Aussie Au

Australian man 42-year-old Mick Brown hit the jackpot with his metal detector near Wedderburn, Victoria. Only 6" (15 cm) beneath the surface of the earth, he found a 6 lb (2.7 kg) gold nugget, worth about $107,000 U.S. ($141,000 Australian). Brown describes first mistaking the discovery for a big molten blob of copper, then the realization dawned, "I thought bugger me, it is, it's bloody gold."

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Dinosaur dance floors

There is an amazing sight (site) in Sucre, Bolivia, which features hundreds of distinct dinosaur tracks from at least 8 different species – a total of 5,055 individual prints. The "dinosaur dance floor," as it is called, stands 328' (100 m) high and stretches .9 miles (1.5 km). Ian Belcher of The Guardian explains how the limestone wall (IMAGES HERE) was formed: “It was unique climate fluctuations that made the region a palaeontological honey pot. The creatures’ feet sank into the soft shoreline in warm damp weather, leaving marks that were solidified by later periods of drought. Wet weather then returned, sealing the prints below mud and sediment. The wet-dry pattern was repeated seven times, preserving multiple layers of prints. The cherry on the cake was added when tectonic activity pushed the flat ground up to a brilliant viewing angle – as if nature was aware of its tourism potential.” Meanwhile, the name of another "dinosaur dance floor" in northern Arizona, U.S., which has been discredited by geologists at the University of Utah as only a dense collection of unusual potholes eroded in the sandstone, must now be understood metaphorically.

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Prismatic presumption

In the latest example of tourists behaving badly, a visitor to Yellowstone National Park crashed a camera-equipped drone into the world's third largest hot spring. This despite the fact that there is no lack of aerial photos of Grand Prismatic Spring and the fact that drones have been banned from U.S. national parks since June of this year. The hot spring (IMAGE ABOVE), which is 370' (113 m) in diameter and more than 121' (37 m) deep, Is brilliantly colored due to bacteria and minerals in the water. The park employee can be faulted for failure to detain the tourist and immediately report Saturday's incident to authorities when the man had the nerve to approach him and inquire about getting his drone back. Park spokesperson Al Nash referred to the pilot as "inept" and said of the drone, "We are trying to determine if we can locate it, and if we locate it, if we’ll be able to remove it. Our concern is about any potential impacts to the iconic Yellowstone thermal feature.”

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Litter to littoral

Yet another negative legacy of our tenure on earth has turned up. Geologist Patricia Corcoran of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and Capt. Charles Moore, of the oceanographic research vessel Alguita, stumbled upon a new type of rock on Kamilo Beach on the Big Island of Hawaii. These weren't igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary. They were cobbled together from volcanic rock, beach sand, seashells, coral, and plastic. When they went looking, they found the stones in all 21 of the area sites they surveyed. The scientists dubbed them “plastiglomerates,” and explain that they can form anywhere there is abundant plastic debris and a heat source, such as a forest fire or lava flows. Melting allows the plastic to cement together the natural fragments and flow into larger rocks to fill in the cracks. The mass of plastic produced since 1950 is close to 6 billion metric tons, and none of it has yet decayed.

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Putnisite

Australian mineralogist Peter Elliott of the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide has led an international team of scientists in describing a new mineral discovered by a mining company on the Polar Bear peninsula, Southern Lake Cowan, Western Australia. Named putnisite, the mineral combines the elements strontium, calcium, chromium, sulfur, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. But whereas most new minerals fall into a family or are similar to synthetic compounds, putnisite is completely unique and unrelated to anything. Concludes Elliot, “Nature seems to be far cleverer at dreaming up new chemicals than any researcher in a laboratory."

 

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Lay of the (Green)land

Last year, American geologists from the University of Vermont identified a landscape in Greenland that was 800,000 years old. This year, they announced the discovery of an ancient landscape more than 3 times older. The tundra has been preserved under the Greenland Ice Sheet beneath 2 miles of ice for 2.7 million years! Ice core samples the international team of scientists brought up (IMAGE ABOVE) include organic soil, which usually would have been scraped away by moving glaciers. This indicates that the ice sheet has persisted much longer than previously known and has endured many past periods of global warming. Instead of acting as an agent of erosion, the ice worked as a giant refrigerator for the organic materials they have now been able to analyze. Researcher Dylan Rood of the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre and the University of California, Santa Barbara comments, "Greenland really was green! However, it was millions of years ago. Greenland looked like the green Alaskan tundra, before it was covered by the second largest body of ice on Earth."

