KPT's Earth thread

Saskquatch11 · Sep 19, 2012

DrewH · Sep 19, 2012

Saskquatch11 said: ↑

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Taco Dan · Sep 19, 2012

ew

MTgirl · Sep 19, 2012

some cool wildfire links. there are satellite images each day of the smoke plumes.
ID and western MT from friday: http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/dat...58202549-2012258203413_250m_id-mt-000_143.jpg

http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/imagery.php

98tacoma27 · Sep 20, 2012

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...aing-grid7|netscape|dl7|sec3_lnk3&pLid=208189

By: Eli MacKinnon, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Published: 09/18/2012 03:03 PM EDT on LiveScience

A flashy claim from Russian scientists, that a Siberian meteorite crater holds "trillions of carats" of diamonds, may be far-fetched but it's not outside the realm of scientific possibility.

Over the weekend, scientists in Moscow divulged that the 62-mile (100-kilometer)-wide Popigai Astroblem crater harbors a peerlessly dense deposit of industrial diamonds, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The Soviets reportedly discovered the trove in the 1970s, but they kept it a secret to avoid upsetting a world diamond market that already favored them. Now that the information is declassified, Russian scientists say Popigai diamonds, some of which are reportedly twice as hard as ordinary diamonds, could revolutionize the global market.

According to Richard April, a professor of geology at Colgate University, there are two main explanations for the formation of so-called "impact diamonds," which he says are found in small quantities at meteorite-impact sites around the globe. [How Are Fake Diamonds Made?]

(Meteors, which are fragments of asteroids or comets that enter Earth's atmosphere at high speeds, are called meteorites after they slam into Earth.)

One possibility is that a meteorite crashes into an area rich with some form of carbon, such as the remains of living organisms. The high pressures and temperatures of the collision would be enough to turn the terrestrial carbon into diamond.

In the second scenario, the carbon arrives inside a meteorite and, at the moment of impact, flash-fuses into diamonds that are dispersed in the ground.

Both scenarios have evidence to back them up, including discoveries of meteorites embedded with tiny diamonds, but according to April, neither scenario is known to create the massive deposits of diamonds that Russia is now touting.

"The diamonds that have been found around meteorite-impact craters have been small and few," he said. "It's interesting that the Russians are claiming that they found a gigantic deposit of diamonds in a meteorite-impact crater, because, from what we've seen so far, it's kind of unlikely."

Still, there is a third Cinderella possibility that, according to April, could theoretically account for the formation of a vast store of super-hard diamonds at a crater site.

It's conceivable that a meteorite landed on a preexisting diamond field, one populated with terrestrial diamonds dredged up from beneath the Earth's surface by volcanic processes. These diamonds, most often found in volcanic deposits called kimberlite pipes, do exist in Siberia.

"The stars would have had to align for the meteor to have impacted a kimberlite pipe. It would be kind of like a hole in one on the golf course," said April. "But it is possible the diamonds would have re-crystallized at the high temperatures and pressures into what they're calling the very hard form."

"That might also account for the fact that there are so many of them. To have trillions of carats, though. This is the first I've ever heard of trillions of carats," he said. "That has never been found before and that would make this a very unique situation."
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bethes · Sep 20, 2012

98tacoma27 said: ↑

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...aing-grid7|netscape|dl7|sec3_lnk3&pLid=208189
Click to expand...

In Soviet Russia, diamond crushes you.

bethes · Sep 20, 2012

98tacoma27 · Sep 20, 2012

xJuice · Sep 21, 2012

http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog...rocious+volcano+produces+spectacular+footage/

Wearing special suits to withstand the searing heat, after enduring severe weather during an expedition that lasted nearly two months on the remote island of Ambrym in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, the crew climbed alongside the boiling vat of lava (reaching 1150 degrees Fahrenheit) for a brief but spectacular view of the one of nature's most ferocious spectacles.
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Wow, I'm

http://youtu.be/DceHEBGVfj4

xJuice · Sep 23, 2012

KPT said: ↑

This is a great shot of a large anticline (a fold that looks like a ). On the right side of the pic, the ridge is dipping to the right at a couple of degrees. In the center of the picture, the beds are nearly vertical. If erosion hadn't removed some of the section, you would see that the rock in between those two exposures would connect, forming a large fold in the rock.
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Trying to visualize the parts you're talking about... The frown would essentially look like an arc or bridge over the road going off into the distance?

xJuice · Sep 23, 2012

KPT said: ↑

Similar to this:
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Sweet

ABregenzer · Sep 23, 2012

Nice pics Keith!

bethes · Sep 24, 2012

Thanks for the pics Keith! Took me back to field camp a little bit, we had the Dakota sandstone as well as the Pierre shale member of the Niobrara in our mapping areas.

bethes · Sep 24, 2012

My thesis project can be housed in 29 five gallon buckets. In an air lock, in front of the fire extinguisher. I do believe we need some more storage space, or at least some grad students who could clean up after themselves.

bethes · Sep 25, 2012

KPT said: ↑

Brings me back.....memories...
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Were you a grad student who didn't clean up after himself?

Edit: or possibly just reminiscing about grad school, where people ask you every day how your thesis is coming along but if you say more than, "Fine, thanks," they get bored and wander off? :/ lol ya. That happens to me a bit.

