Traveling again

Sorry for the sparse posting again - I'm on a whirlwind tour of the wilds of the Blue Ridge, followed by the wilds of...Buffalo's rental communities! Hopefully I'll have time to do some posting this week in between inspecting apartments and trying not to get lost in Western NY.


Coming up: blue quartz, structure cubes and earthquake initiatives.

In the Humorous Vein #7

How safe is too safe?

As many of our posts suggest (see A Carnival of Death-Defying Geologists), we can sometimes be a little lax in our safety standards. I have yet to meet a geologist who hasn't at least gotten sunburned or a little dehydrated on a long hike, or bashed a finger with a rock hammer, or spilled dilute HCl on themself in lab. Geology is not a particularly safe job, although we do take precautions to keep it from being truly life-threatening.

That said, when we're teaching it to young 'uns, exactly how stringent should those precautions be? Naturally, if I'm showing a bunch of third- or fourth- or fifth-graders how to identify limestone, I'm going to use vinegar instead of HCl, and make sure they (and I) are wearing those geeky-looking splash goggles because I KNOW they're going to get something in their eyes. Or if I'm out on a field trip with intro geo students, I'm not going to let them swing the hammer or stand near me when I'm trying to knock a hand sample off an outcrop. Common sense. You don't let little kids mess with something that could hurt them, and you don't let older "kids" do something until you're sure they know the proper technique.

One of my projects at the moment is to put together images for a publication where children "doing geoscience" are prominently featured. Because I work for a non-profit, we try to avoid purchasing images from stock photo sources if we already have something public domain or that the organization owns. Free images get used first, and often these have been recycled many times from past years' publications. So we're a little limited in what we can use, and the images can be kind of old. The main point is, we've used the images before, and we've gotten them from places like the USGS, NOAA, NASA, NRCS, USDA, and a hodgepodge of other official letter combinations. And those organizations have seen fit to publish the photos, and in the past, no one's complained about us using them.

Recently, one of the groups to which this particular publication goes (it's a yearly one) has told us that the images don't meet their safety standards, and they can't distribute the publication unless the images are changed or eliminated. Some of their concerns were valid - one person needed to be wearing splash goggles, for instance. But others went completely beyond the realms of reason. If the children were depicted outdoors, the image was unacceptable if they were not wearing long pants, long sleeves, hats and sunglasses (because they might be exposed to UV rays). If a child was collecting water from a stream, they were doing "chemical testing" and needed to be wearing gloves, boots, goggles, a HazMat suit, etc. If the children were anywhere near rocks or dirt and tools, they had to be wearing safety glasses and NOT touching the tools, because something might get in their eyes or they could scratch themselves and get an infection.

The changes, which they requested very late in the publishing process, would have required a great deal more work and money to make, and required us to either stage new photos, or buy them from stock photo sources. Not only that, but some of the same images had been used in previous years in publications that the group has distributed without complaint and without comment from their safety office. But suddenly, this year, the images are not acceptable.

The main point of the publication is to get kids interested in geoscience and get them outside. You know, in the sun and the dirt. I wonder what kind of images would have been acceptable - should we show children rolled in bubble wrap, covered in buckets of sunscreen and locked in a room with walls covered in undyed organic fabric made from non-GM cotton picked by free-range nuns? Sheesh. It's the same attitude that the "disinfect everything" cleaning products companies are espousing: protect the children from every possible danger, because god forbid we should let them develop immunities or common sense. When I was a kid (not very long ago), if I went outside and played in the dirt or climbed a tree or picked up rocks, I got a bath and some band-aids and maybe a little antibiotic cream afterwards, not a disinfecting routine worthy of a cleanroom airlock. If I tripped and fell while I was running, or scraped myself on a tree, or got dirt in my eyes at an excavation (later on in life), I learned from it.

There's a point when the Cover Your Ass attitude has to be balanced out by common sense. Yes, you can be sued if you don't let people know that you should wear goggles when using acid and someone's kid burns their eyeballs after copying your publication. But rejecting an image because there's a faint possibility that someone could interpret it a certain way and potentially do something dumb is just ridiculous. Wow, there's a kid sitting under a tree. If a storm comes along, he could get hit by lightning or a branch could fall on his head or he could be attacked by rabid squirrels or the tree could be cut down by a crazed chainsaw-wielding neighbor, so obviously we can't publish that photo. In fact, all photos of children near trees should be accompanied by a government warning that trees are highly unpredictable natural phenomena, and should be approached with extreme caution.

