Why, yes, yes I am jazzed. Whyever do you ask??
Some stuff I hope to work in: Dust bunnies and the Crescent terrane (but briefly of course). The Cordilleran ice sheet and the SLU mammoth. Vomiting volcanoes and prodigious progradation. The Green, White and Black. The bright side of our PCB ppbs. Why this picture keeps me up at night:
It’s going to be so radical.
This looks like heavy sustained flood— almost Bretz-style. Look at how big the chunks are! Subangular! But thick.
Sam and I have a joke where I start shouting that before any trip over the mountains. I explained what it is to Levin and Rachel just this weekend as we drove I-90 over to Ephrata.
That’s a spectrogram of seismic activity near Hoodsport on the Olympic Peninsula from yesterday. Don’t worry too much about how to read it but do notice there’s a whole lot of shaking going down— hundreds of events in the last few days. Check out this great web gadget from the UW where you can plot realtime tremor data on a Google Maps API. I’ll write up a proper ETS post later this week.
You’ll almost certainly feel none of this shaking… unless the Cascadia Subduction Zone uses the minor oomph imparted from this long rumble to trigger the dread megathrust earthquake. But, hey, at least the Northwest will have had a pretty last few weeks of life.
I saw on CNN.com breaking news about a 7.3 in the Moro Gulf, off the Philippines. CNN said it was “616 kilometers (575 miles) deep,” so I headed to usgs.gov to see which number was wrong. Arrived to pre-CNN news that the 616 was right— for the second of two 7.4 events within half an hour of eachother. The first earthquake was 576 kilometers deep; both are way deeper than the shallow Pacific Northwest variety I’m more used to.
Pretty funny screwup for CNN.com but not for poor Mindanao. Beam positive juju— they got hit horrifically by a tsunami from the same seismogenic zone in 1976.
An ESA mission made a flyby of the largest asteroid yet visited by human spacecraft.
There’s some pretty cool pictures on the ESA website— but I wanted to show off something that caught even my sleepy eye. Check out these subparallel grooves from another set of Rosetta images:
It took some looking, but I eventually figured out where I’d seen those grooves before.
That’s Phobos— one of the moons of Mars. (It’s mostly visible light, if you’re wondering; some near-infrared as well). You can see those same sorts of grooves, which used to be blamed on Stickney Crater, which the big dimple near the bottom right— those are landslides on its crater rim! A 2006 paper mapped them to show the grooves fall into 12 general age groups and hypothesized they could represent scoring from regular deliveries of ejecta from impacts next door. But Lutetia is a wandering asteroid… what would score it with crater chains on a regular basis? The main belt is far too capricious a place to expect such precision. It’s not like the Empire Strikes Back in there.
Thumbs down for that. Thumbs up for a sunny afternoon outing here:
I added some other photos to the Picasa albums— including the start of a Science section. So far it mostly just consists of this photo from my multihour charcoal hunt the other day:
Can you spot the charcoal? It’s the shiny dark black ones— unless it’s hiding beneath a dirty rind.
It’s probably hiding beneath a dirty rind.
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