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Abbey asbestos

It was news to me that asbestos, which we now know to be carcinogenic, is a natural mineral. I also had no idea that before its industrial application beginning in the late 19th c. as a fire retardant and insulating material, it had been in use for millennia. Artisans mixed asbestos with clay to produce stronger pottery 4,500 years ago. Weavers added the fibers to textiles 2,000 years ago to give them what were considered magical powers: asbestos napkins could be tossed into the fire to be cleansed and asbestos shrouds could keep human ashes separate from the materials used for cremations. Even so, it was a surprise to UCLA archaeologist Ionna Kakoulli (IMAGE ABOVE) to find a form of the mineral underlying the 12th c. wall paintings she was studying. She and her fellow researchers found it when they applied modern techniques to the paintings, including infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray fluorescence imaging, and analyzed micro-samples with scanning electron microscopes. The murals are located in the Byzantine monastery Enkleistra of St. Neophytos in Cyprus and the monks may have applied the layer of white asbestos to the plaster to provide a smooth, mirrorlike surface for painting. But the scientists are still puzzled as to why the asbestos-rich layer was only found beneath certain areas of the paintings, for instance behind the frame around the depiction of the "Enthroned Christ" on the ceiling. Kakoulli remarks, "So far, we've only found it in relation to those red pigments. I have a feeling that it's something that can be easily missed. This was quite an accidental discovery."

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Blue spew

French photographer Olivier Grunewald has been photographing volcanoes since 1997 and, with his friend Régis Etienne, captured scenes of the otherworldly Kawah Ijen volcano in East Java in images (EXAMPLE ABOVE) and a 52-minute documentary film (CLIP HERE). It is sulphur that makes the views so eerie and spectacular, appearing red during the day but glowing shades of blue during the night as it flows from an active vent. Flames from the adjacent hydrochloric acid lake flare up to 5 m high. It is also sulphur that threatens the health of the men who have been mining it for over 40 years. They brave the toxic fumes and heat to break up, gather, and load the crystallized hunks of the mineral. The loads they carry weigh between 80 and 100 kg and sell for 680 roupees per kilo (about €0.04). Some workers managed to haul out 2 loads every 24 hours, but at quite a sacrifice. Grunewald writes, "The sulphur, among the purest in Indonesia, is destined for the food and chemical industry. Whitening sugar, at the price of their health and youth, such is the destiny of these serfs to sulphur."

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Pressing precious

“It’s a new kind of chemistry,” says geophysicist Russell J. Hemley of the Carnegie Institution for Science about something which I again admit is beyond my comprehension. By squeezing substances between 2 diamonds they cause changes in the molecules that result in a surprising modern-day alchemy. And by squeeze, I mean exerting pressure of 50 million pounds per square inch and above inside a special anvil. At that pressure, oxygen becomes a shiny metal. Noble gases interact with hydrogen to become new structures, and hydrogen forms a hexagonal pattern. Everyday items like peanut butter, roofing tar, and wood become diamonds! As the atoms reconfigure, the properties of the substances change: some can then insulate, others become superconductors, some alter their transparency. Scientists are experimenting with the chemical reactions of carbon under extreme pressure to determine the conditions necessary for the formation of life. They are studying these high-pressure transformations to understand what is going on in the earth's core, but also to develop new materials to efficiently produce or store electricity. “You have a new and different periodic table, in a sense,” sums up Dr. Hemley.

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Subterranean schematic

Beneath the ancient city of Rome is a maze of tunnels. Originally carved out as the Romans quarried the volcanic tufa, they have been used over the centuries to deposit the dead, farm mushrooms, and shelter from the bombs of World War II, among other things. But time, weathering, and amateur repairs have weakened them to the point where an increasing number of collapses have occurred. To predict and prevent further collapse of structures on the surface, which rose from 44 in 2011 to 83 to date this year, the high-risk areas of the tunnel system are being mapped by George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, U.S., and Centro Ricerche Speleo Archeologiche (Center for Speleoarchaeological Research) in Rome. First they scan the passageways with 3D lasers to search for hidden weaknesses, then – when they determine the tunnels are safe – they enter them and map them by hand. Critical areas identified as unstable are being filled in by city officials, rather than just patched over. The mapping will provide a tool to combat the erosion which will continue to get worse. As geoscientist Giuseppina Kysar Mattietti explains, "A crack never stops on its own. It always gets bigger."

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Wayback water

“This was not something we were looking for or even expected,” comments hydrologist Ward Sanford of the U.S. Geological Service. His team was drilling 1/2 mile below the ground near the Chesapeake Bay (MAP FROM 1812 ABOVE) at Cape Charles, Virginia, to study how the Earth's crust absorbed the impact of an asteroid or huge chunk of ice which struck about 35 million years ago. The enormous crater – now covered with up to 1,200' (365 m) of sand, silt, and clay – was discovered in 1999 and now scientists have made a new discovery. They found a trapped pocket of water with twice the salinity of modern seawater and have determined it to have remained untouched since the Early Cretaceous period 100 million years ago. While geologists from the University of Toronto can claim discovery of the oldest fresh water (so to speak) in the world at 2.6 billion years old, The USGS has found the oldest large body of ancient seawater in the world.

