New York and Philadelphia

Shortly after my analytical trip to California I returned home and immediately left for the East Coast.  For our trip we visited Philadelphia, Long Island, and New York City.  Although there wasn't a major portioning of geology for our trip I did see some interesting things it was great to see some of the landforms and features of the Eastern US.

In Philadelphia, we visited all of the typical tourist spots of American History: the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, the US Mint.  We also walked around a great deal, soaking in the city and resting in the parks of the city, most placed in large squares about a square block in area.  I saw a fair amount of schist and gneiss in the walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, the famous prison of Pennsylvania.  The walls sparkled with micas but were otherwise drab metamorphic rocks with regular foliation.

On Long Island we visited the beach, where I was surprised to see the local park service people were working to protect sand dunes.  In New York City, I was glad to visit Central Park which was very near our hotel.  It was fascinating to see evidence of glacial activity preserved in the middle of a city.  I had never had a chance to actually feel the striations of glacial movement, so it was a real treat.

We also visited the American Museum of Natural History, where I took enough pictures just of the paleontological to run through my camera's battery.  I was really pleased to see how well done their general geology section was, and their sampled deep sea chimneys from the Juan de Fuca Ridge were fascinating.

 
We took so long walking through the museum that we had the gem and mineral section close on us just 15 minutes after we walked in, but that just means I will have to come back and give it the attention it deserves!

Colorado Plateau Trip (South-East Rim of the Grand Canyon)

We awoke in Bonito Campground to frost on our tents and a cold breeze blowing off the nearby mountains.  I had forgotten to check with someone who had a copy of the schedule of duties for our trip and had slept in, unknowingly neglecting my group's turn to prepare breakfast.  After everyone had their fill of oatmeal and bagels, we made up for our mistake by doing the dishes and cleaning up instead of the scheduled group.

We headed out and stopped to take another picture of San Francisco Mountain and then began our drive to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at Desert View.  It was a relatively short drive (83 miles) and although we saw a few minor canyons on our approach, it was relatively plain scenery with a slight climb in elevation as we approached the Grand Canyon.

We parked in the huge lot for the Desert View visitor center and walked to the observation point.  Speaking personally, every time I see the canyon for the first time, it takes my breath away.  Its size is just staggering, and its colors are so varied that it seems more like a work of art than layered strata.

I found myself frustrated by the hazy conditions of the canyon that day because, due to the winds of the moving cold front that just seemed to follow us, dust was picked up in the turbulent conditions.  Still, it was sunny and warm enough to truly enjoy the magnitude of erosion and time that lay before us.

Our guide and teacher Dr. L discussed the roughly 1° dip of the Kaibab limestone (shown in the photo, possibly exaggerated due to my poor photographic skills).    He pointed out for us where strata pinched out and where new layers of rock appeared as you looked further down the canyon to the West, and reminded us that the river once flowed North-East (shown by reversed dendritic features of the Colorado outside of the Grand Canyon in the picture below).  We had a view of John Hance's old asbestos mine.  My peers presented posters on the the general canyon and on caves and waterfalls within the Grand Canyon, especially in the Muav and Redwall limestones.

No comprehensive trip to the Colorado Pleatau could ever be said to be complete without visiting the Grand Canyon, and although I'd been there once before it was still as amazing to see it at another visitor center.  This visitor's center was really interesting because it had a watchtower which, although under construction, an amazing view 70 feet above the ground.

Geochemistry trip to UCSC and UC Davis

Over the summer I will be working for Dr. R as a sort of undergraduate lab assistant, and my first proper stretch of work for him was traveling for a week through California to run samples on ICP-MS machines.  It was an enlightening, if exhausting experience and I feel really privileged to have been taken along.

We began our trip by heading out on  23rd and drove most of the day.  We stayed at a motel about three hours out and got up early to head the rest of the way to Santa Cruz.  From there we met most of the people who work at the University of California at Santa Cruz W.M. Keck Isotope Lab.  We performed some quick chemistry to prepare our samples while the lab tech prepared the Neptune we used and when everything was ready we began to run samples' Thorium.

The standard we were using (Thorium A) was producing very consistent ratios, implying that our samples were being analyzed precisely as well, so with such reliable stability we decided to run until the machine couldn't keep up the consistent results.  We continued to analyze samples throughout the night and the next day until late that night, reluctantly shutting down the Neptune after such a good session.  It was both a privilege and a chore to personally run the machine for a good stretch of that time, but it will have been good practice if Dr. R's proposal to get a similar machine goes through.

The next day we had to wait three hours to successfully restart the plasma torch on the Neptune.  It kept arcing and blowing out when we added Argon or Nitrogen gas to the system during the usual start up procedures.  The tech finally got it started and finished up our Th samples that night and had a late dinner before driving to just outside of Davis.

The next morning we headed in and got our first look at the UC Davis campus.  I was very impressed by how large and modern it seemed.  All of the buildings seemed very new and the (ICP)² lab there was shocking.  They had two ICP machines (a Neptune "Plus" and an Element) as well as a no doubt expensive air shower to presumably keep the room clean.  The machines seemed well maintained and much newer than the ones at UCSC, and we were ready to begin running our samples in no time.

