Sunday, December 09, 2018

Book review: The Great Way

The Way into Chaos
The Way into Magic
The Way into Darkness
By Harry Connolly

The Great Way is an epic Fantasy Trilogy by Harry Connolly. As the first two books end in cliffhangers, and the narrative immediately picks up afterwards, it is useful to look at them as volumes of a single story as opposed to related independent books. Luckily, the story is very good.

The story opens in the capital of an empire similar to Imperial Rome. Unlike the Romans, however, the Perdaini empire has a caste of scholars, whose sorcerous power is derived from ‘gifts’ brought by God-like- or alien-like beings. Once a generation, these beings visit, and this time, the visit goes terribly wrong.

A plague of ravenous beasts descends on the capitol, slaying the emperor and ravaging the city. The crown prince and a small portion of his entourage escape, including the two very different POV characters:  The first is Tejohn. An aging war hero who won fame and renown hunting down rouge scholars and quelling rebellion, he is the Prince’s bodyguard. The second is Cazia Freewell. The teenage daughter of a rebellious lord, she is kept in the imperial court as a hostage, where she is raised in the imperial culture and is studying to be a scholar. Despite their differences and hatred of each other, the POV characters are united in their desire to preserve the empire and protect the Prince, and they soon split up to run separate quests for him. As the plague spreads and the story progresses, however, the goal slips from maintaining the empire, to survival, of the characters, of civilization, and even of humanity itself.

As a fantasy adventure, this is a fast-paced, hard-hitting, and creative story. And I recommend it on that basis alone. But there are additional attractions that the story has to people of science.

One of the main thematic arcs is the position of scholars in society, and how their knowledge and power is handled and feared by society. This is seen through the viewpoint of Cazia, as she grows up and sees the wider world beyond the palace where he has been imprisoned, and also by Tejohn, who confronts his scars from fighting rogue sorcerers as he comes to the realization that they are needed in the fight to save humanity. Of course, this tale of an ancient fantasy empire is told by a modern American writer, and is prescient for scholars in the here and now. This becomes most clear in the third book, where Cazia experiences what modern scientists refer to as Cosmic Vertigo:

“I can look into the world.” The words barely made any sense, and she was the one saying them. “I can look into the world and see its parts.”

Just as clearly, she sees the fear, greed, and cunning that the rest of society feels when they realize she- like modern atomic scientists- can see and do things outside of the ordinary experience of most humans living their day to day lives. As the story takes place in a collapsing civilization, this is all the more important for all of us to appreciate.

Saturday, December 08, 2018

The Greenland impact crater

This is a brief note on the recent Science Advances paper on the Hiawatha Impact crater, a large, recent crater which lies under the Hiawatha glacier in extreme northern Greenland.

In the past, I have bagged out impact crater scientists and being alarmist and even dangerous. However, this discovery is the real deal. Similarly, I have occasionally criticized the “glamour-mag” approach to scientific publication, but in this instance, a big splash is appropriate, because it is a big deal, and the evidence is overwhelming.

The short version: Ice penetrating radar and analysis of glacial outwash sand show a large (31km diameter), recent impact crater under a Greenland glacier, complete with central peak. The outwash shows shocked quartz, probable melt glass, and PGE anomalies consistent with an iron (or stony iron) impactor. This is not one of those ancient, deformed, maybe-if-you-squint-you-can-see-a-circle crators, this is in your face and completely obvious to anyone who has studied even a little geology.

Like many short format papers, a lot of the details are in the supplementary materials.  For example:
This is a recent discovery because of global warming! Prior to 2012, the outlet glacer emptied into a lake. It is only ni the last 6 years that it has retreated onto land, so that the sediment they sampled and found the shocked quartz, impact glass, etc in was only exposed from beneath the melting ice sheet a few years ago.
They are planning on running conventional gravity surveys to look for rebound, but because all the ice is melting, the melt signal dominates the GRACE gravity signature.
No known impact ejecta is known from any of the North Greenland ice cores, making the crater likely to be older than the oldest of them (about 100ka). Ice cores are regularly checked for volcanic debris, and it is unlikely that they would miss something this large and close (quick math suggests the ejecta volume should be about 200-600 km3, making it a medium to large VEI-7 equivalent).

The crater overprints pre-glacial river valleys, and this is (as the authors state) probably Pleistocene in age (10ka-2.5Ma).

The melt glass should be datable via Ar/Ar dating, but it is not clear if they have recovered a large enough volume of the material to date at this stage.

