Where We Map

A while ago I had a brief conversation with (((Billy))) about mapping in the UK, where we rarely have exceptional exposure and where a lot of our mapping is carried out by playing a game of dot-to-dot, joining up sections across valleys, using boreholes and logs, and doing the old-fashioned things like measuring the dip and strike of the contacts and extrapolating them along the topography.


My mapping area was the Uldale Fells, in the northern Lake District. In theory, I had an astoundingly good area: a metamorphic aureole around a granite intrusion, the less metamorphosed rocks being Ordovician turbidites, and a bit of subaerial volcanics up in the north of the area, complete with contact metamorphism to greenschist facies.

In practice, I had this to map:


You might just be able to see the exposure in the stream sections...

If I was really lucky, I had exposure like this, at Roughton Gill mines:


The highest point in my mapping area (and indeed the whole of the Uldale Fells) was Knott, at 723m. I don't think that even counts as a hill in the USA, let alone a mountain. Latitude-wise, at about 55°N, the Lake District receives less sunlight than the southwest USA, and that and the sheer amount of rain the Lake District is subjected to each year (why do you think it's called the Lake District?) results in a heavily grass-covered, wet environment, which isn't particularly conducive to the exposure of the bedrock.

So what sort of detail can we get out of this sort of area? Tune in next time to see my maps themselves...

Foregone Conclusion?

What a shame. After all the hard work, the letters that have been written to the trustees and the signatures that have been added to the petition, the UW Geological Museum will be closing on Tuesday. There have been nearly 2,400 signatures as of this evening, from all over the world, but as ReBecca reported last week the museum will close to the general public, nevertheless.

So there's a shift of tactics now, to focus on a grassroots education and fundraising campaign. You can read all about it at Keep Laramie Dinos (and pssst - there's a handy "donate" button too...).

Sadly this won't by any means be the last geological casualty. If universities carry on squeezing there'll be nothing left. And it all feels so frustrating!

Science Is Fun!

I've been in town at UCL and Birkbeck all day. I've met with both supervisors, chatted to other students about techniques, visits, specimens and the like, and later I think I'll head to the map shop in the Natural History Museum and get myself a 1:50,000 geological map of the Cotswolds.

I'm feeling more motivated than I have in over five years to get on with my research, and am particularly spurred on by the thought that I could easily have something in review by this time next year. And of course, Cetiosauriscus was mentioned, and is back on track...

So with that in mind, I'll stop wittering on and go back to work. But I just thought you needed to know this.

Why We Need More Scientific Literacy #12

This sort of thing is what one might call a "voluntary tax on human stupidity".

Passengers asked to balance plane
Dozens of holidaymakers returning to Newcastle refused to fly after they were asked to act as human ballast.

Clearly, these 71 people did not have a basic knowledge of how a plane flies which, incidentally, is pre-GCSE level physics - everyone would have needed to know about balancing thrust and drag, lift and weight, by the age of 14 in the UK. There's even a whole section about it on HowStuffWorks in case you happened to be smoking a pack of Camel behind the bikesheds during that particular physics lesson.

Fortunately the pilot knew how a plane flies. And given that the pilot would know before anyone else whether they were all going to plummet into the North Sea and die horribly, you'd think the passengers would trust his assessment of the situation even if they didn't know that a balanced plane is safer than an unbalanced plane...


©Plognark
In any case, on a fairly empty flight it is standard procedure to redistribute the passengers. I would assume that the pilot "walked away" because his head hurt from all the Stupid that he was being exposed to. Good luck claiming back those replacement airline tickets, people. I bet the insurance doesn't have an "idiot" clause.

Good Teaching Resources

I'm trying to find good online resources in time for September, for teaching GCSE and AS/A2-level Biology. The search is going pretty well. And I just had to share this gem with you:


From Boardworks
I love it. Crosses for eyes, flat out on its back, tongue hanging out. It's the universal cartoon symbol for "dead"!

The Woman Who Looks Back At Me

This is a post for this month's Scientiae carnival, and the theme is "Mirror, Mirror, on the wall...".

