPLE TO QUIT WITH THE PSALMS!'"

100 (geologic) things meme

Looks like another fun meme going around the geoblogosphere. Let's see how I score... (Things I've done are in bold, and my comments are in italics.)

1. See an erupting volcano

2. See a glacier
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. - I've sat on it - or at least very close to it - in Big Bend National Park. See the Ks and Ts? Yeah, we were all dorks.

5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage - The Potomac flooded a few neighborhoods near my family's house when Hurricane Isabel came through.
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia) - I've made it to Carlsbad, Mammoth Caves and various small ones in Virginia.
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw. - Lots of these in various places out West.

12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
16. A ginkgo tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) I can only claim half of this one, but I saw some fantastic stromatolites on the Niagara Escarpment near Lockport.

18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera

20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord
22. A recently formed fault scarp - Wait, define "recently" - we're geologists, after all. Recently could mean a few million years ago.
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide

32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees - At Petrified Forest National Park, where you get in serious trouble just for touching one, and about five minutes outside the park, where no one cares.

34. Lava tubes

35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. I wasn't in good enough shape to make it all the way down and back in one day, like some crazy people on that trip did, but I have seen it from the South and North Rims, so I'm counting it. :P
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible (and it is quite BIG)
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck - Even if the van was traveling 60 mph at the time, I still saw it!

52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism. - Maybe this summer!
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia - Only the display at the Smithsonian.
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event - Only after the fact, in Utah and the Virginia Blue Ridge.
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches) - Both, baby!
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado

81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall - Just wait until March!
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand - I'm pretty sure there was a brief and minor one near our house when I was really little, but we were too busy cowering in the basement to see it.
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope. - Does it automatically become respectable if it's most of the way up Mauna Kea?
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century - Hale-Bopp, when I was twelve. Gee, I feel awfully young.
96. See a lunar eclipse - Quite a few of these in the past few years, actually.
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane - Just a few years ago, in Florida. Weak hurricanes are boring - I think my flight was delayed and I spent the day at the mall.
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

26 out of 100. Well, I certainly don't measure up to most of you all in the geoblogosphere, but I'm still a young'un yet. Besides, I'll be fixing that ash fall and earthquake deficiency when I get to do field work in a couple of months. In fact, my dearth of bolded items is clearly unacceptable, and I'm just going to take a few years and go visit all these places* so I can update this post.

*This, of course, requires money, which I do not have in large amounts. So those few years aren't going to happen anytime soon, darn it.

The Fish Lake Plateau: "A most eligible summer camping-place" (Accretionary Wedge #14/15)

I haven't done a whole lot of research yet, but I always enjoy a good chance to get out in the field. For my undergraduate thesis, this meant spending a few weeks in south-central Utah, on the High Plateaus. The work was part of the 2006 NSF Fish Lake Research Experience for Undergraduates, a joint effort between the College of William & Mary and Coastal Carolina University. The project was in its second year, and had been inspired by past W&M field trips to Fish Lake.

My first visit to Fish Lake was on one of those trips - I had just finished my freshman year, and I was still struggling to learn all the basic skills of field mapping. As I remember, we had a discussion about whether Fish Lake was formed by glacial or tectonic processes (and I was on the glacial side, which ended up being not a great choice). Shortly after that, however, my advisor mentioned that the REU would be doing research there, and (dropping a blatant hint to get me interested) that there might be some volcanology I could work on.

So, in the summer of my junior year, I helped drive a minivan full of equipment from the East Coast to Utah. With three people rotating through, and not stopping other than for gas and food, we made it there in about 40 hours. (The rest of the group flew to Salt Lake City and drove from there, but at least they left us a couple of days to recover.) The three weeks that followed were an amazing, challenging, and at times frustrating experience, but I couldn't have picked a more fascinating place to spend them.

The Fish Lake Plateau has something for everyone*: Mesozoic sedimentary rocks,

Tertiary volcanics,

forest,

desert,

faults,

cirques,

landslides,

and scads of Quaternary sedimentary deposits.

It has been a geologist's playground since Clarence Edward Dutton's expedition reached it in the 1880s, and since my brain is a bit fried from studying for finals, I'll let him do a little of the describing for me:

"...we may look down upon the beautiful surface of Fish Lake. This sheet of water, about 5 1/2 miles in length and a mile and a half in breadth, is walled in by two noble palisades..."

"Not the smallest among its attractions for the geologist is the fact that it is a most eligible summer camping-place. In the daytime, throughout July, August, and most of September, it is mild and genial, while the nights are frosty and conducive to rest. The grass is long, luxurient, and aglow with flowers."

"Clumps of spruce and aspen furnish shade from the keen rays of the sun, and fuel is in abundance for camp-fires."

"Thus the great requisites for Western camp-life, fuel, water, and grass, are richly supplied, while neither in in such excess as to be an obstacle to progress and examination.

"On every side it is bounded by precipitous cliffs, except along a part of its southwestern flank, but here and there the malls are broken and notched. Along the side facing west-northwest runs a cliff of vast proportions, second only to the western front of the Sevier Plateau in magnitude and grandeur. Upon the very brink of this wall is the highest point of the plateau, from which, in a clear day, we may easily discern the peaks of the Wasatch around Salt Lake City and beyond."

"Upon the east side rise two conspicuous masses - Mount Terril and Mount Marvine."