I would expect a tektite field from an impact this size, but it isn’t clear where those tektites would end up. If they fell on ice (By definition, the Arctic was mostly ice-covered during most of the Pleistocene), then they would get carried to a moraine (on land), or float around until the ice was exported through the Fram Strait and melted somewhere in the NE Atlantic Ocean.

There is a controversial Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which basically calls for an Arctic impactor as a trigger for the Younger Dryas cooling and extinction of the Clovis culture in North America. I would be careful connecting this crater to that event, as the NEEM ice core, less than 400km away, doesn’t have any reported ejecta, as known tephra are mostly basaltic. 

Finally, they report carbon in the silicate impact melt. That seems odd to me, as neither crustal gneisses nor iron meteorites have much carbon.  they should do ion probe d13C to get the isotopic composition. Who knows, maybe the impactor hit a peat bog.

Sunday, December 02, 2018

Book review: Eaten by a Giant Clam: Great Adventures in Natural Science

By Joseph Cummins

This book combines the biographies of about two dozen natural scientists from the age of European colonialism. It describes their lives, how they got into natural science, and what contributions they made.

Individually, must of these stories are interesting. However, read as a book, there is very much a repetition of the following story: Wealth anti-social person who doesn’t fit into normal life uses their wealth to go to far flung corners of the world, and look at stuff.  While not every single story goes exactly like this, it is very much a pattern describing the 400 year history of the misfit natural scientist. I suppose that is useful to know that this is not a new phenomenon, and there are obvious questions to be asked about how this sort of culture clashes with modern professional science, but consideration of these issues does not show up in this book. In general, it started to drag fairly early and never picked up.

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Sierra Sequoias

On our most recent family holiday back in America, I wanted to take the kids to see the Giant Sequoias of the Southern Sierra Nevada. I hadn’t seen the enormous trees since I was a teenager visiting colleges at the end of high school. I’ve read a bit about how there is concern that these beautiful organisms may be susceptible to drought and climate change, so I figured better to squeeze them in than regret. We ended up going to Mineral King, a remote southern part of Sequoia National Park. Our main activity there was a hike up into the alpine lakes of the high country. However, we did manage a short walk through the big trees.

The forest had an overstory of sequoia and sugar pine, with some ponderosa (and/or Jeffry) pine and an understory of white fir and incense cedar. By early July the forest was already quite dry, and even at 7000 feet elevation, it was still warm. It was obvious that there had been fire come through some parts of the forest- many of the firs, and some pines and cedars had been singed.

The coexistence of the Sugar Pine and sequoia trees did surprise me a little bit. After all, both trees have evolved to tower over the canopy, survive fires, and reseed afterwards.  It seemed a bit odd that both species would be growing side by side. However, an unrelated article on droughtproofing Australian grazing land made me wonder.

Although the Sugar Pine and the Sequoia have similar above ground growth strategies, they are quite different below the surface. Sequoias have a very shallow root system, while sugar pines have a substantial taproot. And in the most severely fire damaged areas, it appeared that the Sequoias were re-establishing best in the gullies and drainages, while the pines (sugar and ponderosa) were doing better on the more exposed slopes. Either way, the sequoias seemed to be doing just fine- old growth, secondary post-logging regrowth and saplings all seemed to be healthy. If anything, the pines seemed to be suffering worse than the sequoias.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Book Review: Sharp Ends, by Joe Abercrombie

Sharp Ends is a dozen short stories of the sword and sorcery variety (more sword, less sorcery), set in a bleak, dark ages type setting. The stories are bleak and brutal, but the writing is beautiful. I found, however, that the action generally unfolds very slowly. The scenes are painted exquisitely, but there is not a lot of urgency to the stories. This book was my first introduction to Abercrombie’s work; it may be that having read his novels would yield context that would make the stories more enjoyable. As a standalone work, some stories are tied together by the recurrence of several characters, the most memorable of which are Javre and Shev, a gritty modern feminist version of Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser.

Despite the excellent wordcraft, I did not find the plots particularly gripping, or the characters particularly compelling, or the fantasy particularly illuminating. Perhaps if I had read the novels first I would feel differently, but I’m not a huge grimdark fan to begin with, and without the supersonic pace of a Harry Connolly yarn or the grand vision of G.R.R. Martin I found the florid prose tended to drag.

Monday, November 05, 2018

After the Fires

Back in 2003, western Canberra was ravaged by bushfire. One of the most heavily damaged areas was the Mt. Stromlo observatory and surrounding pine plantations. The pines were mostly P. radiata, a coastal California species which grows very well in Australia- with 2 growth whorls per year, each up to a meter. A small corner of this plantation was P. ponderosa, however.  This Western US mountain species is a slower growing, longer lived species, and is better adapted to survive fire. The fire break provided by the Mt Stromlo access road allowed one stand of ponderosa to survive, and in the aftermath of the fire, the surviving ponderosas reseeded. That 15 year old regrowth has been putting on some extraordinary growth rates. Bike for scale.

