Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 20, 2012 - 02:48pm PT
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It would be amazing if John McPhee were to do a book on climate, and human-caused climate change and its effects, but he doesn't seem to be writing as much now as formerly. He could probably even explain the subject to some of the true believer deniers.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 20, 2012 - 04:15pm PT
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Alas, but McPhee is getting up there in age. He had an amazing skill at taking a complicated topic and communicating it perfectly.
Hell, I have been a geologist for 30 years and still learned things from his geology books.
The only geology book you need to read, for the casual reader, is Annals Of The Former World. He probably put over a decade into that one book.
I still talk a lot with his son in law. They take regular trips to visit him at his home in Princeton.
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Dingus Milktoast
Gym climber
And every fool knows, a dog needs a home, and...
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Nov 20, 2012 - 04:43pm PT
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McPhee is so good one almost finds herself taking away credit.
No one paints 'the big picture' like John McPhee.
DMT
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Nov 21, 2012 - 08:48am PT
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Here's a cool-sounding, big-picture idea -- new to me at least -- from the Nov 13 issue of EOS (emphasis added).
Weighing the ocean with a single mooring
Scientists propose that it would be possible to measure changes in ocean mass with a single moored sensor. Changes in ocean mass, which can be caused by added water from melting ice sheets, are an important part of global sea level changes, which can also result from thermal expansion.
Many estimates of changes in ocean mass currently rely on satellite-based measurements of the regional gravitational field, which are used to calculate mass. However, satellites have limited spatial resolution and have difficulty distinguishing mass on land from ocean mass near coasts. They also have problems measuring the very largest scales, making interpretation difficult.
Hughes et al. combined ocean and Earth models to show that while changes in ocean bottom pressure, and thus ocean mass, are not uniform over the ocean, it is possible to find a location, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a single ocean bottom pressure recorder could be used to determine total ocean mass changes with accuracy that would be better than satellite data. They used this method to measure the annual cycle of ocean mass.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012EO460007.shtml
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
The Illuminati -- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Division
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Nov 21, 2012 - 10:54pm PT
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Thank you Ed, Base and Chiloe!
I am learning a lot and I am sure others are, even if we are not as vocal as "the distraction." Just ignore the distraction and carry on!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 21, 2012 - 11:19pm PT
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Chief: Not into paying for things that are someone else's useless money making scheming endeavors.
Too late, you already did a career in the military across a number of unnecessary money-making wars.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 22, 2012 - 10:50am PT
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That's a good one, Healje.
Lately this thread has been kind of like the congressional town hall meetings a few years ago. The Tea Party was organized and trained to just start screaming about killing Grandma or something.
They might have a point, but because they are screaming and not listening, there is no possible discussion of ideas.
Global Warming is hardly a settled issue. Yes, the Earth is warming. Yes, it appears to correlate to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes, that CO2 was put there by humans burning everything from cow chips to jet fuel.
What is not well known is exactly how bad it will be. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and how that vapor responds to warming is a huge question being worked on. So it really isn't a matter of if. It is a matter of how much. Laymen take this uncertainty and misuse it, saying that the science isn't settled. That is totally inacurate. The question is not really if it is caused by humans, it is what the result will look like in fifty or 100 or 500 years into the future.
Atmospheric Physics is not my area of expertise. Not even close. What I do know is paleoclimate and Earth history. The best source for this information is in sedimentary rocks. The sedimentary record shows an unending sequence of high and low stands of sea level. High stands occurred during warm times when continental ice sheets melt, and low stands occur during cold times when a lot of water is tied up in ice.
So Eustatic (global) sea level change appears to be entirely climate driven. There is no other known mechanism to raise and lower sea level by 100 to 200 feet than gain and loss of ice stored on continental land masses.
The rock record is absolutely filled with these cycles, and that is my job, to sort that out. If you read my post on the Mississippi Delta lobe sequences, then lithify those sequences for 200 million years and bury them beneath 10,000 feet of younger rocks and younger sequences, then you see my job. I sort all of that out. Most people think of sedimentary stratigraphy as a simple layered cake. The bottom layer is obviously the oldest, and the top layer is the youngest. Some places are actually that simple, but as a rule they are not.
I can look at a 20 foot carbonate reef sequence on the northern shelf of the Anadarko Basin, follow it south where it falls off of the shelf and changes to a clastic (shale and sandstone) environment, with shoreface bars and backstepping sequences reworked by transgression, and the whole thing gets pretty damn complicated.
Back to climate sequences. We know absolutely without a doubt that on its own, the Earth's climate is incredibly cyclic. Every sedimentary rock that I have worked is cyclic, and since depositional environments are one of my main specialties, it isn't that hard to determine the paleo environment that was in place when the rocks were deposited.