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Mapping the Matterhorn

When English mountaineer George Mallory (1886-1924) was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest the Himalayas, he responded, "Because it's there." Well, project manager of SenseFly Adam Klaptocz had a similar reason for wanting to map the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps: "Such a combination of high altitudes, steep rocky terrain and sheer size of dataset has simply not been done before with drones, we wanted to show that it was possible." The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) company and aerial photography company Pix4D used 3 drones to capture points just 8" (20 cm) apart. In the time it usually takes to climb the last 4,000' (1200 m) to the Matterhorn's summit – 6 hours – the drones had surveyed the entire mountain.

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Hoodoo hoodlums

The landscape of Utah's Goblin Valley State Park is characterized by formations known as hoodoos, or more colloquially as "goblins" (EXAMPLE ABOVE). In an act of vandalism that is not unprecedented, 3 idiots - scout leaders, no less - took it upon themselves to modify one of those geologic features. Identified by the authorities because they tagged themselves in the video they posted (VIDEO HERE), they are as uncaring of our national treasures as the fools who damage petroglyphs or obliterate them with graffiti. Jeff Rasmussen, deputy director of Utah State Parks and Recreation, declared that the men face potential felony charges for their senseless and destructive act: “It’s a valley full of these rocks that are perched up on these earth platforms, and obviously we’re very concerned and upset that someone would come and destroy this natural wonder that took millions of years to be formed.”

 

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Space scarab

I may have seen this amulet belonging to King Tutankhamun when I visited the traveling exhibition of his treasures in the 1970s. Little did I know that the yellow scarab at the center predates the ancient Egyptian king's 14th c. B.C. reign by 28 million years. That's when a comet hit the Sahara desert and heated the sand to such a degree that it formed silica glass and spread it over a wide area. The scarab, microscopic diamonds, and a mysterious black pebble dubbed “Hypatia” have been found by an international collaboration of geoscientists, physicists, and astronomers to be the first physical evidence left on the planet by a comet strike. Team member David Block of Wits University explains, “Comets always visit our skies – they’re these dirty snowballs of ice mixed with dust – but never before in history has material from a comet ever been found on Earth.”

 

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Fox photo

Salt print from a calotype negative entitled "The Geologists, Chudleigh, Devon" by William Henry Fox Talbot c. 1843, in the collection of the National Media Museum, Bradford, U.K.

British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) made the photograph above using his newly developed calotype process. American archaeologist Suzanne Pilaar Birch has tried to identify whether the woman in the photo is renowned British paleontologist and geologist Mary Anning (1799-1847). Though the woman in the image is often mistaken for the man's wife, or even his mother, the title by Talbot makes clear that they are colleagues. Birch points out that Anning was one of a handful of female geologists active and collaborating with their male counterparts at the time: "Often overlooked, women's contributions were not just in the form of isolated discovery, but also in the cultivation of and participation in rich scientific networks of men and women." But the most gratifying about this story is that the photographer was also a collector!

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Greenland's glaciers

If you happen to visit Greenland and gaze across the earth near Upernavik (IMAGE ABOVE), you would be looking at land that appears much the same as it did 800,000 years ago. While not exactly primordial, that time frame predates human occupation by 795,487 years. Graduate student Lee Corbett at the University of Vermont (and now Dartmouth) led a team of geologists in determining how old the surface was and why it remained so unchanged, although their trained eyes could immediately see that it was ancient: "Even before I dated these rocks, standing on the land surface, it was all crumbly and falling apart. The rocks are breaking off into sheets, and there are weathering pits on the surface. It's obviously a landscape that has experienced a much longer duration on the Earth's surface. It's a gorgeous landscape." In addition to reaching a date by means of counting isotopes, and determining that the land had been covered by ice and exposed at least 8 times, they figured out that the ice in the highlands did not melt and move and thus could not apply the erosive force that has scoured and shaped other landscapes. Hence the name "ghost glaciers."

 

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Vocal volcanoes

Popocatepetl (Puebla, Mexico), Tungurahua (Tungurahua, Ecuador), and Pavlof (Alaska, U.S.) are among the volcanoes currently erupting in the world. But it is Alaska's Mount Redoubt that has been studied to determine that some volcanoes "scream." Alicia Hotovec-Ellis, a doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, has reexamined an eruption sequence from March 2009 for clues to the volcano's pressurization right before it explodes. Some volcanoes emit sound when magma (comprised of molten rock, suspended solids, and gas bubbles) resonates as it is pushed up through cracks in the Earth's crust. The pressure often causes a series of small earthquakes that occur in such quick succession that they create a low-frequency signal called harmonic tremor, that resembles the sound of a musical instrument – if only we could hear it. Happily, Hotovec-Ellis - who theorizes that the magma in Mount Redoubt is moving through a single conduit inside the mountain because of its "ridiculously high frequencies" - allows us to do just that. In the first 10-second recording, she speeds up 10 minutes of seismic sound 60 times for our ears. In a second recording she condenses an hour of activity, which includes more than 1,600 small earthquakes, into a single minute. Listen to Mount Redoubt scream here.