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Book Review: The 2020 Comission Report into the North Korean Nuclear Attacks...

Book review: The 2020 Commission Report into the North Korean Nuclear Attacks against the United States
By Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

This book is a speculative fiction story about the use of North Korean nuclear weapons in the near future- specifically early 2020. Speculative fiction is nothing new. But unlike Harry Turtledove or John Birmingham, Jeffrey Lewis is, in addition to being an author, a world expert in nuclear proliferation and arms control. The book’s format, closely paralleling the 9/11 report down to the opening paragraph, plays to this strength. However, despite the author’s academic and think tank background, this book is a gripping page-turner, make all the more compelling by its fact-based and thoroughly researched nature.

The book describes a possible scenario in which poor communications and saber rattling result in the DPRK shooting down a commercial airliner en route from the Republic of Korea to Mongolia, and the subsequent escalation and miscommunication that leads the North to launch a pre-emptive tactical nuclear strike, under the mistaken impression that it is under attack. This then escalates to an all-out war, with the DPRK’s long range missiles striking several US cities, with millions of casualties.

The book is a page turner. I read it in a single sitting the day after I got back from Korea. However, because Dr. Lewis is an arms control expert, and not a novelist, it also comes with 20 pages of references for the 270 page novel. As such, it is as much a report in narrative form (much like the actual 9/11 report) as a story in its own right. Except, of course, this book is a report on a disaster that has not (yet) happened.

Overall, it was a good read, both entertaining and educational. Dr. Lewis is obviously knowledgeable on nuclear weapons, their effects on human health, and the havoc they wreak on civilian infrastructure. And he uses his expertise to great effect. While reasonable people can argue about in what areas historical records are pertinent and in which areas technological change has made them obsolete, his well referenced arguments are an excellent place to start any discussion, whither you agree with his points or not.

I found a few things disappointing. The main thesis of the book is that the DPRK, if it believed it was under conventional, regime-changing attack, could use nuclear weapons tactically, (or at least locally) to give itself a chance. This hypothesis was never really investigated in any detail, however, which makes to difficult to judge how rational such a counter strike would be.

My main complaint, however, is that Dr’ Lewis cannot refrain from taking cheap shots at President Trump, when describing the American response. He does have some reasonable criticisms around issues like the President’s lack of appreciation for communications security and the difficulty in responding to a crisis from his various private properties. But he also takes generic liberal cheap shots, which don’t build his case and are distracting from his well researched work. More ominously, they risk politicizing nuclear war, an outcome which everyone should be trying to avoid. We all know what a debacle the polliticization of Global Warming has been; imagine how much worse things could be if the same thing happened with Nuclear War. In fact, while he doesn’t specifically mention this possibility, there are hints at how hyperpartisanship could risk nuclear stability. But that is another topic for another day.

Tuesday, October 09, 2018

IPCC 1.5 degrees of obfuscation

So, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an important document today, allegedly demonstrating that 1.5 degrees of warming is preferable to 2 degrees, and that with an enormous about of effort, we might actually be able to achieve it. I, an Earth Scientist with a PhD and 17 years of professional experience, tried to read it, because it is important, and good scientist citizens ought to at least try to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, the report, as I found it on the IPCC website, is an incomprehensible tangle of bureaucratese and parenthetical rabbit holes. For example:

Warming greater than the global annual average is being experienced in many land regions  and seasons, including two to three times higher in the Arctic. Warming is generally higher over  land than over the ocean. ( high confidence) {1.2.1, 1.2.2, Figure 1.1, Figure 1.3, 3.3.1, 3.3.2}
Trends in intensity and frequency of some climate and weather extremes have been detected  over time spans during which about 0.5 ° C of global warming occurred (medium confidence). This  assessment is based on several lines of evidence, including attribution studies for changes in  extremes since 1950. {3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3}
A.2. Warming from anthropogenic emissions from the pre -industrial period to the present  will persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term changes in  the climate system, such as sea level rise, with associated impacts (high confidence), but these  emissions alone are  unlikely to cause global warming of 1.5°C (medium confidence ) {1.2, 3.3,
Figure 1.5, Figure SPM.1}
 It has all of the pitfalls the 9/11 report managed to avoid, in terms of failing to ensure accessability, readability, and currency to your average human being. In fact, it comes across as a fantasy edict beamed down by aliens, which is probably not too bad a description of Ivory Tower science these days. For example, It spends lots- perhaps most (I've pretty much glazed over a third of the way through the Summary for Policy Makers- you know, the part that should be clear and simple for non-specialists) of the time describing the benefits of aiming for a 1.5C warming target instead of a 2 degree target.

