A Note On Energy Density

An unpleasant example, but nonetheless a sobering reminder of just how much of an expansion in renewables will be needed to replace a significant slice of energy produced from fossil fuels.

Energy Outlook puts out some numbers:

Cape Wind and the Macondo prospect that the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling into represent opposite poles of the energy spectrum, and not just because the latter is now leaking oil into the marine environment at a rate that the latest estimate puts at 5,000 barrels per day, much higher than initially thought. Cape Wind would tap into the clean and renewable, but extremely diffuse energy sources that surround us. After taking into account the restrictions imposed by DOI, its 130 turbines would on average generate as much electricity as a gas turbine power plant consuming a quantity of natural gas equivalent to 6,000 bbls/day of oil. In other words, it takes a very large array of offshore wind turbines to match the energy in the oil currently leaking from a single well. Platforms similar to what BP might have been planning to install after successfully completing the exploration of Macondo routinely produce up to 20 times that much oil.

The implications of this huge difference in energy density are clear. Without the energy concentration that nature has embedded in fossil fuels over many millennia, the hardware required to tap natural energy flows in real time becomes vast in extent.

Over at Science Friday the same point was made with regards to the potential of algae and microbes in producing fuels. They too suffer from the problem of capturing diffuse sunlight..the effect being that very large extents of land are required to produce significant quantities of fuel. The estimates given were a few thousand gallons of fuel per acre per year.

Currently the U.S uses about 275+ billion gallons of oil per year. Currently only a few percent of the liquid fuel needs of the U.S are met by biofuels.

Similar differences apply to the two fastest growing consumers of energy ..China and India.

Updated California Fault Map Released

The California Geological Survey on its 150th anniversary has released an updated version of a fault map along with an updated version of a rock and soil map.

The maps are available as interactive Google Maps.... dare I say ...mashups?

The idea is that knowledge of the location and types of faults will guide decisions on where to build and on construction standards.

You can view the fault map here and the geological map here.

Tip: NYTimes

Volcanoes And The Extinction Of Us

 "Morn came and went, and came, and brought no day/ And men forgot their passions in the dread/ Of this their desolation . . ."

...Lord Byron wrote this in the aftermath of the Tambora eruption in 1815 which darkened skies over England for weeks. Apparently quite a few artists were profoundly affected by this eruption. Mary Shelley got depressed and wrote Frankenstein while others like JMW Turner painted the bright sunsets that were brought about by haze forming suspended ash all over Europe.

Simon Winchester has a good article in the Guardian on volcanic eruptions of the past and their impact on humans and on their capacity to wreck havoc on global ecosystems.

He comes out distinguishing the aftereffects of earthquakes and volcanoes. Earthquakes kill a lot more people but in terms of long lasting impacts on organisms, volcanoes are more lethal. Earthquakes don't cause extinctions unlike the ill-effects of volcanoes which can linger on for weeks or even years after, resulting in a more widespread environmental damage and extinctions of local and sometimes global reach.

The article is mostly about the impacts of volcanoes on biology but I can't help pointing out that recent massive earthquakes have had very important, potentially long lasting, social impacts of local and regional significance.

After the 2004 Sumatra earthquake, the separatist movement which was gathering strength in the island of Aceh lost steam due to the utter devastation of its population and infrastructure. A peace agreement with the Indonesian government resulted in restoring peace and stability after decades of violence.

On a more villainous note,  in the aftermath of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the social arms of the terrorist organizations Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen rushed in to provide help to the local populations in the absence of prompt government relief and gained enormous popular support making it that much harder to uproot them.

Coming back to the article..one minor quibble I have is about his section on the rates of mass extinctions. He says that two to 5 major extinction events occur in the world every million years or so. This is in reference to "profound and world changing" mass extinctions and I am puzzled by this statistic. Surely he means every few tens of millions of years or so, especially since he is linking these events to flood basalt volcanism? Or does he mean flood basalts from Iceland volcanoes in the past few million years have triggered mass extinctions on a million year frequency? Extinction is occurring all the time and occasionally there will be a spike over and above the background extinction rate brought about by catastrophic events, local and regional and only rarely global ..but what does he exactly mean by "two to five major extinction events"? are these local or global events...and do we really have paleontological methods to resolve events that closely spaced?