Here we were running Lead isotopes, so the procedure was slightly different on this machine, but what really shook things up was the auto-sampler on the Neptune Plus.  The auto-sampler seems like a good idea, but the calibration on the aiming of the sampler to place a tube into our sampler to analyze it did not work very consistently.  We had to babysit the auto sampler most of the time, but beyond that our analyses went very smoothly for Pb.  My only other complaint about our experience at the lab was their clean room was temporarily in the engineering building across campus and since it was there we had to wear bunny suits to protect the nano-engineering clean room next door.

After two good days of Pb analyses, we tried to analyze some samples for Uranium isotopes that we had brought along in case we got ahead of schedule.  The software that ran the Neptune was acting up however, producing odd levels of certain isotopes, despite a careful tuning and peak-centering procedure.  With nothing left to run, and the Uranium samples out of the question we left early and drove straight from Davis to Las Cruces in one long drive.

Along that drive we went a little out of our way to pass through Owens Valley.  Long Valley Caldera is in this valley, and we stopped for a short hike to Obsidian Dome. 

It was my first time in the area and after hearing so much about Long Valley (as a caldera produced by a super volcano like Valles Caldera here in New Mexico) and Owens Valley itself as a field area, it was nice to see everything for myself.  It was also nice to get some fresh air and see some geology beyond analytical work.  Overall, it was a great week of getting to know Dr. R a bit better and the incredible opportunity to get some hands on experience with an ICP-MS as an undergraduate.

Colorado Plateau Trip (Sunset Crater)

Reading all of the current anniversary posts on Mount St. Helens in the geoblogosphere has reminded me that I should write about my trip throughout parts of the Colorado Plateau.  The trip lasted for nine days (May 9-17) and focused mainly on Utah.  Our guide for the trip and the teacher of our Geology of the Colorado Plateau class was Dr. L, he was insistent that our trip was merely a "sampling" of the geologic area and after spending eight days in the region I think I now understand what he meant.

We began our trip with a 7 AM departure time, agreeing beforehand that we would stick to "New Mexico" (Mountain) time throughout the trip to avoid confusion when traveling through Arizona.  We drove solidly through New Mexico, stopping only in Gallup for lunch before continuing on to our first national monument.  Throughout the drive it was interesting to note that the graduate students who made up the majority of our car were fascinated by the young, scattered volcanic features of Central and Western New Mexico.  They were thrilled by a paleovalley that had been filled by a basaltic flow and the cinder cones along the roads we took were often pointed out, even from a distance.  It was an enlightening experience to see how spoiled the Southwest (and New Mexico in particular) had spoiled me for dynamic geologic histories compared to the graduate students in our company.

We drove onward until arriving at Sunset Crater National Park.  Here we saw our first and last exclusively igneous parts of the trip.  Sunset Crater is a young cinder cone just north of Flagstaff.  It is 340 meters (1,120 ft.) tall, and erupted between 1080 and 1150 AD according to paleomagnetic data.

I found this cinder cone interesting mainly for how colorful it is (due to the young scoria deposits that cloak the cinder cone) and the impact it had on indigenous life in the area.  It appears that the 2100 km² of ash that blanketed the area forced out the native people known as the Sinagua Indians.

The educational and cultural aspects I gained most from this park were more small and personal than the cinder cone and the volcanic field that produced it however.  While walking the short trail at the foot of Sunset Crater I learned about a fascinating feature of volcanic fields: hornitos.

Apparently, these small openings are eruptions within eruptions and are produced by upwelling within lava tubes.  What is significant about hornitos at Sunset Crater is that the natives who evacuated the area apparently placed corn and presumably other goods within the hornitos as a ritualistic gesture, and some of the impressions from the sacrifices were preserved in the lava and are on display at the visitor's center.

Beyond that, this young volcanic field (the San Francisco Volcanic Field) held another treasure.  San Francisco Mountain, an eroded stratovolcano, was within view of the park and is believed to represent an analog to Mount St. Helens, due to its significantly eroded, asymmetrical body.

We camped that night on cinders, within sight of Sunset Crater at a place called Bonito Campground.  A cold front moved in late that night, raining and hailing on us in between strong gusts of wind.  Not a very auspicious first night, but it certainly wasn't the worst we saw on the trip...

Finals Week

So ironically enough, finals week has always been a time of relative relief for me.  Projects are turned in and all that is left is studying and hoping I can wake up early and still function enough to take an exam.  This will hopefully mean that I will be writing a bit more often than usual up to the 9th when my Colorado Plateau class departs for our field trip.  It really is a relief to have the poster for the class done.  I ended up covering the Late Cretaceous rocks on the Kaiparowits Plateau, and I found enough figures and sources to be both proud of the poster and know enough of what I'm talking about to not sound like a complete fool (knock on wood).

I made it through my entomology final easily enough, taking an indulgent half-hour to double check my work before heading out.  My peers seemed to care less than me, some heading out significantly earlier than I could believe possible.  Maybe they just finished enough of the test and had better things to do.

My chemistry final was another story.  I can't determine if it was the 8 AM time slot or if I just didn't study enough, but the final was significantly harder than it should have been (and would have been any other time).  I was terribly embarrassed when my professor joked after I turned my exam that some of the class wouldn't know how acid affects carbonate and I had to admit that I wrote on the test the carbonate became carbonic acid rather than obviously effervescing to CO2 and water.  Still, I am confident I did well enough on the exam and time will tell where I stand in that class.