"No resort more beautiful than this lake can be found in Southern Utah. Its grassy banks clad with groves of spruce and aspen; the splendid vista down between its mountain walls, with the massive fronts of Mounts Marvine and Hilgard in the distance; the crystal-clear expanse of the lake itself, combine to form a scene of beauty rarely equaled in the West."

*As far as it concerns me, however, Fish Lake has no fish. Or, rather, it has fish, but they didn't want to be caught by me - not even after two days of fishing attempts. So much for that 4th of July fish fry we had planned.

More evidence for water on Mars

And guess how they know? Opal! (Here's another article, and here is a link to a PDF of the original article in Geology.) Score for mineralogy!

This interests me at the moment for a number of reasons, besides the fact that finding out anything new about Mars is just cool. First reason: I'm taking a remote sensing class right now, and we're getting ready to do projects that involve tasks like identifying minerals by their spectral properties - just what the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer (CRISM) did to find the opal.

Second reason: I'm sure that for some people, the word "opal" conjures up images of shimmering, multihued gems strewn about the landscape. Unfortunately, what CRISM recorded on Mars won't be anywhere near as pretty. In fact, it will probably look something like this:

While this photo (taken just outside the caldera of Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii - and yes, I've shown it before) is a pretty good approximation of what the Martian surface looks like anyway, the important thing to note is the ground. Don Swanson is walking on the surface of an eruption deposit that's made up of ash, lithic fragments, and ballistic blocks. He should be sinking into something like that, which is usually pretty unconsolidated, but he's not - because the ground he's walking on is all crusted over. And that crust is made of...wait for it...opal! The explanation (which I gave here, back in March) is that acid rain forms from volcanic gases, dissolves SiO2 in the environment, and redeposits it again, which cements the ash and lithics into the hardpan surface you see here.

The articles discuss the possibility that low-temperature acidic water may have been at least partially responsible for forming the opal deposits - precisely what happens in Hawaii, although the source of the acid is probably not just from volcanoes. There are areas where there doesn't appear to have been any acid involved, however, and the jury's still out on what processes were operating to deposit opal there.

Miracle Mud

On Thursday, our department lecture series brought Dr. Lynda Williams of Arizona State University to talk about antibacterial clays. Now, mineralogy was never my strong point, but this talk brought a whole new perspective to it - that mineralogy can contribute to medical research!

For a little background: There's a kind of mycobacteria (yep, that's spelled right) that exists in African swamps that gets onto the pincers of a biting waterbug. When people are bitten, the bacteria gets under their skin and creates an infection, which eventually (WARNING - ICKY PART) causes their skin to rot and slough off. It's basically a flesh-eating bug, like necrotizing fasciitis, and in the past, the only real treatment has been to amputate the affected limb. It's called Buruli ulcer, and it's nasty, and the people who get it don't do well. If they survive the infection and don't have the limb amputated, they have to have extensive and messy skin grafts to repair what are essentially open wounds.

One woman, however - a French humanitarian treating people in the Ivory Coast, Madame Line Brunet de Courssou - heard about special French green clays that were purported to have antibacterial properties. This is a claim that's been put forward by a lot of alternative medical people, and there are literally thousands of places on the internet and elsewhere that you can order healing muds. But Madame de Courssou remembered using the clay to heal cuts and burns when she was a child, and wanted to try it out on the people she was treating for Buruli ulcer. Incredibly, she discovered that the clay not only killed the infection, but helped skin grow back over the wounds. The treatment was both effective and cheap, which made it extremely valuable for people who had no way to afford expensive and difficult-to-obtain drugs, and naturally she wanted to bring it to people's attention. When she tried to get support for her treatments from the World Health Organization, though, she met with a great deal of criticism to the effect that her claims were not scientifically supported. So...

Dr. Lynda Williams comes in. She's a clay mineral geochemist, and was asked to help figure out just what about the green clays stops infections. I can't possibly do her talk justice here, but I can remember a few of the highlights: It seems that the antibacterial properties of the clays - which are mostly smectites - are linked not only to a specific size fraction of the clay minerals (~200 nanometers), but to trace minerals in the clays. She went through a complicated process of testing clays with interstitial water removed, and leached clay, and pH-adjusted clay; it turns out that in the French clays, the presence of iron had something to do with the antibacterial properties. (The clay leachates, which must have contained some iron, also killed bacteria, although they weren't effective after a certain time span. I think that Dr. Williams suggested that this might have something to do with the oxidation process the iron is undergoing - there was an Eh-pH diagram involved at one point.)

Not only do the French clays seem to kill Buruli ulcer, they also go after things like E. Coli and staph - with amazing results. One of the clay samples killed 100% of the E. Coli, and most of a particularly resistant staph strain. And these aren't the only clays that do this - some clay samples Dr. Williams received from undisclosed locations in the US do the same thing. (They have somewhat different chemical properties, however, which makes the puzzle even harder to piece together.) At any rate, she and her colleagues are still examining the clays, doing various kinds of geochemical analysis and SEM/TEM imaging to try and figure out the specific factor - or combination thereof - that makes them valuable as antibacterial agents.

And the best part? The clays are derived from altered volcanic rocks. That's right - volcanoes are saving lives! (Well, really indirectly and a long time after the fact.)*

I don't know about you all, but if I ever get a staph infection from a hospital visit, I'm definitely asking for a mud bath.

Read more:

http://asunews.asu.edu/stories/200611/20061102_clay.htm
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-you-stop-flesh-eating-bacteria-apply-clay

*Believe me, I can find volcanology anywhere.