The woman I see first thing each morning and last thing at night has three grey hairs in the centre of her hairline. I remember her anguish when the first one appeared on 24th December 2005. They stick out at funny angles, and resist all dyes. She should probably just suck it up and deal with the fact of life - even my little brother has grey hairs.

Her eyes change colour: blue, green, grey, depending on the lighting and her choice of make-up. I always think she is at her most beautiful when they are a vivid blue. Lately she has got some fine lines in the outer corner of her eyes. I can see them all the more clearly because the skin in the wrinkles is much paler than the rest of her face.


She's been on fieldwork or working outside a lot. I, and everyone I know, can always tell because her freckles appear all over her face. It makes her look younger, but maybe that's also down to her being happiest outside. I've seen her come so alive out in the field that I can barely keep up with her. Her own husband would probably not recognise her when she's up to her ears in rocks.

The woman looks older than her 29 years, and she doesn't laugh as much as she used to. Even when she's simply relaxed, she looks sad. Her eyes and mouth droop slightly at the outer corners, and her unnerving habit of always maintaining eye contact has been known to scare people. I sometimes dig out her old US driving licence, of her smiling, blonde-haired and vividly blue-eyed. Maybe it's the blue background of the photograph, but I chuckle wryly, and murmur "That's her before the lights went out".


She has tattoos now. They're scars she has chosen for herself, and she will tell anyone who will listen that she'd rather have any number of tattoos than a C-section or episiotomy scar. She has picked fossils, and shuns names of close family, saying "I'd never choose anything as transient as a human being". Sometimes I see her looking out of the window of a tattoo parlour with a wistful look on her face, and I know she'll be back for more.

We are worse than best friends with our criticism of each other. Sometimes when I catch her gaze she looks absolutely repulsed by my body. In turn, I spot every lump and bump (although I also notice that the bitch always looks pretty damn good in the bedroom - if only she would look as good in the shop windows as I walk past).


Occasionally she'll dress up for a night out, put on a really pretty top which shows off "The Girls", and some killer heels. She always gives me one last look, as though she needs my approval. She must think my opinion matters over anyone else's. She looks great when she leaves the house, but by the first photograph she seems to no longer fit her clothes, and I can hardly believe it's the same person looking out of the Facebook page at me.

But when she puts on combats, boots and a fleece jacket, ties her fringe back and slings on a cowboy hat, she loses five years and 10lbs, and becomes some kind of a superwoman.

Maybe it's just as well she's a palaeontologist.

Rock Filth

I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, trying to find my degree certificates. They are still eluding me, but I did finally find one of my favourite photos:


This is at the Lulworth Fossil Forest. Two algal mounds flanking a felled tree trunk. It never fails to amuse.

Happy 400th post to me, by the way. I felt this was a suitably high-intellect post to mark the occasion. Bet it gets more comments than all my serious posts...

Once Upon A Time In Keyworth

Twelve years ago, when I was a mere slip of a 17-year-old girl, I won a Nuffield bursary to spend the summer working at the British Geological Survey in Keyworth. I worked in what was at the time called the Regional Geophysics Group, digitising radiometric data from the 1957 airborne survey of Cornwall.


Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved.
I started at the most westerly section and made it as far east as St Ives in the four weeks I spent in the Group.


Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved.
I came up with a 10-page report, "Digitisation Of Analogue Airborne Radiometric Data From South-West Cornwall And Its Interpretation", submitted it in triplicate, got a gorgeous colour printout of my map and never saw any of it again. A year later, my data made it into the BGS technical report "Digitisation of the 1957 Airborne Radiometric Survey of Cornwall" (ISBN: B0018TNG3A).


Reproduced with the permission of the British Geological Survey ©NERC. All rights Reserved.
The colours are different on my plot and the plot for the whole of Cornwall - the latter was an equal area plot, which shows up nicely the increased radioactivity associated with uranium-bearing granite.

