Well, AESRC is done for another year and with it my role as co-chair of the organizing committee! Thank goodness for that! Hopefully, I can finally get some actual thesis related work done in the coming months…and maybe get back to blogging a bit as well. However, as grateful as I am that AESRC is done, I have to say that it was a fantastic conference this year with a host of terrific talks ...[Read More]
Groundwater
The Most Epic Unboxing Ever
There is a strange phenomenon on the internet called unboxing. Unboxing is when a person receives a new package of something and takes a video or pictures of the process of opening it for the first time and posts it online. Mostly, from what I can see, people “unbox” electronics or hockey cards or things of that nature. However, what I have today could be called the granddaddy of all ...[Read More]
New study shows nitrate leaches to groundwater for over five decades
A new and very interesting study just came out in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the other day titled “Long-term fate of nitrate fertilizer in agricultural soils”. This paper addresses some very interesting and extremely important questions using isotopic geochemical tools. The question central to this paper is what happens to all of the nitrogen in ...[Read More]
AW# 60 – Radioactivity: What’s the use?
I am very excited to be hosting the 60th Accretionary Wedge at GeoSphere! Sorry my own contribution is so slow in coming…it has been a busy month PhD wise. In fact, I expect it will be a busy year PhD wise since I am hoping to submit in the Fall of 2014 and I have got a LOT of writing to do. Anyway, in the call for posts I said: For this wedge the topic will be momentous discoveries in geolo ...[Read More]
Back to Basics on Groundwater
When many people hear the word groundwater they imagine a raging underground torrent of water flowing along a pathway called an aquifer. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but you could not be more wrong about how groundwater exists and flows. In this post we will discuss the very basics of groundwater science (hydrogeology) and flow. What is groundwater? As the name implies groundwater is simply wate ...[Read More]
Day 3 and 4 – Craters, Very Old Rocks, Fukushima and Extinctions
Here is my Goldschmidt summary part 3 comprising both day 3 and day 4. I had to prepare my own talk, that I gave on Thursday (day 4) so I had to put the blog on hold to practice. Here are a few of the most interesting talks that I went to: Fred Jourdan hailing all the way from Curtin University in South Australia gave a talk called – Volcanoes, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions (abstrac ...[Read More]
The Mysteries of Maqarin
We all know that cement is a man-made substance and therefore cement is always synthetic right? Wrong! In the unusual case of Maqarin, Jordan the stars aligned to produce natural cement and many of the “synthetic” minerals found therein. The Maqarin site has been the subject of an intense geological investigation by a consortium of over 100 researchers for years in an attempt to try an ...[Read More]
Guest Post – Mike Power – Using surficial geochemistry to detect buried mineral deposits
Finding the next big mineral deposit is a dream of many geologists past, present and future. However, in the past hundred years or so, many of them close to surface have already been found and developed. This is because they can be found relatively inexpensively by traditional methods such as geochemical surveys, shallow geophysics, drilling, and a lot of luck. In the 21st century, mineral explora ...[Read More]
Geology Photo of the Week #35
This edition of the photo of the week highlights something I feel that I should have explained a long time ago: my banner photo. The banner photo above is more than just a pretty picture. It actually illustrates, very beautifully, a truly interesting phenomenon that can be encountered in Arctic watersheds. I speak of the aufeis, pronounced oh-fyse, which is the giant sheet of ice covering the rive ...[Read More]