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Ingesting the ice

I found out several years ago that it was typical of French-American naturalist John James Audubon to eat the specimens he drew, but I only learned recently that it is a long-standing tradition among scientists to sample what they study. The entomologists, of course, get the most press! But scientists who study ancient ice cores also taste their research subject. When they are in the field, the only source of fresh water might be the Antarctic glacier on which they are camped. But they are driven by more than just necessity. They use broken pieces in their drinks and they fizz as they melt because of compressed gas bubbles inside. And they have even been known to use the ice to hold their drinks: "I actually made drinking glasses out of 40,000-year-old ice by hollowing out the inside of a waste core, a byproduct of the sampling we did," says geoscientist Ed Brook of Oregon State University. Ancient ice is - on the whole - fresh and pure, having lost most of its impurities through pressure squeezing. But it is miniscule amounts of metals in it that give scientists like Paolo Gabrielli (pictured above in the cold storage facility at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center) clues about past environmental conditions. These trace and ultra-trace elements, carried to the ice mainly by dust, can include lead, mercury, and platinum. Other contaminants like lead and mercury can also be found in polar ice cores. But it is elements leached from the surrounding rock that gave 2.6 billion-year-old water its taste – and its discoverer did follow tradition and taste it! Earth scientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto critiques the ancient agua: "What jumps out at you first is the saltiness. Because of the reactions between the water and the rock, it is extremely salty. It is more viscous than tap water. It has the consistency of a very light maple syrup. It doesn't have color when it comes out, but as soon as it comes into contact with oxygen it turns an orangy color because the minerals in it begin to form - especially the iron....It tastes terrible. It is much saltier than seawater. You would definitely not want to drink this stuff."

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Petrified lightning

A few weeks ago, one of my aides Octavia told me that lightning hit the side of her apartment building, leaving a strange icicle-like somewhat crystalline formation on the ground reaching about knee-high. I reasoned that the lightning had fused the sand together, but by the time I thought to ask her to take a photograph, the maintenance man had hauled it away. And here I admit to another gaping gap in my paleontological and geological knowledge. When I was researching my post about Dodson's dodo, I saw on the link for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History that they are offering an exhibit of fulgurites, which they bill as split seconds of stormy weather captured in stone. The phenomenon has a name (from the Latin word for thunderbolt) and its fully documented! Lightning – which can reach 3,270 °F (1,800 °C) – melts the grains of sand and the resulting natural glass forms a hollow tube as it cools. The tube can be up to several centimeters in diameter and several meters long, extending into the ground as much as 15m (49'). A blogger who grew up in New Mexico, the "lightning capital of the United States," describes, "In an instant, no more than one second, the white-hot thunderbolt melts and fuses the sand around it and creates an object, a rock, a hardened mass of matter in the shape that the lightning took when it entered the earth. It makes a jagged, plaster-looking cast of itself. Granules of sand cling to these lightning rocks — geologists know them as fulgurite — giving them the appearance of a crusty, crystalline mass. On the outside, they’re not much to look at. The exterior is a mess. Gnarled and knobby....But on the inside, the part you can’t see, it’s pristine. Smooth. Sleek and polished. Molten glass solidified."

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Below

Bedrock beneath: Unlike the North Pole, which is situated on (rapidly disappearing) floating ice, the South Pole is located on a landmass. But until now, we have not been able to visualize in detail the surface of the continent of Antarctica. Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey have used satellite and surface data collected over decades to strip away the sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets to reveal the Antarctic topography (VIDEO HERE). Says team leader Peter Fretwell, "Before, we had a regional overview of the topography. But this new map, with its much higher resolution, shows the landscape itself, a complex landscape of mountains, hills and rolling plains, dissected by valleys, troughs and deep gorges."

Beneath bedrock: Almost 2 miles deep in a Canadian mine, at the level of what used to be the ocean floor, isotope geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues at the University of Toronto found the most ancient pocket of untouched water discovered to date. They used a device that measures levels of stable elements (hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen) and noble gases (helium, xenon, and krypton) to determine – knowing how long it takes for chemicals to react between rocks and water – how long the fluid had been trapped in the deep crust. As it turns out, the water predates the development of multi-cellular life on the planet. Lollar exclaims, "It was absolutely mind-blowing, These weren't tens of millions of years old like we might have expected, or even hundreds of millions of years old. They were billions of years old."

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