Speaking of chemistry, I finally got to apply for the summer job as Dr. R's laboratory assistant and hopefully I'll be officially employed before the end of the semester.  I have to admit I am a little nervous about my mineralogical knowledge being strong enough to pick out grains from the samples I will be testing, but more than that I just don't want to break any of the expensive equipment I will be working with all summer.  Still, the job really is ideal and although I am a little sad to have to stay behind in Las Cruces over the summer when everyone else is returning to their homes, I will learn a lot and be earning some money while I am at it.


Money will be less of an issue than I expected this semester, since I was awarded a significant scholarship tonight at our department's awards ceremony.  I'm elated and slightly uncomfortable by the award, since it is so large and it is given to students who work while in school.  While my potential job for Dr. R certainly counts, I know a lot of other more than deserving peers I was selected from.  It is hard to avoid sounding snobbish complaining about an embarrassment of riches like this, but accepting any form of praise has always been difficult for me (monetary or otherwise).

I hate to publish a post without any pictures, but I am much too tired to really continue writing any more and I can't seem to think of anything appropriate to accompany everything I've written today.  Maybe I'll edit in some photos later if something comes to mind.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to fall asleep after reading a bit from The Map that Changed the World.

Open magma systems and a Mothra on top

So for the past few days I have been diligently working on my Geochemistry paper and on my Entomology independent project.  It has been very slow going on both beyond initial framework setup for the writing.  I usually don't have as much trouble as I have when writing, and the problems I have had are entirely new to me.

For my geochemistry paper, I have had to worry for the first time in a long time about: plagiarism.  See, with the crystal samples given to us by Dr. R I have no idea what the locality they were taken from was like at all.  I've certainly been to Valles Caldera enough times, but never have I taken any samples of my own from the caldera's formations, and with his published papers he has given us to use as reference, it's had to say anything without having to paraphrase and cannibalize heavily from his writing.  My interpretations are entirely my own but everything from the background and methodology to the major sources I am citing are all heavily borrowed from Dr. R's papers.

The ten grains we successfully analyzed match Dr. R's conclusions that the 1.61 Ma Otowi Member we are studying originated from an open magma system.  The difficulty for me now is how to balance respect for my teacher's publications with further reading I've done and my general ignorance of the member beyond its geographical location.  Dr. R suggested in the papers he gave us that "sweated" wall rock was principally responsible for the open system dynamics we seem to see, but I've come across a few other papers suggesting that an injection of magma spurred the eruption and contributed to the variance we see in rubidium-strontium isotope ratios to suggest an open system to us.  Now I have to pull all of it together into a draft Dr R is willing to buy into, and still not see enough of his own papers to blow a whistle on the derivative writing I currently have.

Meanwhile, my entomology project is significantly less demanding and although I realized I ought to start writing 9 days before the due date (April 23), I have more than half of it already done.  I've drawn and written three quick comics (he asked for strips but I don't know what to make of that), a movie review of Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) and four website reviews (just a paragraph each).  The website reviews were surprisingly fun, and I got to talk about the Prehistoric Planet Store and the USDA Insect Sound Reference Library.  Mainly though, any excuse to watch a Godzilla movie and get points on an assignment for it is ideal.

The next project I'll have to undertake is my Colorado Plateau poster.  I still haven't settled on what I would like to write on.  Part of me wants to deal with the boundary of the Interior Seaway and the Sevier Orogenic Belt.  The other part of me wants to go nuts with the inter-fingering of the Mancos Shale and the Drip Tank Member, which are really impressive just due to the dynamics of the shoreline of the Great Interior Seaway.  I'm not sure what I'll do, but I ought to choose quickly.  I just don't want to fall into the trap of using my professor's publications for this assignment as well, though Dr. L has some really interesting papers dealing specifically with the Cretaceous...

Overall, not a lot is going on in my life besides writing and getting ready for finals when the time comes.  These papers and projects are a huge part of my grade though (equivalent to a full exam in Entomology) so I really want to get them done and done right.  Meanwhile the weather just gets better and better here and I'm stuck inside typing away when every instinct worth listening to in me wants to head outside and take a literal breather.  Life goes on, and I'll definitely have the summer so things could be better but I'm doing really well as my second year nears to its conclusion and I'm really proud of that.

Photo Credit
Ron Blakey, Northern Arizona University Geology. "Paleogeographic map of the Late Cretaceous (75 Ma)". Link

The laser tags me back for my neglect

So it's been a long stretch of time again since I've posted anything, and with the uneventful spring break I had there really isn't much excuse why I didn't jot something down with everything that has been happening.

School has been pretty time consuming lately, and with a sudden urgency to write papers coming due before the end of the school year I will be doing a lot more writing on my Geochemistry project, Colorado Plateau poster, and some Entomology papers for my elective class than any recreation writing.  I have a lot of anxiety right now about all that writing simply because I haven't started on any of it, but I hope to remedy that by the weekend.

I've been really happy to be learning about the (TIMS) mass spectrometer and the chemistry that goes with it.  I'm reluctant to be such an easy catch for Dr. R, but geochemistry has really caught my attention this semester and if I work for him this summer I will probably get even more into his type of work.  Next semester should be a good time to test how much I really enjoy it though, when I'm taking more sedimentary based classes.