Basically the sedimentary rock record is like a fantastic book. If you know how to read it, it is a lot of fun. Don't think that I do this on my own, though. At any given time there are probably a dozen other geologists in the company working on the same problem at the same time, not to mention the other dozen companies who are also working it.
There is a lot of ship jumping right now. A hot geologist from one company will get a fat offer from another company and then go there taking his noggin full of information over to that company. So in the end, despite all of this proprietary hush hush, the framework of the play becomes well known.
I just finished a consulting contract for Chesapeake Energy, who drills more onshore U.S. wells than any other company. Since natural gas prices have cratered, and they are basically a natural gas company, they are really hurting right now. I was brought in to work a set of carbonate sequences in a hot play. Half of the work was just bringing my already worked data and zapping it into their server, but I worked with a wonderful multi-disciplinary team of very smart people.
The gist of all this back slapping is that the sedimentary record has been pretty well scoured. A lot is known about every period in Earth's history back to about the Cambrian. The rocks I work are pretty much Devonian through Permian, although the Gulf of Mexico rocks are far younger. They are almost baby rocks of Tertiary and younger age. I work pre-dinosaur era rocks and the Gulf of Mexico is a lot of Miocene and Oligocene stuff when there were already little midget horses running around.
Anyway, depositional environment is one of the most important questions to ask when looking at something. Right now I am working a Pennsylvanian fluvial/delta complex. The pay zone is only 10-20 feet thick. It is pretty shallow, about 4000 feet deep, but I can follow this delta sequence down into the deep Arkoma and Anadarko basins. As the deltas prograded into the deep basin, which was dropping as this sequence of rocks were deposited, what is a 200 foot thick sequence of five overlayed deltas becomes a 5000 foot sequence of thirty or more deltas. That is what sequence stratigraphy is. Just go to wiki and read this page for a good basic explanation of sequence stratigraphy, which is actually a fairly new way of sorting out sedimentary sequences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_stratigraphy
People think that oil is found in caves, but it is found in normal old sandstones and limestones. The Wingate at Indian Creek would be a fantastic reservoir rock. It is thick (over 100 feet), it is very porous (probably 20-25% pore space), and it obviously has great permeability. To measure permeability I need a core sample to take back to the lab, but I have worked enough sandstones to say that it is almost certainly over 100 millidarcies. 10 milldarcies are usually good enough, but if the permeability gets too low you need to frack it.
Rivers and delta distributaries are places where lots of nice sandstone accumulate, so usually I work those. The Wingate is great to look at, but it is at the surface eroding away, sending its little sand grains downstream to be deposited again as another sandstone. Sand grains are quartz for our purposes, and when a granitic rock weathers, the feldspars and micas and more mafic minerals disolve into clay minerals. Quartz is the same thing as glass, and it is hard and nigh immune to chemical weathering. Quartz grains can be recycled over and over into different sandstones over hundreds of millions of years, which is what is happening to that wonderful loose sand at the base of the routes at Indian Creek.
Preservation is most likely around sea level, so most ancient depositional environments are deltas, bars, beaches, etc. I can map a delta distributary system for a hundred miles, even though it is a mile or two deep and lies beneath a wheatfield.
There are buried mountain ranges, massive fault systems, big canyon scours in an ancient surface from a river system. You name it. As you drive across the plains you are driving across a lot of history.
So stuff like paleoclimate drives the distrubution of a depositional environments. The fossil record is also a reasonably direct picture of the environment and climate at the time of deposition.
All kinds of weird things have been figured out.
The driver of climate cycles isn't well understood. We know that the Earth's inclination from the ecliptic plays a part. Over time the Earth's axis changes due to cycles of precession and nutation. This certainly would affect climate and has been considered as one of the possible main drivers of natural cycles in paleoclimate. As it sits right now, I'm not aware of any good explanation of the main driver in the cycles.
I mentioned previously that you can measure the paleomagnetic signature of a rock by carefully taking small core plugs from outcrops and then measuring their signature in the lab. Most rocks have at least a small amount of minerals with magnetic susceptibility, so you can look at a rock and tell its latitude when it was deposited. That is how you can follow the wander of continents and subcontinents and collisions, rifts, and the whole shebang of where a rock was in the past. So if you see a rock that was deposited in a temperate zone that has evidence of glaciation, then you know it was a really cold period. By now much of the planet has been studied.
Look at Mars. Why does it have only a token atmosphere and no water left?
First is that it has no magnetic field like we have. The planet is much smaller in volume and cooled off in a billion years or so. When the magnetic field went, then the atmosphere was scavenged by the solar wind. Low atmospheric pressures are too low for liquid water to survive and the water vapor was scavenged away as well.
Now this is the cool part: The most famous martian meteorite, ALH84001, is about 4 billion years old, and has a paleomag signature about as strong as what the Earth has right now. So we know that conditions in the Martian past were much different than what we see today: a bunch of dried up riverbeds covered with craters and yada yada.
