Posts Tagged ‘geology’
“Beneath all the wealth of detail in a geological map lies an elegant, orderly simplicity”*…
This year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of William Smith’s extraordinary map, “A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland“– the first geological map to identify the layers of rock based on the fossils they contained rather than on their composition.
Smith revolutionized the study of geological time and the order of the succession of life, and established the founding principles for geological surveys worldwide; accordingly, he is considered the “Father of Stratigraphy.” And as he helped British geology become a science, he is also known as the “Father of English Geology.”
More at “Two centuries of map-making – from William Smith’s survey to satellites,” and at the British Natural History Museum’s page on William Smith.
* Tuzo Wilson (one of the fathers of the theory of plate tectonics)
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As we think about the land in three (nay, four) dimensions, we might spare a thought for William Morris Davis; he died on this date in 1934. A geographer, geologist, and meteorologist, his most substantial contribution was probably the development of geomorphology, the scientific study of landforms and their evolution. Specifically, he described a “geographic cycle,” or “cycle of erosion,” explaining the way in which rivers create valleys and elevate land masses. When Davis retired from Harvard in 1911, the study of landscape evolution was dominated by his theories. Since then, several facets of his theory have been superceded (in part by plate tectonics thinking, as advanced by Tuzo Wilson), though the evolutionary orientation of his theory still informs the field.
Davis was a founder of the Association of American Geographers in 1904, and heavily involved with the National Geographic Society in its early years. He is considered the “father of American geography”; his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts is a National Landmark.
“Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy”*…
Reddit turns its lens on itself and its users…
Randall Munroe sorted the sciences nicely by purity. Let’s see what sequence the application of other metrics, like usage amount of specific words in the respective subreddits, yields.
About 434k randomly chosen comments to about 34k submissions from 2013-08 to 2014-07 on /r/biology, /r/chemistry, /r/compsci, /r/engineering, /r/geology, /r/math, /r/medicine,/r/physics, /r/psychology and /r/sociologywere collected and analysed for frequency of specific words and phrases…
By way of analytic example: given the chart above, one shouldn’t probably shouldn’t be surprised by these results…
More insight at “Science subreddits and their choice of words.”
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As we get our rocks on, we might send stony birthday greetings to Raphael Pumpelly; he was born on this date in 1837. A geologist and explorer, Pumpelly is best remembered for his pioneering petrographic study of the Great Lakes region, as a result of which he sensed the increasing importance of steel, and advised investors to search for iron rather than gold– making those who heeded his advice great fortunes.
“It is not down in any map; true places never are”*…
Still, maps hold us in thrall. Consider, for example, this exquisite piece created around 1715 by Johann Baptist Homann, a German mapmaker working in Nuremberg. It measures 2 ¾ inches in diameter.
This particular pocket globe came in four pieces that nest inside each other like matryoshka dolls. The outside case, made of leather and featuring an S-shaped hook that secured the two pieces together, is lined with concave representations of a celestial map, showing constellations as seen from the earth. (Celestial globes were among the earliest globes produced, and were once commonly sold alongside their terrestrial cousins.)
Inside, the terrestrial globe (on which California is depicted as an island, a common misconception of the time) is hollow. Split into two parts, it reveals an armillary sphere: a type of skeleton celestial globe that represents the movement of heavenly bodies through circles. This armillary sphere has a band around it that’s illustrated with zodiacal symbols.
Katie Taylor, of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the U.K., writes that pocket globes could have served as “status symbols for wealthy gentlemen,” or functioned as educational tools for children. Homann made no other globes, specializing instead in maps and atlases; he might have sold this pocket version as a trinket…
The globe is featured in Sylvia Sumira’s Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power. Read more in “An Itsy-Bitsy Early 18th-Century Pocket Globe” at Rebecca Onion’s essential The Vault.
* Herman Melville
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As we plot our courses, we might spare a thought for Samuel Warren Carey; he died on this date in 2002. As a geology graduate student in Australia, he read a translation of Alfred Wegener‘s The Origin of Continents and Oceans, the book largely responsible for introducing the concept of continental drift to the English-speaking world; as a result, he became an early advocate of Wegener’s theory. Carey’s plate tectonics reconstructions led him to develop the Expanding Earth hypothesis– a theory now largely rejected by the scientific community, but one that generated research and debate that helped advance the field of tectonics materially.
And they say that salt is bad for one’s heath…
In news likely to unsettle “young earthers”– the plurality of Americans who believe that the earth, and life on it, were created by God all at once about 10,000 years ago– scientists have discovered 34,000-year-old organisms…
It’s a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something … alive.
Thankfully this story doesn’t end with the destruction of the human race, but with a satisfied scientist finishing his Ph.D.
“It was actually a very big surprise to me,” said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.
Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.
“It’s permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules,” said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert’s advisor at the time…
The key to the microbes’ millennia-long survival may be their fellow captives — algae, of a group called Dunaliella.
“The most exciting part to me was when we were able to identify the Dunaliella cells in there,” Schubert said, “because there were hints that could be a food source.”
With the discovery of a potential energy source trapped alongside the bacteria, it has begun to emerge that, like an outlandish Dr. Seuss invention (hello, Who-ville), these tiny chambers could house entire, microscopic ecosystems…
The bacteria are the tiny, pin-prick-looking objects, dwarfed by the larger, spherical algal cells. The colored spots come from pigments the algae produce, carotenoids, still vibrant 30,000 years on.
Read the story in its entirety at OurAmazingPlanet.com; and read Shubert’s paper in the January 2011 issue of the journal of the Geological Society of America, GSA Today.
As we ponder the prospect of seasoning our popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1809 that the first U.S. geology book of importance was read by William MacLure, a Scot who’d immigrated to the U.S. ten years earlier, before the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, Pa. Observations on the Geology of the United States, which was published in revised form in 1817 and contained the first chart of United States territory that divided the land into rock types, was the first true geological map of any part of North America and one of the world’s earliest geological maps. (MacLure’s reading predated William Smith’s first geological map of England by six years.)
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