My schedule for next semester is essentially complete after today.  I have GEOL 399 Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology, GEOL 420 Stratigraphy and Sedimentology, GEOL 465 Isotope "Geoghemistry", GEOL Structural Geology, and GEOG 381 Cartography and GIS.  This will be the heaviest 15 credits I have ever seen assembled together, but I certainly won't be working next semester so I feel that I persevere.  It feels odd to have all of my general education credits nearly covered as this semester comes to a close.  My only non-departmental elective I haven't covered is an engineering or programming course, but the GIS course could be covered under the new catalog if my sources are right...

Thursday was an unusual day considering the past month.  I had been severely neglecting my LIBS work by doing Geochemistry work and today I finally got back to my LIBS data.  I hadn't realized that I had 12 data sets just waiting to be analyzed so it was long overdue to sit down with Dr. M and run the Unscrambler software to analyze my spectra.  Running those 2100 shots with 13701 spectra each took a long time though, and so I was at school from 8:50 to 6 with only one two hour class to go to, and I was sad to miss out on the laser tag event the school was hosting that night.  I guess when you trade up in laser class it's hard to go back to the simpler tools of learning you had as a child.

I have had some very good times lately though, and I have to say this is a very happy time in my life right now.  Coming off of spring break after visiting with a lot my good friends back at home and taking it relatively easy in the shadow of midterms, I can't complain.   I may have two midterms next week already and due dates on papers quickly approaching but this may be the golden semester compared to what in my future classes.  All I know is that tomorrow will be a relief from today's nonsense, and over the weekend I am going to make some serious dents in those papers!

Photo Credit
Cornell Geology Department Facilities. "Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer"

The Sydney Traveler. "Code Red" (for Code Red Leisure Centre)

Midterms and Molarities

So this week has been a little more busy than typical, due to a combination of several midterms this week and coming down with a quick cold (or some similar illness).  However, with midterms comes the great relief one feels at the end of an important exam.  Every day this week has felt like a Friday, partly because of the improved weather and partly because each test finished and school day completed brings me closer to Spring Break.

This week has also been exciting because a group of my peers and I in Geochemistry have been diligently working on preparing the crystals our teacher wants us to analyze.  Our teacher is an isotope specialist, who focuses a lot on the element Strontium, and works mainly with igneous rocks.  Subsequently we are going to run the entire digestion, column chemistry, and mass spectrometry work on crystals from Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains.

This caldera was the result of a small super-eruptive volcano, and there are calderas below the Valles (the Toledo Caldera being the main example).  I've been all around the area many times both camping and hiking, but have somehow never read anything about the geology of the area beyond the eruptions that caused the caldera systems.  It'll be interesting to learn about this place in a new light.

This geochemistry work however has shown me two very important things about myself.  I, unlike my geochemistry instructor Dr. R, am a very shaky person when it comes to handling fine instruments like micropipettes.  I have also found that I have a more than healthy respect for hydrofluoric acid and have been extremely relieved to have made it through our digestions without burning myself with any of it.  I did have the thumb of my glove disappear and I definitely burnt myself with something in the clean lab, but it was really very minor considering the concentrations of the acids we use to break down these crystals.

The irony of all this exciting work is that Dr. R had been putting it off for some time hoping to photograph the crystals with a special computer he ordered and had been waiting for.  Since we started this week, his computer naturally came today after we've dissolved them and have since started to prepare them for column chemistry to get the Sr out.

I feel truly privileged to have to opportunity to get the clean lab and analytical experience this Geochemistry project will offer.  It has really made me appreciate just how difficult preparing and analyzing rocks is on the chemical side of Geology.  I'd always known that it took thousands of man-hours to make geologic maps, measure sections of an area, and the like but I never knew putting samples through a mass spectrometer would be so involved.  I only hope that I don't mess up any of our samples, and that we can finish our runs before the write up for the class is due...

Photo Credit
Allan H. Treiman and Lunar and Planetary Institute. "Redondo Panorama 2 (Annotated)"

Paradox Basin lives up to its name for me

So, as promised I have the figure of the evaporite deposits in Paradox Basin, UT.  I've been really fascinated by these well logs, trying to figure out what sort of settings they must have formed in.  Since the key is difficult to read: green is halite, maroon red represents potash, and the gray is a gray shale.



As you can see the pattern of deposition is always shale during stages of furthest transgression, followed by evaporite rock forming until the last of the potash dried.  Glaciation is believed to have subsided from time to time and the basin or salt flat would have recharged.  My main issue with this stratigraphy, given the near certainty that recharge must have occurred, is that the highly soluble potash top layer should have by all accounts been dissolved when the area was recharged. We also see slight layers of halite before any shale is put down which would have capped the potash and kept it in place.  If the recharge really did come from glacial melting, why does this recharge water not pick up the evaporites faster than it caps them with shale?

From the 28 cycles of halite we see in the sequence, our class determined that the rate of deposition for the evaporite and shale layers averaged around 0.1 mm/year (well within believable bounds considering modern deposition rates).  The glacial cycles also match historic trends well (not our current outlier, but previous cycles of ice ages) so the resurgence of glacial water was a dependable factor.

The deep valley/basin model some suspect formed the deposits would have provided (in my mind) enough water to dissolve the evaporites without having a deep enough water column to worry about temperature preventing uptake of evaporite sediment.  A salt pan model seems like a better candidate to me, but even that seems unlikely given the extant of the evaporite deposits, which can be pretty sizable.