Last month I finally got a chance to visit the area, on my holiday. Despite participating in a field trip to southwest England as an undergraduate, we never went further west than The Lizard, so a week in St Ives was a great opportunity to see the rocks. Here is the granite that makes up the vast majority of the Lands End peninsula (with my pudgy little hand for scale):


You'll see that it's quite a pale granite, chock full of feldspars (about the size of each of my pudgy little fingers). It erodes to form some of the most beautiful quartz and feldspar beaches:


And of course, where you find granite, you find metamorphic rocks. These were on the private beach at Trebah Gardens:


I do wonder sometimes if anyone has ever set eyes on my report since 1997. I suspect not, which is good because there are few things more embarrassing than a 17-year-old trying to write in academic style.

It's very likely that, over the next year or so, I will have to go back up to the BGS at Keyworth to look at some of their boreholes from my new field area. It'll be great to look around again!

Accretionary Wedge!

This month's Accretionary Wedge carnival is up and good to go at Outside The Interzone. Lockwood has done an excellent job, and there are loads of great posts. It's fascinating to see the range of time periods the Geoblogosphere would like to visit collectively!

Back To The Jurassic

This month's Accretionary Wedge, the geology blog carnival, has the theme "Let's Do A Time Warp". The question Lockwood poses is:

Where and when would you most like to visit to witness and analyze an event in Earth's history?

I thought about going back in time to when I last submitted an Accretionary Wedge post, but thought I could probably go back a little bit further than that.

So it's all aboard the time machine, christened the "Professor Waxman" in honour of the first palaeontologist to attempt such a stunt. And I have a simple request. I don't want to go back to the big events of Earth's history. I don't want to see the Siberian Traps, or the Rockies being built. I certainly can't be bothered to go back to the K-P_g Boundary, because even if I had directly observed data there'd be some smartarse arguing with me about it.


From Mudge (1995)
I just want to go 40 miles or so up the M40 motorway, and back in time 165 million years to a normal day, a Tuesday afternoon if you like, in the Bathonian Age. Because I just got myself a field area, which currently (well, it will once harvest kicks in sometime in August) looks something like this:


This is a typical shot of the Cotswolds, a delightful chocolate-box area of the country, and (very importantly) home of Wychwood Brewery. Lovely as it is, however, I have one helluva task ahead of me, properly constraining the palaeoenvironment, probably becoming intimately acquainted with some well-hung ostracodes in the process, and one way or another trying to improve on this:


From Cope (1995)
Clearly first-hand observations of the area would speed things up a bit on the work front, and help me stand a chance of finishing this PhD before my 40th birthday.

So the first thing I'd do would be to whack on some SPF30, because everyone who works on British geology says "It was like the Caribbean", so there's a good opportunity to combine Serious Research with taking the edge off my Northern European pallour (fearsome predators permitting).


Now, the "Professor Waxman" would very much have to be theropod-proof, but at least I would hopefully spot a Megalosaurus coming over the tidal flats. More worrying might be the multi-species herd of sauropods trundling around at the time (Day et al 2002). I'd need to make sure I had a few spare batteries and memory cards for my camera, because I wouldn't want to miss preserving those photos!

What would I do while I was there? Assuming the "Professor Waxman" can also fly, I'd want to do a decent aerial survey of the region, mapping the coastlines in detail. I'd measure the difference between high tide and low tide - would it be easy for dinosaurs to get out to the offshore sandbars at low tide only to be stranded when the tide came in? Water and sediment samples would be obligatory, and I wouldn't be able to resist getting a few plant samples. Out with the ziplock baggies and the pruning knife, or even just the trowel. One sample for the lab, one sample for my garden...


By Doug Henderson from this website
I thought about obtaining DNA samples, to try to settle the BAD/BAND argument once and for all. Get a couple of carcasses and do a proper dissection, that sort of thing. But without a herculean amount of tranquiliser it would be downright dangerous to even attempt to get close to a dinosaur, herbivorous or not...