ABregenzer · Sep 26, 2012

So, after doing all this research about fuel sources and renewable energy, i'm generally concerned about our future.

bethes · Sep 26, 2012

ABregenzer said: ↑

So, after doing all this research about fuel sources and renewable energy, i'm generally concerned about our future.
Click to expand...

We're $&@*^%.

Edit: my apologies for the defeatist tone.

We're $&@*^%!

Hope that's better.

ABregenzer · Sep 26, 2012

bethes said: ↑

We're $&@*^%.

Edit: my apologies for the defeatist tone.

We're $&@*^%!

Hope that's better.
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We're more than $&@*^%!

I feel like the term "History repeats its self" is going to take on a whole new meaning…

98tacoma27 · Sep 27, 2012

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/27/161840202/big-quakes-signal-changes-coming-to-earths-crust

On April 11 of this year, an extraordinary cluster of earthquakes struck off Sumatra. The largest shock, magnitude 8.7, produced stronger ground-shaking than any earthquake ever recorded. And it surprised seismologists by triggering more than a dozen moderate earthquakes around the world.

The quakes are also a sign of big changes to come in the Earth's crust.

But chances are you don't remember the April 11 quake off Sumatra. That's because it was far offshore, so nobody got severely shaken, and it didn't produce a killer tsunami. But the event didn't simply fade away for Ross Stein at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif.

"I was having dinner with my wife at a restaurant a few hours after this earthquake had occurred, and I kept getting paged," Stein says, "and I would look and see that a large earthquake had occurred somewhere around the world. And it just seemed very, very odd that we were having this run of earthquakes of magnitude 5 and larger in this short space of time."

Stein's pager didn't stop after dinner. It kept going off for nearly a week, because moderate quakes kept popping up all around the world.

As Stein and his colleagues report in Nature magazine, the big quake triggered 16 moderate quakes. That defies conventional wisdom. Big quakes trigger big aftershocks locally, but the distant quakes they trigger are typically tiny.

It turns out this was no ordinary quake.

"The shaking produced by this earthquake is larger than any other earthquake recorded, even though we have earthquakes such as the magnitude-9.2 event in 2004, which is 10 times larger than this one," Stein says.

The energy from this quake was all released in about two minutes, compared with eight minutes for the quake that triggered the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. And while most quakes of this size move the ground up and down — which can cause tsunamis — ground movement during the April quake was side to side.

"This is the largest strike-slip, or San Andreas-like earthquake, ever recorded," Stein says.

The shock sent a series of long seismic waves around the world, shaking the ground horizontally and ringing the planet like a bell. Those are called Love waves, and Stein suspects they were strong enough to trip quakes on faults that were pretty close to failing to begin with — not creating new hazards, just changing the timing of quakes.

And the story here isn't just about distant quakes. Seismologists studying the April 11 quakes themselves were also in for a surprise.

"The main shock, the 8.7 event, ruptured on four different faults, which is really unusual," says Thorne Lay at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He and his colleagues describe this in a separate paper in Nature. Lay's team found that the quake zigzagged through a hash mark of faults. And the quakes themselves were not where anybody expected them to be.

"They didn't happen where we typically observe very big earthquakes," Lay says. "It was not on the boundaries between tectonic plates, where plates are rubbing against each other."

Instead, Lay thinks we're witnessing the gradual evolution of a new boundary between tectonic plates.

Here's the big picture. Australia and India sit on the same vast chunk of rock, along with a large swath of the seafloor. This makes up one tectonic plate, "and it's all been moving together northward pretty much coherently for many tens of millions of years," he says.

The western half of that plate has run up against Asia. That slow-motion collision is pushing up the huge Himalayan mountain chain. But the other half of that plate, to the east, is still moving north, unimpeded.

"One part got stuck," Lay says. "The other part kept going. And that sort of wrenched the plate."

That wrenching spot is where the April 11 events took place. Over millions of years, Lay figures, a new plate boundary will form there.

"This event is a very tiny step in that evolution. But it's geologically fascinating to actually be able to record it in our lifetimes and see that process going on," he says.

The new plate boundary will appear only after thousands of more quakes like the ones in April tear up the rock and shift the stresses that are constantly reshaping our planet.
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bethes · Sep 27, 2012

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-305#7
This is so cool. Who else wants to get a rig up there to core it?!

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind.

Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream's flow.

"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. "Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."

The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. Earlier imaging of the region from Mars orbit allows for additional interpretation of the gravel-bearing conglomerate. The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds.

The rounded shape of some stones in the conglomerate indicates long-distance transport from above the rim, where a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years.

The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called "Hottah" and "Link," with the telephoto capability of Curiosity's mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Project's rover, touched down.

"Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient streambed," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The gravels in conglomerates at both outcrops range in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball. Some are angular, but many are rounded.

"The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow," said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

The science team may use Curiosity to learn the elemental composition of the material, which holds the conglomerate together, revealing more characteristics of the wet environment that formed these deposits. The stones in the conglomerate provide a sampling from above the crater rim, so the team may also examine several of them to learn about broader regional geology.

The slope of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater remains the rover's main destination. Clay and sulfate minerals detected there from orbit can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.

"A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment," said Grotzinger. "It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."

During the two-year prime mission of the Mars Science Laboratory,esearchers will use Curiosity's 10 instruments to investigate whether areas in Gale Crater have ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, built Curiosity and manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
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