Interview With Writer John McPhee

On Point Radio's Tom Ashbrook conducts a lively interview with writer John McPhee.

McPhee has written on an astonishing range of topics but holds special interest for me for his books on geology.... part field manual...part conversations with a geologist....part literature.. The first one I read was Assembling California which I think was his last detailed book on geology.

Mussel Rock is a horse. As any geologist will tell you, a horse is  displaced rock mass that has been caught between the walls of a fault. This one appeared to have got away. It seemed to have strained  successfully to jump out of the continent. Or so I thought the first time I was there. It loomed in the fog. Green seas slammed against it and turned white. It was not a small rock. It was like a three-story building, standing in the Pacific, with brown pelicans on the roof. You could walk out on a ledge and look up through the fog at the pelicans. When you looked around and faced inland, you saw you were at the base of a fifty foot cliff, its lithology shattered beyond identification. A huge crack split the cliff from top to bottom and ran on out through the ledge and under the waves. After a five-hundred-mile northwesterly drift through southern and central California, this was where the San Andreas Fault intersected the sea.

I was hooked...

You get a sense of the effort it takes to write one of these geology books as Mc Phee describes the entire process from initial interviews to field trips to the numerous drafts to the vetting from a specialist to make sure he has got the science right.

It's been quite a while since Assembling California...1993 I think.. I hope he writes another one...

Meanwhile, the interview is terrific listening. Its not just about the geology books but more about his wider involvement in the art of writing and what makes him tick.

Iceland: Why Such An Explosive Eruption At A Mid-Oceanic Ridge?

Over at Nobel Intent John Timmer talks to  Dr. Jeff Karson of Syracuse University who explains the conditions that produce the ash rich explosive eruptions generally associated with subduction zones and not the mid-oceanic ridge setting of Iceland.

He identifies two factors:

1) Unlike most mid-ocean ridge settings the magma underneath Iceland have a silica rich rhyolitic component along with the copious basalt. Silicic magmas which form rhyolites contains more dissolved volatiles that fizz out of solution as the magma ascends and the pressure on it is released. Hence rhyolitic volcanism tends to be explosive.

2) The ice cover over Iceland. As hot magma comes in contact with ice, it vaporizes it and produces explosive steam, contributing along with other volatiles to a violent eruption.

 Credit: Nasa

Why is there rhyolite at a mid-oceanic setting which is usually dominated by basalts?

Two possible answers: One is that it forms through fractional crystallization of a tholeiitic magma. Some geochemical work on the Iceland igneous province suggest though that this might not be the dominant mechanism at work. Instead, partial melting of older crust may be at work. Iceland differs in this respect with Hawai where fractional crystallization of basalts do not produce rhyolite. In Iceland tectonics keeps bringing to depth earlier extrusives. Ascending magmas interact with this earlier formed crust which is heterogenous in character being made up of basalt and containing silicic segregations from earlier cycles of solidification and this interaction likely generates rhyolitic composition magmas.

Geoengineering: Mad Science...Last Resort....Doable..?

Technological hubris..playing God with climate..mad science... in between these extremes are a range of intermediate options and views on geoengineering.

On NPR's Fresh Air writer Jeff Goodell talks about his book How to Cool the Planet. It is an informative restrained talk, not quite endorsing geoengineering.. only suggesting that since there seems to be no signs of serious global efforts to reduce emissions in any significant way... it may be time to start thinking seriously about geoengineering.

That won't come without its own problems. There will be geopolitical issues to be dealt with along with ethical issues of who can and should act as the earth's thermostat.

Speaking of geopolitical issues and international co-operation on geoengineering..at Energy Outlook Geoffrey Styles is skeptical that international treaties will work:,

Imagine having tried to get the delegates at Copenhagen to agree to let someone put finely-divided salt particles into the atmosphere over, say, the Arctic, to make clouds more reflective. Might as well have tried to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time.

That's the core of the problem as I see it: If we do end up needing to deploy geoengineering, it's likely to be precisely because we were unable to get every country on earth--or even just the small subset of large emitters--on the same page with regard to climate change, let alone establish a universally-trusted body to oversee their mitigation efforts. If we yoke geoengineering to the same UNFCCC/IPCC process that brought us the Copenhagen Climate Conference and the Kyoto Protocol, then we might as well forget it and try to figure out where to invest in the likely new beachfront property of the 2050s.

He has some interesting thoughts too on the set up of small scale geoengineering experiments.

Back To The Old Blogger Template

Admin stuff...

After experimenting with the new Template Designer on offer with Draft Blogger I am back to the old minima template on regular Blogger.

I liked the look of the new template I had tried. It was the simple style by Josh Peterson. But for some reason the page was slower to download and also broke up while scrolling. I have noticed that on few other blogs which are using the Designer Template.

I've tinkered with old minima template though. My pet peeve was that it was too narrow and I didn't want the stretch version.

In Layout- Edit Html I changed the width of the Header as well as the Wrapper. These two elements control the width of your blog title and the width of the banner image you want to insert and the width of the main post text and the sidebar.

I'm happy with the results. The page is wide enough to insert larger figures than before and the wider banner image looks good too.

Seismologists Do Dallas

Relax....

This page ain't turning adult.



That is science...seismologist style. The explosions that demolished the famous Dallas football stadium on April 11 were being monitored by a team of seismologists from Baylor University who hope to image the crust below to get a better picture of the subsurface geology.

Of interest is the story of the complicated Ouachita deformation created when South America collided with North America in the late Paleozoic.

Doing science is as much about opportunism as any other attribute and the Texas seismologists grabbed this chance to learn more about the geology beneath their feet.

Nature News has the full story.