An instant later, both Professor Waxman and his time machine are obliterated, leaving the cold-blooded/warm-blooded dinosaur debate still unresolved.
Cope, J.C.W. 1995. Introduction to the British Jurassic. In: P.D. Taylor (ed). 1995. Field Geology of the British Jurassic. The Geological Society.
Day, J.J., P. Upchurch, D.B. Norman, A.S. Gale & H.P. Powell. 2002. Sauropod trackways, evolution and behavior. Science 296: p1659.
Mudge, D.C. 1995. The Middle Jurassic of the Cotswolds. In: P.D. Taylor (ed). 1995. Field Geology of the British Jurassic. The Geological Society.

Cool Organism Thursday #14

I shan't pretend that this is a regular revival of Cool Organism Thursdays, but I saw this last week when I went to get pizza, and thought this was pretty damn cool, especially as it was just crawling along the pavement in the middle of Isleworth.


This is the lesser stag beetle, Dorcus parallelipipedus, our second biggest insect. This one is about maximum size, 30mm, which is quite big enough, thank you very much.

Having said that, I did recently get to hold hissing cockroaches and emperor scorpions, so I guess I'm getting used to large arthropods.

OpenLab 2009

It's getting to that time of year again, when entries start to be collected for The Open Laboratory.


Nothing I did in 2007 was good enough to be accepted, and I didn't submit anything in 2008. But this year I'm feeling saucy. Maybe, just maybe, my writing has improved enough to get a piece published.

If you agree, please consider nominating one of my posts from this year (remembering, of course, that the year is but halfway through and I am sure I have a whole lot more to get angry about). There's a submission button on the left hand side of my blog, just under the footprints picture. Thank you.

Right, that's the begging out of the way. Normal science will be resumed shortly.

Angry Dazed Bird Of The Day

Last week I posted photos of an adult European robin (Erithacus rubecula) taken on holiday. Well, at the weekend I had the chance to see a juvenile up close and personal, as the silly bugger flew in through our back door and straight into our bedroom window, terrifying the hell out of Paul, whose writing desk is in the window bay.

I was alerted to this by the "Aaagh! Whoaa! Jesus! There's a bird!!" from the bedroom, and ran in to see what sort of bird we were dealing with. I shut the doors so it couldn't wreak havoc through the house and identified it as a juvenile robin, almost certainly one of the fledged babies from our robin family's first batch. These chaps are now independent of their parents, so I was happy enough to handle it without gloves.


Despite its furious look in the photo above, it wasn't that angry. I could feel its little heart pumping, and assume it was absolutely terrified, but it was very good and didn't whiz on my hands. Dr Brazen Hussy has been doing a series on angry birds - I can only assume this little sweetie was trying not to push its luck.


You can see the juveniles are very spotty indeed - from last year's observations I reckon they'll start getting their adult plumage in a couple of months tops. I took it out to the garden and released it into the hedge behind our apple tree, where it could sit and take stock (and no doubt wait for its headache to wear off). I suspect I learned some avian swearwords as it flew off twittering loudly.

Yup, at Jurassic Towers we let all sorts of animals in. Two years ago we had a neighbour's cat that liked to just amble in as we were cooking dinner. We could have shut the back door, but it's so nice to have a cool breeze circulating in the summer!

Save The UW Geological Museum

Here's a recent distressing development. The University of Wyoming is facing an $18.3 million budget cut. Of particular concern to the readers of this blog will be:

In total, 10 units will see employees terminated: [...] the geology museum will lose two...

Which means the director of the University of Wyoming Geological Museum, good friend Brent Breithaupt, and the secretary will both lose their jobs.

As ReBecca says, the museum's public outreach and research are top quality, and it would be a tragedy for this to be lost. Wyoming is one of my favourite states in the US, and I feel tremendously sad that it is facing cuts, but most devastating is the loss of the Geological Museum. It's in Laramie, as in the Laramide Orogeny - doesn't a site like this demand somewhere the geologically minded can go to find out about the area?