I was already excited to see some of the salt tectonics of Paradox Basin in person when our class goes to visit the Colorado Plateau this summer. Now, after our teacher has introduced some features that could have placed that salt, I'm more interested to learn about current theories of what was happening in that part of the world that we now have these wonderful deposits of salt to consider.  It also makes me wonder what other curious oddities nature has hidden in remote locations of our planet, waiting to puzzle us and earn a namesake to remind us that not so long ago we thought we had most of the basics down...

Photo Credit
Hite and Liming. "Pennsylvanian Stratigraphy of Paradox Basin"

The month of waiting around...

Well it has been quite a while since I've written here, but I have excuses!  Mostly I was waiting for my professor to put up an image from a slide he had in class so I could talk about the salt and potash deposits in the Paradox Basin.  My Colorado Plateau class had a great discussion on the Pennsylvanian salt deposits in that famous basin system, and I really wanted to have the stratigraphic representation of well logs he put up before I began talking about anything relating to the basin.

I've also been waiting for insurance people to settle the totaling of my '99 Chevy Lumina, which was hit by a drunk driver on Superbowl Sunday (February 7th).  It was a long and anxiety inducing process, but I finally had it towed away sometime today while I was at school and we settled on the money it was worth last Friday.

Now I have been looking at vehicles, mostly jeeps and small four wheel drive capable cars, so that I can get for around the compensation money the totaling gave us.  This has left me spending a lot of time researching potential replacement vehicles and biking to and from classes at the university.  The half mile ride isn't too long or cold to need a vehicle, but the entire campus is placed on a hill and it seems all the more steep for my lack of motorized transport.

These things aside, my life has been pretty ideal.  I have done very well on my first round of exams, especially in Geochemistry, Entomology, and regular Chem. The weather here in Las Cruces just keeps improving, with temperatures almost reaching short-weather highs.  Almost.

The main academic concern I have right now is with my LIBS oil research.  I have seven oils analyzed with at least 140 samplings for each.  Enough, I feel, to begin using the analytical software my adviser has to examine what our LIBS data can be used to investigate.  At the moment the primary concern is still looking at reservoir rock traces in the oils to show how LIBS analysis could be used as a first notification of changing conditions in oil samples.   If the LIBS data will be useful for those ends will be interesting to see.  The technology has always been introduced to me as "quick and dirty" and I have had enough oil on my hands to believe it.

Graduating to three dimensions

Looking back at my academic career an interesting thing occurs to me: my teachers were always holding out on us with the third dimension.

Before I began learning the beautiful things calculus can represent and model, the only time I recall using the third dimension in any work I did was for measuring simple volumes (of spheres, cones, cubes, etc).  My entire world seemed to be made of algebraic curves and trigonometric triangles.  When someone traveled on an airplane for example, I made a line or curve across a flat map to track their progress.  Molecules had simple lewis dot structures to show their orientation and that was that.

As I learn about the true mechanics of waves, moving bodies beyond simple particles, and molecular arrangements due to certain bonding schemes I realize the main difference between college level and high school level learning seems to be paying attention to a third dimension.  Towards the end of my high school career I had some advanced classes in physics and some calculus that introduced concepts that consider the third dimension, namely the right hand rule for cross products (not that we were told that was what was going on) and to find where those volume formulas of yore were derived from.

I remember the right hand rule enraged me when my teacher explained that was how all the electromagnetic forces we would be considering were handled.  Why should I have to contort my hand and then align it with the forces explained in a problem?  Surely there must be an easier way?! 

There was were vectors.  I think our teachers teased us with our early introductions to vectors.  Planting the seeds of a third dimension then and there, possibly testing our potential for higher learning with those first rudimentary lessons that never seemed to go anywhere but was still "in the curriculum".  I must have passed those quiet tests, those subtle moments that lay my entire intellectual merit bare for inspection. 

I have had a lot of instructors put their faith in me as a competent student based on a prior teacher's recommendations.  I can't say with any confidence if I deserved that trust and opportunity, but here I am in college coming to terms with everything they didn't teach me.  However, I am also coming to realize how they still laid the groundwork for later education, whether I was going to make it here or not.  Now I understand why graduation felt like a hollow ceremony compared to my entry into calculus: I had been weighed and measured long before that decorated day.

The Jung and the Restless

This semester, I have a considerable number of blocks of time in between classes where I have to find something to do, but it isn't worth heading back to my apartment or start doing research work.  Lately I've been spending the majority of that free time walking the shelves of the main library on campus.

Zuhl library is an interesting place for a number of reasons.  First, it is purely a literary repository with Branson library containing the public documents, maps, and other great caches of scientific works.  Secondly it has a huge collection of petrified wood donated from its namesake: Herb Zuhl.  Thirdly, it has the most accommodating seating and lighting to read and lounge away free time.  With the weather warming up, most of the people squatting in the libraries for the warmth are also clearing out, so it has become a great place to haunt.

So, for the past three or four months I have had a terrible time committing to a book.  I've browsed and surveyed over a half dozen books, but haven't settled on anything since I finished Khalil Gibran's The Prophet.  I tried reading John Wesley Powell's account of his trip down the Colorado River, read a bit of a fictional story of a sleepwalking bookie with a family curse, and a few other odd books just picked at random from the shelves to fill my time.