Iceland sits atop a mantle hot spot that coincides with a mid-oceanic ridge. This underlying heat engine may be the modern representative of the hot spot responsible for past flood basalts provinces of Greenland and in the British Isles which formed during the early Cenozoic opening of the north Atlantic.  Seen in this context, is the recent Iceland eruption the beginning of a more prolonged volcanic activity that might threaten our very existence?

That's off course pure speculation in an article that is otherwise full of information and interesting facts..but it does make you a bit uneasy....

Tip: Nanopolitan

An Inane Sentence About Dinosaur Extinction

This from the Daily Mail about the discovery of a sudden shift in Early Cretaceous climate and its potential impact on dinosaurs:

The temperature drop during the Cretaceous period would almost certainly have wiped out an 'abundance' of the world's dinosaurs.

The scientists behind the ground-breaking study claim this would have been the first major step dinosaurs took on their eventual road to extinction.

Hmmm...I had heard stories about lemmings committing mass suicide but didn't know that the dinosaurs too came to an agreement in the early Cretaceous to take decisive major steps towards eventual extinction.

I know..I know.. the writer didn't mean it that way...but the sentence does come out reading that odd.

More seriously Dr Gregory Price of Plymouth University, one of the scientists involved in the study suggests that climatic shifts possibly caused by a dysfunction to the nascent Gulf Stream which brings warm waters to the north Atlantic resulted in a temperature drop about several degrees beginning around 137 mya and similar events recurring throughout the Cretaceous may have caused a gradual dying out of the dinosaurs.

If that is true it should be reflected in the patterns of dinosaur diversity through the Cretaceous period. Dinosaur diversity should show a systematic decline beginning around 137 mya.

What does the paleontological record show?

I dug around for references and came across several studies that have measured and estimated dinosaur diversity through time. They show that:

1) There is no trend of a systematic gradual decline in dinosaur diversity beginning around 137 mya (Ref).

2) There seems to be an expansion of dinosaur diversity early in the history of the group in the late Triassic - mid Jurassic. After that there were periods of minor expansion and diversification - as recognized by origin of new dinosaur groups - in the later Jurassic and in the mid - late Cretaceous (Ref).

3) The raw data i.e. the observed diversity from the collected fossil record shows a major expansion of diversity in the mid -late Cretaceous. That however may be an artifact of sampling. This can occur in a number of ways. Perhaps the mid-late Cretaceous has been sampled more intensively due to an interest in the late Cretaceous mass extinction. Or more Cretaceous strata is exposed and is available for study than earlier times (Ref) .

Corrected for these biases the increase in diversity in mid-late Cretaceous is more muted.

Figure below shows the patterns of dinosaur diversity through the Mesozoic.

Source: Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution

Fig a is an estimate of the frequency of new lineages originating through time and the pattern suggests that the majority of new groups seem to have evolved in the earlier 1/3rd history of dinosaurs,

Fig b, solid line shows observed diversity with peaks in the early history of the group with a Jurassic maxima and a later increase in the mid-late Cretaceous. Dashed line shows diversity corrected for ghost ranges, which are estimates of the total geological range of the fossil. Many times the first appearance of a  group in the fossil record may not coincide with the origin of that group. Therefore the earlier existence of that group is estimated based on evolutionary relationships with related groups. So for example the appearance of several new groups in the mid-late Cretaceous may not mean those groups originated then. If one applies estimates of when that group actually originated i.e. includes their basal ghost range, then the diversification peaks for mid-late Cretaceous are moderated.

Dotted lines show diversity corrected for sampling bias. The result suggests that diversification rates are heavily influenced by sampling. In other words the data corrected for sampling bias indicates neither an increase nor a decrease in dinosaur diversity throughout the Cretaceous.

Fig c shows the likelihood of shifts in diversity through time. The trend line suggests an overall decrease in diversity shifts (lineage branching events) after an early (late Triassic - early Jurassic) peak. The likelihood of lineage branching events (increases in diversity) fluctuated moderately throughout the Cretaceous (Ref).

4) Some studies show that dinosaurs did decline in diversity a few million years (10 million or so) before the K-Pg mass extinction event. Others suggest that no such pattern in discernible once you take into account not just observed diversity but estimated diversity as well. Estimated diversity is a measure of how much of the actual diversity remains to be discovered.