I am sure there are further plans in the works, and troops will be mobilised (metaphorically of course, although literally could be interesting...). In the meantime, however, you can sign this petition, repost it on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, everywhere you can. There are also some addresses for your correspondence listed. If anyone has any further tips, please post them. And any pertinent links will be gratefully accepted.

This is, sadly, one of the first casualties of the increasing global desire to restrict funding to only science that is deemed economically profitable. Science for the sake of increasing our knowledge of the world in which we live is clearly not a priority for any administration.

Sixty Five Years

Changing tack slightly, and on a personal note, today is the 65th anniversary of the Allied forces' landings in Normandy on D-Day. Some of you may know that I am incredibly proud of my paternal grandfather's involvement in D-Day, as part of the RAF's Mobile Radar Unit (his report was submitted by my father to the BBC People's War archives).

Not having Granddad's report bookmarked, I did a quick Google search, and was surprised but absolutely delighted to see it referenced on the World War 2 Talk forum, and absolutely flabbergasted to read that a forum member had met my grandparents on a tour of the D-Day beaches. I'm very much hoping that SteveP won't mind me posting one of his photos of my grandfather (centre, with Grandma on the right), on Omaha Beach, at his landing site:


There was some accompanying text from the scrapbook pages SteveP had put together:

This was Eric's 1st visit to Normandy since 1944. We visited Bayeux GWGC where Eric's friend is buried and he laid a wreath. Listening to Eric describing his experience standing on Omaha was very emotional. I was proud to take a picture for Eric and Moyna at the spot where he landed + lost his pal.

I am so grateful to SteveP for posting photos of the visit, and there were one or two tears as I looked through the other photos. One thing the other forum members mentioned was how few people (even veterans) were aware that there had been British servicemen at Omaha Beach, and even fewer people who knew of the RAF's involvement. I spent a lot of my childhood being told not to be so stupid, that there weren't any RAF personnel on D-Day and that I must have got it wrong because Omaha was the American beach, which is pretty hurtful to a child who has listened to the stories from her grandfather and father, but must be devastating to the men who were there.

Granddad died in 1990. His best friend died on the beach in 1944, right next to him, and many more lives were lost from 15082 GCI. So today I am particularly remembering the men in the RAF Mobile Radar Unit, and hoping that many more people will pay tribute to them and the key role they played in one of the biggest operations of the Second World War.

Dropping The Hot Potato

Once upon a time there was a Department of Education and Science. This worked pretty well for over 30 years, but one day they decided that they didn't fancy the Science bit so they passed it on to the Department of Trade and Industry and became the Department for Education. Then the Department for Education merged with the Department of Employment to become the Department for Education and Employment. Six years later they decided they didn't like the Employment bit much either, so gave it to the newly set up Department for Work and Pensions and rebranded themselves the Department for Education and Skills.

Then one day Gordon Brown became prime minister, and he decided to abolish the Department for Education and Skills, and instead split Education two ways between the new Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). He also made the Department of Trade and Industry into the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and decided that DIUS could bloody well have Science back.

Non-European readers may be unaware that we've had elections to elect MEPs, or Members of the European Parliament. Just before the elections (which were combined with a lot of local council elections in the UK), a lot of senior government ministers jumped ship, leaving Gordon Brown with a much larger Cabinet reshuffle than he'd obviously planned. Today is the first time since Barack Obama was elected that I have watched a streaming news channel, because there's rather a big movement afoot.

John Denham has been transferred to the Department for Communities and Local Government, but no successor has been announced. There have been rumours all morning on Twitter that DIUS (yup, still sounds like a contraceptive) is being abolished, with the Innovation going to the care of Sir Alan Sugar (yes folks, he's our Donald Trump...), Science going to BERR, and who knows where Universities are going (probably absorbed into DCSF).

So science policy will be decided by a load of businessmen. I've already said why I think that it would be bad to try to run science as a business, that it just is not possible to just fund "economically viable" research. The research councils will almost certainly be part of BERR too. The research councils are our equivalents of NSF (we have arts and humanities, economic and social sciences and medical research councils as well as four science research councils).