You can't plan for every idiotic thing that someone could potentially do. Naturally, you shouldn't take unnecessary risks, or let children do obviously stupid or dangerous things. But when you start saying that kids shouldn't be depicted running around in sunlight, or digging in the dirt, or wading in water at the beach, you're just being silly and alarmist. We can't raise a generation of people who have no idea how to handle themselves in the real, dirty, messy, natural world, because they'll just spend their lives inside. And you can't do geoscience from a bubble.

The group ultimately opted not to distribute the publication, which was just fine with us, since it saves us money and the hassle of printing X many thousands of copies. But it's a shame that thousands of teachers and students won't get to see a really great product that encourages them to embrace the geosciences, and get the darn kids outside to do the same.

The Accretionary Wedge #10 is up!

Go take a look over at Geological Musings in the Taconic Mountains. Lots of great reminders that geology shows up frequently in art - paintings, photos, maps, stories, and songs - and that geology itself can be art.

Aesthetic Geology: Thomas "Yellowstone" Moran

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872 (Image from Wikipedia)

My first impulse on seeing the latest Accretionary Wedge topic (Aesthetic Geology - Geology and Art) was to look through my books for a favorite volcano painting. There are quite a few, especially from the 19th century, when geology was becoming popular, and they're almost always spectacular (as most images of eruptions are). But because this is the time of year I'm usually out in the field, I decided to concentrate on art that had its roots in the first explorations of the American West. Powell and Dutton's expeditions have always been fascinating to me, but there were others that receive less acclaim, though they were no less important.

One of these was the 1871 expedition of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories, led by geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden. The expedition included, in addition to scientists and frontiersmen, both a photographer and a painter. The painter was Thomas Moran, an English immigrant who had settled in New York City in the 1860s. He eventually became the chief illustrator for Scribner's Monthly, during a time when all the monthlies - Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner's - were competing with each other to report on frontier expeditions. In 1871 Scribner's ran a story called "The Wonders of Yellowstone," which Moran was assigned to illustrate.

(Image from American Visionaries: Thomas Moran, National Park Service)

As a result, Moran developed a desire to see Yellowstone for himself, and arranged to join the first government-sponsored survey of Yellowstone - Hayden's 1871 expedition. The expedition departed in the summer of 1871, and over the course of several months Moran produced dozens of watercolor studies and field sketches that would serve as the basis for numerous oil paintings. He collaborated closely with William Henry Jackson, the expedition photographer, and many of his watercolors and sketches are mirrored in Jackson's photographs of the expedition.

Thomas Moran, Liberty Cap and Clematis Gulch, 1871 (Yellowstone Digital Slide File)

William Henry Jackson, Liberty Cap, Mammoth Hot Springs, 1871 (Yellowstone Digital Slide File)

Moran's field sketches, and the paintings he created from them, were the first color images of Yellowstone ever seen in the East, and did much to stimulate public interest in westward expansion. Soon after the expedition's return, Ferdinand Hayden and others began promoting the idea that Yellowstone should be protected and preserved as a national park. Because no member of Congress had seen Yellowstone, Hayden and his colleagues brought Moran's watercolors, along with the photographs taken by William Henry Jackson, to Capitol Hill.

Great Springs of the Firehole River, 1871 (Yellowstone Digital Slide File)

Their images were key in convincing the Congressional Committee assigned to the matter to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in March 1872, only seven months after the work on the Hayden Survey ended. Congress later purchased two of the oil paintings that Moran created from his sketches to hang in the U.S. Capitol: The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872) and The Chasm of the Colorado (1873). The powerful images in Moran's paintings, of Yellowstone and elsewhere in the West, "fired the imagination and helped inspire Congress to establish the National Park System in 1916" (NPS).

Thomas Moran may be considered a member of the Hudson River School of painting, but his colorful landscapes and romantic depictions of lands in the West stepped far beyond the boundaries of many of his contemporaries. Because of his work's influence on Congress, he has been called the "Father of the National Park System", and Corps of Engineers Captain Hiram M. Chittenden wrote that Moran's paintings (and Jackson's photographs) "did a work which no other agency could do and doubtless convinced everyone who saw them that the regions where such wonders existed should be preserved to the people forever."