Of course, we aren't on course to hit a 2 degree target. We are on course for a 3 or 4 degree target. So the relevance of the report is completely at odds with the reality of the world we live in. Now, there are technical reasons why it is hard to write a report describing the difference between 4 degrees and 3.5 degrees. It has been tens of millions of years since the world was that warm, so reconstructing that climate is much more difficult than a 1 or 2 degree warmer world, which we had an order of magnitude more recently. So explaining where we are going is actually quite hard. But they don't even try, or acknowledge this. Instead they are off in this fantasy land where we all have ponies, and they want to sell us on the benefits of unicorn horns and sparkles in the manes.

However, this may be more of a dark fantasy than a rainbow pony fantasy. The "target" CO2 emission reductions curves (Figure SPM.3a) they show have no rollover or transition period, but drop precipitously from the present day at a rate comparable only with that seen in the collapse of the USSR. They don't explicitly talk about this, but there is a blathering world government waffling towards the end that goes:
Cooperation on strengthened accountable multilevel governance that includes non-
state actors such as industry, civil society and scientific institutions, coordinated sectoral and cross-
sectoral policies at various governance levels, gender-sensitive policies, finance including innovative
financing and cooperation on technology development and transfer can ensure participation,
transparency, capacity building, and learning among different players (high confidence). {2.5.2,
4.2.2, 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.4.3, 4.4.4, 4.5.3, Cross-Chapter Box 9 in Chapter 4, 5.3.1, 4.4.5, 5.5.3, Cross-Chapter Box 13 in Chapter 5, 5.6.1, 5.6.3}

In otherwords, the governments of the world, which are currently assassinating skeptical journalists,. locking up children, and dropping trillions of dollars of bombs in proxy wars which endanger millions of people,  all just have to join together and sing kum-by-yah while dismantling their transportation and industrial facilities, and we'll all be fine. Frankly, I suspect we're more likely to solve global warming with nuclear winter at this point, at the IPCC report gives me no hope that they have a more reasonable or concrete plan.

In summary, the world experts on climate got together and wrote an unreadable report.  If you piece the bits and pieces that might mean something together, it awkwardly hints that saving the planet is completely possible if the entirely of human nature and politics is magically transformed in the next year.

In other words we, every one of the 7.8 billion of us, is totally, completely, and thoroughly fucked.

Sunday, August 26, 2018


So I bumped into Nelly Furtado the other day, and of course I immediately started to explain to her all about Atlantic hotspots and a couple of Canadian cities I’ve never been to and some styles of music that I don’t really know anything about, but she must have had something really important to go to because she walked away before I could tell her that she got the lyrics to her 2006 #1 UK hit all wrong:

Everybody listen to me
I walk in the door and you start fleeing
Come on everybody want to hear more?
Well actually this how it all goes.

Everybody get your pot to crack around
All you crazy people come gather 'round
I wanna tell you all one more point please
You either want to be deaf or flee me

Mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard
Make you want to plug his hole
He’s a manslpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard
Stroke his ego's his one goal

He’s a mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard
Make you want to plug his hole
He’s a manslpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard
Make you wish you never ever met him at all

And when he talks he talks with passion
When he stalks he stalks to interject shit
When he asks “but as you know” he means it
Even if you never understand it.

Everybody get your pot to crack around
All you crazy people come gather 'round
I wanna tell you all one more point please
You either want to be deaf or flee me

Mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard
Make you want to plug his hole
He’s a man-slpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard
Stroke his ego's his one goal

He’s a mansplainer: ignore work hard stupid libtard
Make you want to plug his  hole
He’s a man-slpainer what a blowhard catch you off guard
Make you wish you never ever met him at all

No never ever met him at all
You wish you’d never ever met him at all…

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Looking back at my ASI years

It has been two and a half years since I stopped working at Australian Scientific Instruments. I haven’t written or said much about it since then. But I probably should. The best way to do that is probably to focus on the positives. Here are several benefits that I gained as a result of working at ASI for almost six and a half years:


Prior to working at ASI, I had never been to Asia, aside from airport stopovers. I managed to reach all the other inhabited continents during my PhD back in the late 90’s, but somehow I had managed to miss the big one.
And Asia is a big deal. More than half the world’s population live there. Six of the cities that I visited have populations bigger than Australia, and thus were far bigger that New York, the place I grew up thinking of as the Big City.

