Despite the obvious interpretation of the title that studying the early Earth IS cool, there is now additional evidence that the early Earth WAS much cooler than many people would have expected for newly accreted planetary body full of radioactive elements. In this new study by Trail et al., they develop a new geothermometer for the ancient zircons that have been dated into the Hadean Eon (the oldest, >3.85 billion years). With this they show that some of these oldest-discovered-zircons have crystallized from a cool melt (for rocks to be cool and molten, they need to be rich in water), thus bolstering another argument by John Valley et al., (full disclosure: JV was a former committee member for me) that the early Earth was cool enough to have liquid water on the surface and a functioning rock cycle long before people had imagined.

Both of these studies are extremely interesting because the zircons they have studied seem to indicate that there was a functioning rock cycle as far back as 4.4 billion years (only ~150 million years after formation), of which these zircons were a part of, but we have no complete rocks older than about 4 billion years (the Acasta gneiss in Canada), leaving us with a giant gap in the geological record. What happened to all these older rocks, and if they are all gone, how have tiny bits of them survived while the main bodies were lost? Verdict: early Earth still cool.

Image by A. Valley and M. Diman from here

You might find these seismogram traces boring or uninterpretable, but I find them to be really cool. Thanks USGS. Each of these traces represents one station from somewhere in the continental US, with the ones closer to the bottom being located further from the source (near Niigata, Japan). The earthquake is not unique in any way, it just happened to be large enough to both cause damage and be detected by multiple stations in the US. If you are lucky enough to have a MacBook like me, I recommend this nifty piece of software which is both cool and helpful in understanding the different types of earthquakes and ground motion that are possible by using the built-in gyro. And if you happen to live in earthquake prone areas (unlike me) you can have your very own desk seismograph.

I was going to use part of this column to talk about what a great job Japan has done in building earthquake resistant structures, but now I see that my previous conclusions were a little hasty. Maybe Japan should reconsider building more nuclear reactors to supply electricity.

So I have a pretty long commute everyday to and from work. Lucky for me, I have an iPod and many radio (and now TV, it seems) programs podcast their episodes for me to download and listen to while I sit on the train. Last week I had a listen to my friend Tom Ashbrook with a story about the incredible waste that goes on with people drinking bottled water all the time. Today I read a BBC story to the same effect. Up to one quarter of each bottle’s volume in oil is spent in producing and shipping each bottle to its final destination?!

At risk of sounding uncool, I never understood what the big attraction of bottled water was. I can count on one hand the number of bottles of water I have paid for in my life. Why would I want to pay money for something that I already receive for free? I have some old hydrogeology friends and I know how much testing and monitoring they do of groundwater. They were smart people, and I trust them when they say the groundwater is safe. Is it just marketing that has driven so many people to drink bottled water?

Well, it looks like NASA is sending its Mars rovers on increasingly dangerous missions (or look here for another story, complete with daggy intro). I’m really impressed with all the information these rovers have recovered, but I have to say it is fun to think about how much more a geologist on the ground could do than a small robot. Any field geologist could have completed all the tasks done by the rovers and more in a few hours (including walking) with a hammer and a hand lens. Having done a little field work myself, you come to realize how much interpretation is constantly happening as you walk around. For me, an essential part of field work was always seeing the big picture and the ability to constantly check interpretations by visiting many different rock outcrops. I imagine this process to be severely limited by looking through a camera and having only limited mobility and vision.

Even putting a few real geologists back on the moon would have a big payoff in terms of earth and planetary science. I’ll be watching carefully where Bush’s plan for lunar exploration will take us in the next few years.

Hi all, and welcome. I want to begin with a little introduction of this blog and the topics I plan to cover during our time here together.

First a little about me: I’m a student pursuing a PhD degree in earth sciences. I’ve been living here in Sydney for more than a year, but I’m originally from the US. My primary interests are geochemistry and geophysics, but I’d like to think that I have a broad background in geology and I’d like to speak to as many geology- related topics as I can throughout this blog. This will primarily take the shape of me picking something that I find interesting and then writing comments about it. I’m also nursing an (unhealthy) obsession with politics, especially those related to science policy. So as a bonus feature, I’ll occasionally write about politics and science policy as I observe it, with a special emphasis on Australia.

In this vein comes today’s topic: Australian perceptions on climate change. The way I see it, Australia has a lot to lose if there are changes in climate. I’m thinking a lot more about the important food producing areas than about coastal effects. The already drought-stricken “bread basket” of Australia stands to become much drier. I think many people here realize this. So much so that they have named a climate change scientist (Tim Flannery) as Australian of the Year. This does not prevent him, however, from being an idiot. You gotta love the politicians misquoting scientists to make them look bad (e.g. “It’ll never rain”) at exactly the same time as the west is getting their first sip of rain in ages. I thought this kind of trickery was more firmly entrenched in the American political sphere, but I was far too naive to realize that politics and “idiocy” are more universal.