"...Yellowstone retains its hold upon my imagination with a vividness of of yesterday...The impression then made upon me by the stupendous and remarkable manifestations of nature's forces will remain with me as long as memory lasts." -- Thomas Moran

Thomas Moran's work impresses me not only for its beauty, but because he, a man who had never ridden a horse and camped only once in his life, took it upon himself to travel to a place almost wholly unexplored in order to share its wonders with his adopted country. I've not yet visited Yellowstone, but I hope that when I do, I'll be able to see it with the same reverent and unjaded vision that Moran brought to his art.

References:

Thomas Moran (National Gallery of Art)

American Visionaries: Thomas Moran (National Park Service)

Yellowstone Digital Slide File: Moran works and other art (National Park Service)

Thomas Moran and the American Landscape (Joshua Johns, University of Virginia)

Everything I need to know in life, I learned on geo field trips

Can you tell I'd rather be in the field than at a desk right now?

Maybe in a few weeks. But in the meantime, because it's Friday and it's fun to make lists, I thought I'd go through some of the useful things I've learned in the field - mostly through personal experience or helping bandage up someone else who didn't learn them fast enough. (Fortunately none of them required hospitalization, but considering that I'll be working with active Guatemalan volcanoes next year, it's only a matter of time :)

• Dry streambeds are great for hiking in. That said, if it rains - even for just a few minutes - get the hell out of the streambed.
• Don't jump over something (log, rock, etc.) if you can't see the other side of it. You could land on a snake/beehive/marmot/other grudge-holding critter.
• Don't hike on volcanic rocks while wearing shorts.
• If you're hiking on fresh lava flows, always wear heavy gloves unless you like picking volcanic glass out of your hands.
• Scotch makes a pretty good anesthetic when you're picking volcanic glass out of your hands. (Taken orally, of course.)
  
• If you're on shelly pahoehoe, you're going to fall in sometime.
  
• Don't wear synthetic clothing when you're going near active lava flows, and don't stand or leave your pack too long in one place.
• Duct tape can be used for backpack, shoe, car, cooking pot, clothing, and occasionally skin repair.
  
• Don't EVER go out into the desert on a 110-in-the-shade-day with a single 20-oz water bottle and then ask your hiking partners for their extra water.
• Hammer tent pegs into the ground with the points TOWARD your tent.
  
• Liberal use of Febreeze can almost counteract the effects of a week with no laundry facilities. Use it on the vans too (the rental people will thank you).
• Don't eat pink snow.
• If your professor is capable of running marathons, don't try to beat him at capture-the-flag.
  
• Don't put water in a hot pan (especially if there's fat or oil in it), and don't put a hot pan into water.
  
• Honey can be used in place of antibiotic cream. If getting the honey requires subsequent application of antibiotics to bee stings, don't bother.
• If a moose wants to eat your Hint-of-Lime Doritos, let it.
• Tarantulas can move pretty damn fast if they want to.
• That cute, innocent looking cactus is perfectly capable of putting a spine through your boot into your big toe.
• Cactus tastes like kiwi fruit.
• Don't listen to your adviser if he says "You should ford the river there, it looks pretty shallow."
• Spam should only be eaten in an emergency.
• Store-brand Spam tastes better than name-brand.
• Bits of ash fall deposits explode beautifully on impact.
• Nighttime swimming in sea-urchin infested waters is bad for your feet.
  
• Duplex cookies are second only to fresh blueberry pie as the ultimate field trip dessert.
  
• Tuna fish and Duplex cookies do not mix.
• Don't let inebriated underclassmen run off with the satellite phone, even if it does have unlimited minutes. (Especially if it has unlimited minutes.)
• Sitting directly on top of a hot spring usually results in A) burns in inconvenient places or B) bruises from people trying to shove you off the source of warm water.
• In some places, it's good to be a wine snob, because it's cheaper than the beer.
• It is possible to get excellent phone reception while standing on top of an erupting volcano.
• Field clothing is not really appropriate for traversing the lobby of the Bellagio.
• It's not really an illegal border crossing if you're only there for a few minutes.
• Trout is excellent breakfast food.
• Real men don't wear "pink" - they wear "desert rose".

So let's have em, everybody. What are the pearls of wisdom you've picked up from fieldwork? (If you've picked up actual pearls, that counts as well.)

And geology is...

(From http://xkcd.com/)

...way over to the right somewhere. Possibly off the screen. Yeah, we use ALL that stuff.