After nearly a week of this fruitless searching, I think I've settled on reading through the Carl Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious.  I had actually begun to consider reading his works a long while back, but repeatedly found the compilation-style volumes usually offered in bookstores to be uncouth and frustrating. Now that I have a large library at my disposal I can find more well portioned works of his.  As much as his ideas are referenced in psychology, music, and countless other places I have yet to come across any non-psychology/philosophy major who has read any of his vast writings.

As much as the cliche of self-discovery in college is touted, separation from parental influence is the main reason I've seen people change.  People pick up new music tastes, new friends, start smoking or drinking things, but only minor worldview changes occur.  My own personality and opinions have been rather static for a long while now, at least from the start of high school.  As nice is it is to offer a reliable element to my friends' lives I've felt stunted and unsatisfied.  I'm hoping if I start looking towards my subconscious, I'll overcome most of the neurosis in my life.

As happy as I've been with my classes and social intimacy, I haven't been at peace with my life.  There's not much to complain about with my lot, but I do find myself wanting.  My school work keeps me pleasantly occupied and learning, and my friends and family are more distant than I'd like but I know they are there for me.  That just leaves myself to work on, and I hope that the promising ideas I've come across from Jung will help fill my free time and the personal vacuum I've felt in my life.

Sit and nod

As I progress through my undergraduate experience, I've realized a somber truth: many of my peers are either too fearful to discuss concepts, or (more frighteningly) they are generally too inept to follow the instructional process most teachers use.  I was raised and instructed to believe that "there is no such thing as a stupid question" and "if you don't understand speak up" were cardinal rules in education.  Now that I am paying beyond three figures for my education, I intend to make that money count for something beyond credits to earn a degree.

I feel badly for the teachers who have to deal with the indifference and mild entitlement I've seen.  I can't speak towards whether this is a generational phenomenon or if modern higher education has always been plagued thusly, but as I get deeper into college I wonder why so many classes are presented as informative entertainment.  My entomology class is entertaining, but when more than half of a lecture there is spent with the professor playing a BBC documentary series on insects, I wonder if he enjoys instructing this course.  As smart as some BBC documentaries are, or comparative productions from the Discovery channel, can anyone really believe this is really at COLLEGE level instruction?

The teachers I do know well enough to ask how they treat introductory level courses, where the worst level of indifference occurs, usually have ambivalent takes on their situation.  They view their basic courses as a chance to introduce new concepts to students they would otherwise would miss out on and inform their pupils enough to have a conversation in the subject they are attending.  These professors also tend to tell me that they feel most of their lectures fall on deaf ears, with students reading powerpoint slides online before an exam and pass with a "gentleman's C".  Looking back on how tedious retaking calculus classes was in my freshmen year, I wonder how a professor can teach three introductory level courses each semester, year after year.  The word steadfast comes to mind...

 

This whole rant started when I noticed peers afraid to speak up in class, so that's where I'll return to.  Geochemistry is currently my favorite class, in part because Dr. R will call on students and seek an answer from them until he is satisfied.  In there, the silence is often deafening and everyone seems to squirm and feel uncomfortable about being picked out (myself included).  I feel like this keeps me honest in a way that no other course I have this semester lets me get away with, and so when I sit though another class where only a single teacher's pet type is chiming in regularly this makes me self conscious of my own commentary but also baffles me why nobody else seems to care.  It's a catch-22 and its cause is contagious, so I tend to grow partially antisocial in my classes as a result.

I don't think I will ever understand why some people are as cripplingly shy as they are but, in my mind, when the majority of a classroom is silent because nobody wants to answer a non-rhetorical question only the two causes I mentioned earlier could be responsible.  I'm at college to learn and I expect some my peers are just here for the ride and others are figuring out why they're here, but it worries me that so many are spending so much of their parents or their own hard earned money to be mediocre and mute in class.  I know the value of an education and the loving investments my family has put forward for me to be here, and I intend to make them proud.

Photo Credit
Seevas. "The first lecture of biochemistry xD". http://www.flickr.com/photos/seevas/2924350054/

Elemental substitution

So with no Optical Mineralogy classes to attend this week, I've been a little starved for new and exciting geologic material. With the disappointing hour short lecture in my Colorado Plateau class (on the Cambrian and Devonian transgressions of the sea on Rodinia), I was left with my only other geology class: Geochemistry.

While the class originally struck me as too much chemistry in one semester (I am taking the second semester of "scientist level" intro chemistry) I've recently grown to reconsider. In mineralogy, solid solution series' and coupled substitutions were the bane of my formulae memorization but were also fascinating to me. In geochemistry, I am spared most of that former pain and can now learn beyond the balancing of charges and comparing ionic radii to what it really means to have have cations interchangeable in a mineral's composition.

A similar pleasure came from Dr. R's explanation of chemical systems typically "treating" different isotopes of an element identically, and yet sometimes preferentially depending on weight, energy levels, and other factors. It made me wonder why in all of the years of general, chemical, and physical science I had never been taught anything beyond radioisotopes. Granted radioactive atoms are vastly more important for current uses in geology, yet here all isotopes are presented in a whole new light.