Geoscience is a massive topic. Give me one grain of sand and I can tell you a story. If I can't do it, I'll find somebody who can.
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Bruce Kay
Gym climber
BC
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Nov 22, 2012 - 04:42pm PT
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Here on the wet coast of BC I'd say the warming has been rather muted over the past 30 odd years, certainly compared to many other regions, including just inland in the BC interior. No doubt the onshore flow from the cool northwest pacific has a lot to do with that. A often presented forecast is for increased cloud cover giving a climate more similar to that which currently exists in those godforsaken lands up by Prince Rupert or Juneau Alaska. That would mean summers actually being cooler or at least having a lesser increase in temperature than would be seen elsewhere.
It may be that BC will be the place to be while everywhere else takes a hit. I can tell you one thing, even with the presumably bottomed out real estate values in the south west deserts, I'd think twice before diving in. Terrace BC might be a better bet. And believe me I'm more tempted by the desert than Terrace right now but you gotta look ahead a bit.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 22, 2012 - 04:52pm PT
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Although coastal BC is rather exposed to earthquakes, with one of magnitude 9 or greater likely in the next 100 - 200 years.
As for Mars, what about the hypothesis that much of its water simply migrated underground, perhaps together with any unicellular life that had managed to get started before things got too cold and dry?
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Nov 22, 2012 - 04:57pm PT
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I can't believe this Global Warming sh#t is still selling. Climate Change now?
Sounds like people trying to keep their day-jobs!
Stop with the alarmist bullshit already!!! It's f*#king climate!
And yeah, I hear we're in a new solar cycle.....wooooooo, scary!!!
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Bruce Kay
Gym climber
BC
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Nov 22, 2012 - 05:05pm PT
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Stand down everybody
Bluering is on it
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 22, 2012 - 05:06pm PT
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I diagnose bluering as having sporadic rantitis, and prescribe a soothing dose of turkey, mashed spuds and cranberry sauce for him. Plus a tickle fight with John.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Nov 22, 2012 - 05:09pm PT
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I'm having steak tonight, Anders. Had the turkey-stuff with the wife's parents last weekend.
Steak, garlic-bead, salad...dude, that kicks ass on that T-day crap!!!
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Nov 22, 2012 - 05:12pm PT
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Stand down everybody
Bluering is on it
Yeah, well, stupid Bluering had it right on solar cycles before others here...
Expect 10 years of cooling.
Bluey out~~~
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Nov 22, 2012 - 05:16pm PT
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hey base ,great post[s].geology,meteorology,with a bit astrology ,always been interested.i think you write the big picture yourself. chesapeake energy,i believe they are into fracking here on the allegheny plateau,with ngas prices tanking,whats their angle?gas wells[storage] leak in on our area,because of abundance,yet prices to consumers are rising.are you privy to the propritary chem mix they use to extract?are you a proponent of fracking?just curious.happy thanksgiving. it is 62 here today,i know its not scientific,but me and friends always skied this day in the 80s and 90s,and i mean backcountry skiing.
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Bruce Kay
Gym climber
BC
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Nov 22, 2012 - 05:24pm PT
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Bluey - I hope you're right about that.
But why would anyone think that you are right?
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Dr. F.
Ice climber
SoCal
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Nov 23, 2012 - 04:58pm PT
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Fox News, BluRing's source of Climate Change Propaganda, along with Rush, they are experts in convincing people like BluRing that they are Right,
And scientists are all a bunch of duped idiots that are just slaves to what ever science says, like some kind of coltish followers
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Nov 24, 2012 - 07:09am PT
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One aspect in this fight around climate, as our bus rolls toward a cliff, is how people "know" what they know. Scientists generally think that people should learn about the evidence and on that basis form their beliefs. That's what most scientists do of course. So, many scientists are baffled that as evidence builds up, public beliefs remain largely unchanged.
What seems to be happening instead is that many non-scientists already have strong beliefs, which tell them what evidence about reality they can accept. More actively, in the Internet and cable news age, they know just where to go to hear more and more "evidence" that supports their political position. We see countless examples of that in the cut-and-pastes on this thread.
Less actively, or in cases where they have no information one way or the other, some people construct beliefs about physical reality straight out of their politics. As one way to cast light on this process, I've lately been adding knowledge questions to surveys. Here's an easy one (but remember, on a survey you can't Google):
Which of the following three statements do you think is more accurate?
Scientific measurements have confirmed that in recent decades, the
concentration of CO2 or carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is ...
 Increasing
Staying about the same
Decreasing
Don't know
Any guesses how that came out? Or how it might break down by age, by gender, by education or political party?
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Bruce Kay
Gym climber
BC
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Nov 24, 2012 - 09:44am PT
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Oh I think you don't have to be a rocket scientist to accurately guess those answers.
Thanks for that brief assessment of the politics, which of course determines everything except reality.
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