The reason that these cities are so big is that Asia has been having an enormous economic boom. In my lifetime, hundreds of millions of people ascended into the middle class. And they way that they did so is fundamentally different than how European and American technological societies developed. In many places, it seems like the 20th century, in which I grew up, was skipped over entirely, and 19th century societies had jumped straight into the future.

The cultural differences are of course, both confronting and educational. I have never realized what it is like to not be able to read anything until I first went to China. But even though the writing systems, history, and culture are vastly different to the western world I’ve grown up in, the humanity and the science is still the same.

I am not a city person, but the nature of the work we were doing generally had us in capitol cities or other major urban areas.  And while this was hard for me, it also means I learned a lot by virtue of being challenged.


Ever since I can remember, I have resented being a Junior, and for most of my post-pubescent life I have been trying to distance myself from my parents as much as possible. This has resulted in me settling down in Australia, which is about as far as one can get from New Jersey without blasting into space. It turns out that my dad is a scientist too, and he is quite well respected in the field of surface and semiconductor analyses. This doesn’t have a lot to do with geology- that was one of the appeals of geology- but because he built one of the first SIMS instruments with a quadrupole analyser back in the 70’s, when I started building SHRIMPs at ASI this offered me an opportunity to reconnect with my dad. We even ended up writing a paper together. If I had stayed working in Alice Springs as a Central Australian fieldwork contractor, that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened.

Technical awesomeness

The Australian Scientific Instruments teams were, quite simply, ludicrously good at their jobs. A lot of the people I knew as an undergrad went to work for NASA, my first job outta college was in Menlo Park, the heart of Silicon Valley. The ANU, where I did my PhD was at that time a world leader in building technical equipment for geologic purposes. None of them could hold a finger to ASI. I suppose it must have just been an evolutionary necessity. After 25 years of competing against a 40 billion dollar multinational, you need to be pretty good at what you do, and we were.  Some highlights included:
All kids of multicollectors. The original SHRIMP multicollector at ANU was eventually taken apart and simplified, but ASI refined the design until it could be built, setup, shipped around the world and set up all over again. When the discovery of 4 isotope sulfur fractionation meant that three head collectors were essentially obsolete, we built a cleansheet design from scratch on a shoestring, and popped two on a couple of SHRIMPs in Japan with minimal complications.
The IRMS++. This is a 5 cup, Nier-Johnson mass spectrometer with an electron cyclotron resonance source, which we built from scratch for ANSTO. The original plan was for us to assemble it off of drawings they provided, but at our first planning meeting, on of our engineers took a look at what they were proposing, pointed out how many manufacturing and assembly issues can be obviated by thoughtful design, and then just took ownership of the project. There aren’t that many groups who can simply build all-new multicollector magnetic sector mass spectrometers from an ion trajectory, and I’m fortunate to have worked for one.

It was always strange to go to Silicon Valley, or Tokyo, of Beijing, and be treated like royalty, only to disappear back into our Fyshwick garage when we got home, but I guess that’s just one of the quirks of being a world-class outfit based far off the beaten track. And honestly, that’s kind of how we wanted it. ASI was a place of quiet achievement.


One of the lesser known highlights of ASI was the workplace culture. When I first arrived there, the company was about half immigrants, and half white Australian men brought up on the land. And the culture that evolved there- part tech startup, part paddock, was amazing. There was an expectation that everyone would do their own work well, without pride or preening, but there was also a willingness to help out if you could do something better or more efficiently than someone else. There was also a knowledge of who was good at what and how things could most easily be completed. It was a culture of low key, quiet achievement, and probably didn’t help the sales & marketing folks much, but it directly lead to the technical excellence listed above. And there was never blame, or finger pointing. It wasn’t until outside management came in towards the end that the word “fault” meant anything other than a broken electrical connection. And while everyone was fairly introverted- even by my standards- that didn’t stop things from getting done, and done well, and quickly.

 In these days, with the commodification of knowledge and know-how into intellectual property, the ability to create and improve often gets overlooked. But ASI was an exemplary example of a group of people who could do things, and I’m lucky to have been a part of it for so long. But the broader issue, and one reason I’m sharing all this, is that a lot of Australian ability suffers from similar dilemmas. This country has a traditional culture of quiet, selfless achievement. And while this can be very effective, in this day and age it is not always clear how this can be utilized and advertised. The culture of quiet achievement does not always mix well with the boosterism demanded by the short attention spans of some people these days who don’t think deeply enough about what they are doing and what can be achieved.