In the midst of an uneventful week for me (who cares about Groundhog Day after elementary school?) it was nice to have a moment of novelty from what seemed a dry well. I've been learning a lot of new concepts and details in my classes but this isotope surprise has really cheered me. Six more weeks of winter, even in relatively toasty Las Cruces however...

Photo Credit
Aram Dulyan. "Olivine (peridot)". Natural History Museum, London.

Keys in hand

So after writing last night about my expectations for the LIBS lab research I was to do today, something interesting happened. Right after Geochemistry, I headed to ask for keys and my adviser and Dr. M must have become tired of the requests because she asked Lee to sign out some keys to me. I can now work just about whenever I want on my research!

The downside of this moment was that Dr. M reminded me that we wouldn't be having Optical Mineralogy on Monday or Wednesday. I think despite the early (to me) lecture time of 9:30 AM, I'm going to be sad to miss out on that class as my first of the day. It will be nice to sleep in though, depending on the way the weekend turns out.

Right now though, I am trying to occupy myself on my now empty Thursday afternoon. With the slow, cold rain coming down my options are limited to indoor activities. I think I'll bone up on my Geology fundamentals by finally reading my intro Geology book. I can't tell if it's the weather or just finding out that J.D. Salinger died yesterday, but I'm feeling apathetic.

Photo Credit
Bram_app. "Yale Keys". http://www.flickr.com/photos/bramapp/106561520/

Full Sample of Classes

So after a week without labs, I've finally been to every class I signed up for this semester.  This is also the first time that I feel I have a context for how long the semester is going to last.  I mean the semester is always around 3 months long, but this is the first time that the long term has been more in focus than the week to week way I've handled past semesters.  I think part of the reason I've been treating things this way is because I don't have any math classes or truly heavy midterms to worry over.

I finally have a Geochemistry book for class tomorrow, which is nice.  I still can't fathom how a paperback textbook of its size costs over $130, but that's another issue from what I'd care to discuss.  After asking at the desk for online textbook orders if the Geochemistry books were in, I was informed my order was canceled and the books weren't there.  After checking my e-mail however, I discovered that not only were the books in, but they were ready to be collected.  Needless to say I've lost nearly all respect for the bookstore here. Where I used to excuse their inconsistencies and poor service with the transitional stage of the Barnes & Noble buyout, I now think the staff is just generally inept.

Tomorrow brings another session of LIBS work and this time I will actually try to collect some usable data!  I wish I had some keys to actually get into the labs, but I guess my requests for keys helps the department gauge my progress and commitment.  Let's go with that...

In more long range news, I've signed up for a poster topic to accompany me on the end of the semester Colorado Plateau field trip.  During the eight days of geologic goodness in the trip I will be giving a brief presentation on the Late Cretaceous (Andean mountains and an inland sea).

I'm not entirely sure what I have committed myself to, but I do know that my poster will not cover the Laramide orogeny and doesn't encompass the K-T boundary (some other lucky peer will have that famous sliver of time).  This class is already the most intimidating and instructive course I have taken in college, but I know I will gain immeasurably from it.  My only qualm with it is that it is only scheduled once a week!

Basic synopsis is that context has been established for my current semester, time will be flying by, courses are heavy but lightened by their fascinating content, and I have a considerable amount of learning ahead of me.  Still living one day at a time though, and tomorrow is Geochem and a session with the LIBS lab...

Photo Credit

USGS. "Waterpocket Fold - Looking south from the Strike Valley Overlook".  http://3dparks.wr.usgs.gov

The dizzying heights of Optical Mineralogy

Well I thought I would be immune to the nausea-inducing peculiarities of the petrographic microscopes we were warned about in Optical Mineralogy, but I was mistaken.  Trying to discover the different scale each objective displays at, I was moving the focus and stage at the same time.  I noticed right away that my body was displeased with what my eyes were telling it but tried to work quickly through it and ended up compounding the feeling.  I don't think it is like sea sickness, not that I've ever felt those effects, but it is its own sensation.  I'm still nauseous, and I've definitely learned my lesson.  One thing at a time on the microscope, which follows nicely with the scientific principle of only modifying one variable at a time in an experiment.

I find it oddly coincidental that on the day of my first foray with the colorful thin sections I was introduced to the fluorescence of scorpion exoskeletons.  Apparently, when an adult scorpions' cuticle is exposed to UV light, it produces a fluorescent glow due to the beta-Carboline in that casing.  This only occurs in adult scorpions, and when they molt their new casing takes time to produce the fluorescent effect again, and their shed casing continues to glow.



The two theories I find credible as to why this occurs are to lure in prey and/or as a form of sun protection when scorpions were more diurnal.

My main point in these two topics is that the properties of light have been a huge impact in my studies lately, and when even my Entomology class brings up the properties of light, I feel like science is both deeper and more interconnected than ever.  I may feel slightly different when I go a couple days without talking about photons, spectroscopy, or similar topics but right now things are oddly in harmony.


Photo Credit
skinheaddave. "Leiurus quinquestriatus, freshly moulted under UV light." http://www.arachnoboards.com

All thumbs and lasers lately

Today has been a strange day.  I woke up and went to Geochemistry, where in a start-the-morning quiz I somehow forgot how to explain that when an atom is unstable it undergoes decay.  This "foreign" word apparently escapes me at nine in the morning, where I was grasping at straws before Dr. R gave me the elusive phrase I'd been struggling for.  Then in an intense fit of overcompensation I try to educate my optical mineralogy TA when she forgets that the temperatures in stars ionize any atoms within them.  Needless to say, my shoe tastes like rubber and cloth when I put it (and my foot) in my mouth.