I'm awaiting the statement that will apparently be released this afternoon stating the full reshuffle, but in the meantime I am shitting bricks at the thought that the awful Lord Mandelson is going to be in charge of NERC funding. NERC supports, among other institutions, the British Geological Survey and British Antarctic Survey. We'll get no more penguin poo research with him running the show.

16:14: Dr Ian Gibson MP has resigned as an MP with immediate effect. Given his extensive experience with science on parliamentary committees, it's difficult not to read more into his resignation than is being divulged at the moment. Still waiting on a statement from the PM.

17:12: Shit. Yes, BERR and DIUS are to be merged to form the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS?). The whole sorry situation is up on the Downing Street website. As I feared, it's going to be all about economically viable science:

Continue to invest in the UK's world class science base and develop strategies for commercialising more of that science.

Some science just isn't open to commercialisation. And I have a horrible, sickening feeling that these topics are going to suffer badly in the next few years.

The Red Red Robin

There is a common misconception among my American friends that the ugly big native blackbird with the token bit of red on its throat is a robin. Any self-respecting British twitcher will scoff, say "That's just an ugly blackbird with a paint job" and direct you to a real robin (Erithacus rubecula):


Note the smallness, cuteness and redness. I accept we're not talking cardinal red (a bird that, every time I see it, causes me to say "Wow, that's really quite red"), but it's red nonetheless.


This one was hanging out at the Lost Gardens of Heligan a couple of weeks ago, and it was absolutely as bold as brass.

And if you've never heard the British Dawn Chorus, have a look at this video by my dear pater:


I've been chuckling about what the ranger said about bird song being all about sex. A few years ago, on the way home from university, Paul and I discussed how bird song comes down to one of three things:

1. Fancy a shag?
2. Get off my land!
3. There's a CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!

It would appear that we weren't far from the truth.

Silence Is The Enemy

I am one of the lucky ones. On the grand scheme of things, considering I lived in a society where one in three women are raped (I don't have UK references but I can't imagine they're too much lower), I did quite well to escape with "just" being sexually assaulted^[*]. But I know another American academic who wept when I told her why I was leaving my PhD programme, because she had done exactly the same after being raped on fieldwork by her advisor, and she saw just another generation of professors behaving the way her advisor had done ten years previously.

Women in the UK and US are used to being leered at by tradeys in their vans, cat-called at by builders, groped in pubs and bars and followed home at night. It's part of the daily grind. More women than the casual reader might think are used to highly inappropriate behaviour on the part of other students and faculty, and fieldwork has a whole set of perils that the average male academic will never have to worry about. And this is in White-Middle-Class-Ivory-Tower Land.

Yesterday, Sheril Kirshenbaum launched Silence Is The Enemy. Because what happens in White-Middle-Class-Ivory-Tower Land is extrapolated, enhanced and meted out on thousands if not millions of women and children all over the world on a daily basis. If this isn't okay with you (it certainly isn't okay with me), then there are a number of things you can do. The simplest thing is to click on the blogs who have pledged to donate their blogging revenue to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. I get no revenue from this blog, but these people get it on theirs:

• On Becoming A Domestic And Laboratory Goddess
• Aetiology
• Neurotopia
• Bioephemera
• The Questionable Authority
• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• DrugMonkey
• Blog Of The Moderate Left
• Seattle Grassroots Examiner

The next simplest thing is to donate money yourself, and/or to write your own blog post to highlight the campaign and keep the momentum going within the blogosphere. And if you can write a blog post you can write to your friendly government representative.

Which would all be a start.

^[*]I have become increasingly reluctant to talk about all of this. Unfortunately it is an essential part of my narrative, and ultimately less damaging than any fabrication I could come up with for failing to complete a PhD. What I overwhelmingly feel after talking about it is a sort of emotional uncleanliness, as I tell the story on autopilot while a voice inside my head screams at me to shut up. This is an occasion where I didn't need to say anything if I didn't want to. However, isn't it rather the point of the campaign, to stand up, say something that is uncomfortable to say, put some weight behind it and get others to do the same?