The Possibilities

The last thing that really appealed to me was how many low-hanging developmental fruit there were in teaching the SHRIMP new techniques. Because it has a two stage secondary acceleration column, the extraction field at the sample surface is more like a quad SIMS than any of the other magnetic sector SIMS instruments. So there are all sorts of analytical setups which could be implemented with only a tiny bit of additional engineering, which would allow the instrument to do types of analyses that simply weren’t possible before. I’m a little bit disappointed that I won’t be the guy to build and develop new techniques. But hopefully the new generation instrument that they’re building now will be able to do some neat stuff.

With the acquisition of the laser ICP stuff, there was obviously an opportunity to make all sots of cool multi-platform microanalytical synergy. I’m a little less optimistic that will happen- even though we did get a SHRIMP running on Geostar (as described in the technical supplement of our Geology Paper), I don’t know that anyone is currently working on following that work up. But it was promising enough for me to push it for as long as I thought there was a chance it would work.

In the end, I left because it wasn’t clear what staying would accomplish. In October of 2015 we had a round of layoffs, which included a successful senior engineer who was the most outspoken person with regards to resisting management’s attempts to put us on contracts instead of renegotiating our Enterprise Agreement. I was next in line to take up the mantle of employment rights agitator, and my value to the company was diminished by the fact that my boss had bailed from the Silicon Valley meetings I set up for him to drum up business,  thereby ensuring that I wouldn’t be bringing any new work in any time soon. I still second guess my choice to leave- The brave thing to do would have been to stay and try to bring a union in, but I convinced myself that getting off payroll would maybe save someone else’s job.  And though I second guess myself often, it isn’t clear what I could have done better.

The first 18 months of my new job has been settling in, and for most of the last year I’ve been trying to be more involved with my family and take better care of my health. As for what next? It’s hard to tell. But suggestions are welcome.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Book Review: The Political Value of Time, by Elizabeth Cohen

I study geologic time for a living. That’s my job, and my day to day work involves making sure that the scientific instruments we use to figure out how many billions of years old various rocks are haven’t started to malfunction in ways that can generate millions of years of errors.

Apparently, though, most people don’t live their lives across the spans of eons and millions of years.  It’s good to remind myself of this every now and then, preferably before our fridge runs out of milk. One way to do this, and to gain some perspective on other ways of contemplating time, is by reading books of academic experts who study human interaction, instead of billion years old rocks. One such study is The Political Value of Time, by Professor Elizabeth Cohen (Syracuse University, USA).

Geosciences have a variety of ways to measure time. Of course, the fundamental unit of scientific time is the second- defined by atomic oscillations, from which minutes and hours are derived. But there is also astronomical time- days, months, years, and Milankovic cycles derived from the movement of rotating or orbiting moons and planets. And there are the various radioactive decay schemes, which give us 238U time 40K time, and other lesser used decay schemes, which are generally tied to one of those two systems. Comparing and cross-calibrating these various schemes is a lot of what geochronologists have been doing over the last 20 years.

The Political Value of Time combines all of these in to scientific time- e.g. the time measured by clocks and calendars. It discusses this, as opposed to other qualitative types of time used by social scientists, such as leisure time, overtime, and quiet time. Oddly, political researchers seem to have spent less time thinking about scientific time than some of these other fuzzy sorts, and this book tries to redress this situation.

The book shows that governments appropriate the time of their citizens in a way that constitutes a political economy of time. It then shows that there are several philosophical, practical, and technical reasons for this to be so. However, it points out that, because this area is understudied and the ramifications are not thought through, many of the unconscious and structural biases that burden other economies also make the economy of time less fair than it ought to be.

As it is outside my area of expertise, I don’t have the background to critically appraise the interpretations of French revolutionary philosophers and other cited works. Taking their referenced statements as given, however, yields a book with a clear, compelling, and straightforward argument. The vocabulary is specialized, and I reached for the dictionary many times in the introduction. However, the terms are used consistently and precisely through the entire book, so once the introduction is finished, the vocabulary becomes less intimidating.

As someone who used to travel extensively internationally for work, the queuing section struck all sorts of chords on the intersection of time, money, duty, efficiency, and information technology in the area of airport customs queues.

Over all, it is a good book, clearly argued. It looks like there are lots of opportunities for future research.

Saturday, June 02, 2018

Where on Google Earth are the dearly departed?