Heading out from that class I got started on my undergrad research.  Essentially I am the third person attempting to use LIBS analysis to differentiate between different crude oils.  I prepped some samples, taking extra care to get a feel for the materials I was working with after a long break from them, and put them in a plastic bag to walk them over to the LIBS lab in another building.  After getting everything all set up I wasted a good hour or so tweaking every setting I could remember to try and get a signal beyond the Na and Ar spikes I somehow managed to receive.  Then an older undergrad researcher and classmate (my predecessor on this project) came in to work on his project and showed me that I didn't un-kink the fiber optic cables running my light to the spectrometer.  Feeling like a first class fool I thanked him and he generously gave me the LIBS start up walk-through he wrote (with screenshots!) and the macro I need to process the data into an understandable Excel format.  We talked a bit more, sharing that we have doubts about the oil project specifically and LIBS analysis in general due to flaky equipment, which really improved my mood.  It's good to know that people have your back even when you didn't know they were there.

After that I had awkward talk with my undergrad research adviser.  I think she's been under a lot of stress from preparing the new hall the department will move into, but I'd picked up on her negative energy and naturally (for me) taken it personally.  I think I finally get where she's coming from now that we've shared more than some passing words, but she had me worried for a while.  I think we have reached a stage in our association where I've passed the curious undergrad level in her eyes and so she has become more a patron to me.  I hope this is the case, and I am excited to keep working and learning in Optical.

Essentially, I'm saying that this week needs to end as soon as possible but the future looks brighter than I've seen it in a long while.

A proper start to the school year

After the short two day nonsense of the official "first days of classes", school is now actually getting underway tomorrow.  So far I have had my Geochemistry, Chemistry, and Entomology classes.  Chemistry is business as usual (except I'm only at that lecture on Fridays) and I am glad we were spared from reading the syllabus again.  The Entomology class I am warily excited about because it seems like it won't be an intensive course by any means, but it will actually instruct me.  I think my main cause for pause is the professor's personality reminds me of the disappointing physics professor I had last semester.  I'll have to try to give him a fair shot and pay attention to separating the two instructors' merits.

As far a geology classes are concerned, I know most of the department (at least in some measure) and the subjects are deceptively familiar as well.  My Geochemistry text is bringing no end of anxiety to me lately, as my first attempt to order it online was aborted when the seller gave me a refund.  Needless to say I was pretty irate at that turn of events, and now I have to wait until the 23rd (according to the university bookstore) before I will have a text in hand.  I am very excited to see how my Geology of the Colorado Plateau class will turn out, and it comes highly endorsed (at least by Dr. M, Tristan, and Evan).  Optical Mineralogy however I am worried about for the eyestrain induced headaches to come.  As exciting as it will be to toy around with polarized light and thin-sections, I am worried the subtleties of rotating and reading into minute details of slivers of minerals may lose its novelty and simplicity fast.

In unrelated matters, I broke up with my girlfriend Donna today.  After nearly a year and three months together I felt like it was time to move on.  I think that she handled it well, but it doesn't feel very real to me yet.  I told her that neither of us seemed very happy with our relationship the past month, and that I felt like things were getting away from me in my life (which was my main fear).  I told her that I still cared about her and that we could be friends but not to expect much one-on-one time together until a long way off.  I feel like it was the right thing for me to do, but she still really seems to love me and I am not sure how I feel about that.  I'll have to wait and see how well she actually copes with it, and how our friends will grow to treat us now that we have broken up after most of our friendships consisting of mutual friends.

Shortly after the breakup conversation I went for a hike up Tortugas Mountain to try to refresh my mind and get everything together.  It was nice to hike alone, and the mountain was pretty vacant with the exception of a pair of runners and a few stray hikers coming down.  It was nice to have the peak to myself, and I took some pictures before my camera died to make a panorama (after the NMGS one I wanted to make another).  For once the cold wind felt more refreshing than cutting, and I think winter should be over soon both seasonally and for my mood...

Introduction

Well after a great deal of thought and with the best of intentions I have decided to create a Blogging account. My main purpose in this is to have a place to mentally vent and to sustain my writing abilities now that the majority of my school work is data and result based and requires very little creative writing. I am going to make an effort to find a balance between trying to write "profound" thoughts and feelings and throwing down mundane thoughts. The result, I hope, will be a thoughtful and meditative collection of thoughts and sensations. In another way, this journal/blog will serve as an outlet for conversation that I feel I have partially lost now that I am at an agriculturally based school. With so many of my friends scattered around the state and the country, it is harder to open up to relative strangers here in Las Cruces and so I hope that this journal will serve as a means of conversational exercise until I have the opportunity to find people I can truly share my thoughts with.

I surmise that the fear of the eyes of prying friends or overly "empathetic" readers I had when writing blogs and journal entries on social networking sites will be relieved with the relative anonymity I have on this account. I also hope that I will write on this account with some regularity and with valuable introspection. This being said, I will leave the rest of this journal to actualizing my hopes and needs of communication and contemplation. Wish me luck...