In summary.. the data does not seem to support Dr. Price's contention that there was a gradual decline in dinosaurs initiated by climatic changes around 137 mya over a time period of some 70 million years before the K-Pg mass extinction and certainly does not even come close to supporting the crackpot headline in the Daily Mail that Dinosaurs 'killed off by a sudden drop in temperature and NOT by a comet'

Dinosaurs were a group with a world wide distribution. There would have been throughout their history local extinction events brought about by environmental perturbations. A possible cooling of the earth about 137 mya may have harmed dinosaurs in the very northern latitudes but did not set the stage (in a non-teleological sense of the phrase) for a long term globally widespread decline of the dinosaurs through the rest of the Cretaceous. In fact, there may have been a moderate expansion of dinosaur diversity in the mid-late Cretaceous. Globally the dinosaurs seemed to be doing quite well until their rapid demise 65 mya.

Earth Day And Geology Education In India

I had no idea what to write for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day - April 22 - until I recalled a short note I had read in Current Science some time back about the state of geology education in India and its impacts on society.

Piyoosh Rautela of the Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre in Dehardun is critical of the state of geology education and calls for a revamp of geology syllabus and increased attention to the importance of geology in our daily lives.

He has this to say:

..The passouts of present times know how to determine their location using a global positioning system (GPS) and plot the same in maps created in the GIS environment but are unable to do the same using topomaps and compass/clinometer. To them, compass/clinometer and geological hammer are things of the bygone days...

and more on syllabus..

Geology is one such subject that has failed to keep pace with the changing scenario in most of the Indian colleges and universities. It is still being taught the same way it used to be in the 1960s. This does not imply that the courses have not been revised. There have been some additions and deletions but these have failed to make a perceptible positive impact.

I am not sure I share his perception on point one. I interact with graduate students from the local university and they all seem pretty competent in the use of the compass and in locating themselves on a map without a GPS. They were wielding the geological hammer with gusto too!

But I do think he makes an important point about geology education not keeping pace with times.

Now I hear all the time that the syllabus at post graduate (M.S) level is too "academic" and does not prepare students for industry. I am not too sympathetic to this point of view for a practical reason. I don't see how courses in most geology graduate programs in India can be really "industry oriented" when the faculty have no industry experience themselves.

The education to job pathway followed by a vast majority of academics is an uninterrupted B.S. to M.S. to Ph.D to faculty without any breaks to work in industry. No wonder their teaching methods and contents will reflect their own academic experience. That will be hard to change given this preferred route to professorship.

That doesn't mean that syllabus and teaching cannot be made more effective in preparing students for life outside academia.  I think that is what Piyoosh Rautela is getting at. Individual faculty no doubt revise syllabus and teach principles and concepts well. But how do you go from knowing a principle to using it to solve a problem. I think that element is lacking in many geology programs. The habit of critical thinking and problem solving is not being inculcated as rigorously as it should.

I am more worried about this aspect of geology education than a perceived lacuna of "industry oriented" education. A student coming out, sound in principles and a critical thinker will adapt to any industry, which in any case  takes up the slack and retrains the new entrant to suit their particular needs.

What will be lacking though if we persist with dull exam oriented syllabus is our ability to produce the next generation of top quality scientists and thinkers. This is worrying because knowledge of earth sciences and geology will be playing an increasingly important role in how we manage our planet in the future.

How should the academic geology community in India contribute to Earth Day?

I do support the usual measures that many people are writing about... take personal responsibility..  live a less consumerist lifestyle and so on.

But if we want to create a sustainable way of life on this planet we need a sustainable stream of skilled human resources. Scientists and intellectuals with the ability to think deeply about today's and tomorrow's problems and propose realistic solutions to them...people with the ability to assume stewardship of the country's development and environmental policies and guide them in the direction of a more responsible and less destructive way of achieving a better life.

And it all begins with how we train our students.

That is the best and most long lasting contribution that the Indian academic geology community can make towards Earth Day. Energize your syllabus, inspire your students and mold them into critical confident thinkers. Create a sustainable source of skilled people who can contribute towards building a sustainable planet.