Callan Bentley of the Mountain Beltway has announced, via Twitter and Facebook, that Ron Schott has passed away. Ron was a long time of internet advocacy for Geology, both through his blog, his twitter account, his gigapan advocacy, and other activities which I haven't kept up with. He was an enthusiastic, good-natured, and helpful geologist, and though I only met him once, in 2009, his passion for explaining the stories of geology at all scales and structures was memorable. And just as fantastic geologic events leave their stories imprinted in the rock record, so too can the traces of Ron's digital Earth Science outreach be found buried and the blogs and feeds of social media. However, like the paleontological records left behind by vanished creatures, these digital fossils serve mostly to remind us of the sense of loss that we have in knowing that we can no longer meet their creator. Rest in Peace, Ron. We miss you.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

Nomination language note

This is a brief update to last week’s post on nominating for society prizes.  There has been some discussion on twitter about biased language in letters of recommendation, particularly for junior women. This was an issue I was vaguely aware of, but didn’t especially delve into deeply at the time.
Our basic approach was to mostly focus on the science, which of course doesn’t have a gender, and explain why the science she did was so exciting. You can see my citation in the previous post. I’m not posting anyone else’s letter on this blog, but I will put the combined word cloud here, along with a list of high frequency words:

Words used ten or more times:
53                                                                                      Jenner
33                                                                                      elements
28                                                                                      data
25                                                                                      paper
23                                                                                      magma
20                                                                                      Frances
19                                                                                      element
18                                                                                      trace
16                                                                                      analytical
16                                                                                      MORB
15                                                                                      O’Neill
15                                                                                      glasses
15                                                                                      work
15                                                                                      new
14                                                                                      analysis
14                                                                                      chalcophile
13                                                                                      quality
12                                                                                      geochemistry
12                                                                                      published
12                                                                                      volcanic
12                                                                                      Carnegie
11                                                                                      differentiation
11                                                                                      magmatic
10                                                                                      papers
10                                                                                      years
10                                                                                      young
10                                                                                      many

Saturday, February 03, 2018

Nominating for society prizes

One of the great things about being a geochronologist is that you can delve back in time to when unfinished blog posts were abandoned, and drag them screaming into the present to be finished.

Sometime around about 0.0000035 Ma*, there was a push by Dr. Ball over at Magma cum Laude bemoaning the gender disparityin society prize nominations. The argument, seen here and other places in early 2014, goes something along the lines of:
-When nominated, women are about as likely as men to win society awards.
-However, nominations skew more male than the general population of scientists
-Nominators are mostly crusty old farts, and young scientists (young meaning anyone under 50) are not stepping up and nominating people.

I forgot all about this pressing issue until June (still 2014), when the MGPV division of the Geological Society of America announced that they would be awarding a new early career scientist prize. At that point, I suddenly recalled the issue, and thought, “Might this be a testable hypothesis? What happens when some random industrial scientist barely 40 years old tries nominating?”

I’d sat through a few award ceremonies before, and seen these sorts of things handed out to a wide variety of scientists, from really cool people I’d never heard of to the banal big names who had spent a quarter of a century cruising on achievements from when I was in high school. But in most cases, the nominees were very senior, old, respected scientists. And they nominated other, slightly less old but otherwise very similar scientists. I suppose their point of view is that if they’re great, other great people ought to be pretty similar.

I am not a great scientist. I’m a disorganized industry hack whose H-index can be tallied on the fingers of Count Rugen’s hand. So the way I see it, anyone I nominate for a prize should be as unlike me as possible. So from there it was an easy step to revisit the nomination gap studies, and think, “Might there be, perhaps, any women who would be appropriate for this award?” Luckily, our nominee came to mind almost immediately.

As someone who went through college loathing political correctness, my first thought was therefore, “OK, now am I cutting any more deserving nominees out here by nominating her?” As it turns out, when I was still working at the ANU (see the first three years of this blog) we had many really good grad students. However, none of them really took ownership of their favorite field of science and made it their own the way our nominee did, so I was satisfied that I had made a good choice.

The GSA Junk Mail that announced the creation of a new award came out in June 20 of 2014, I probably read it and connected it back to the earlier exhortations to nominate about a week or two later, around the end of the month. The trouble was, the deadline for nominations was the 15th of July. And I didn’t start approaching people for supporting letters until the second.

My strategy was simple: Here in Canberra, cruise the ANU hallways to figure out who was actually in town and able to put something together on zero notice. I threw the Japanese postdoc into the too-hard basket, as I didn’t personally know any of the people she worked with there, and also language barrier, and concentrated on her colleagues at DTM. I also approached some big names in the field with whom she hadn’t collaborated, to see if they thought it was a sensible nomination and would be willing to write something supportive from more of a peer review perspective.

I was pleasantly surprised at how enthusiastic most of the people I approached were. I guess the good thing about picking a good candidate, however, is that people really do get excited and are willing to get on board and turn letters around in remarkably quick timescales. I had my three supporters lines up by the seventh, and three letters in hand within hours of the deadline. In responsible, organized nominator fashion, I had my nomination letter done a whallopping three days before the deadline, and circulated it to the rest of the team for a science check and general feedback (as I had never done this before).

Around the time of the deadline, a potential referee who had been out of contact emailed me saying that he really wanted to write a fourth letter, and could the deadline be extended? So I asked the coordinator, and he said that as long as a complete submission package was in on time, we could have a week or two to get additional bonus letters in. One such letter was submitted.

Fast forward nine months:
There’s an email in my inbox from our nominee:
Hi Chuck,
Here is the letter that I woke up to today!!!! Thanks so much!!!”

And that is how Dr. Frances Elaine Jenner won the Geological Society of America’s inaugural MGPV early career award. The only sad part of the story was that I was not able to go to the GSA meeting where the award was presented, so one of the guys who wrote a letter of support gave the citation. He’s a proper academic scientist anyway, so probably had the gravitas that I lack. The citation and acceptance are on page 8-10 of thisnewsletter.

The point of all this story is this: It is possible for mid career non-academic scientists to throw together a nomination at the last minute, and get support from respected scientists, and construct a nomination package sufficient to win the prize. Don’t die wondering, folks.

Now, I should point out that I did have a few things tilted in my favor:
Firstly I attended a number of top institutions during my academic career, which put me in contact with top scientists like Dr. Jenner. Having a great candidate goes a long way towards making a case.

 Secondly, I’ve been kicking around science in one capacity or another to know her referees, several of whom were quite respected scientists. I was reasonably acquainted with three of the four supporters I got letters from, and had at least been to the fourth guy’s lab.

Thirdly, once the decision was made to go, I went all out. This isn't the sort of thing to be half-assed. I read all her papers, and tried to put together a passionate yet logical case for why they made our nominee a prizeworthy scientist.

I’m sure the greybeards who get together at annual meetings to sip nasty scotch plan out their conventional safe picks way in advance, but with a little passion, some broad thinking, and a genuine enthusiasm for science, anyone can nominate for their respective society’s awards, and win. And there’s a month and a half to go before the deadline forthe 2019 award, so don’t be shy, y’all.

* True calendar years; -0.000064 using the 1950 zero year favoured by 14C weirdos.

And in case anyone wants the really nitty gritty details, here’s the nomination I wrote in a sleep deprived haze during the first week of July 2014. Typos and all:

Nomination for Frances Jenner

Dear Division Secretary,
I would like to nominate Frances Elaine Jenner for the GSA’s MGPV division early career award for 2015.  Dr. Jenner is an outstanding young analytical geochemist who has pioneered several novel analytical techniques and applied them to igneous rocks from a wide temporal and geographical range.  Her ability to generate novel, high quality data has allowed her and her colleagues to overturn previous assumptions or hypotheses about a variety of igneous processes, giving us a better understanding of mafic volcanism over the last 3.8 billion years of Earth history.

Upon the completion of her PhD on the nature of Eoarchean rocks (Jenner et al., 2009; Jenner et al., 2013), Dr. Jenner immediately branched out into a new field of study, namely the quantification of “less commonly analyzed elements” in volcanic glasses. One such element is selenium.  In theory, selenium should be a useful proxy for sulfur in systems (such as volcanic glasses) which may have undergone partial degassing, but in practice, there was no standard analytical protocol for measuring this low abundance chalcogenide in silicate materials.  Using the electron microprobe, laser ablation inductively coupled mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS), and the Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP), Dr. Jenner characterized a suite of commonly used reference materials (Jenner et al., 2009). This study remains the only case where the SHRIMP has been used as a negative ion trace element quantification tool.  However, despite developing this novel SIMS technique, she and her colleagues used the SIMS data to devise an analytical protocol to routinely measure selenium using LA-ICPMS. The use of the cheaper, more versatile LA-ICPMS equipment meant that selenium contents of target glasses and minerals could be determined along with other elements of interest in a wholescale manner much more economically than the use of the SHRIMP would allow.

While an analytical specialist may have been content to run this application without too much thought to the geologic implications, Dr. Jenner and her colleagues immediately put it to use in investigating the enrichment of Cu, Ag, and Au in arc-related magmas.  Their “magnetite crisis” paper (Jenner et al., 2010) uses this selenium analytical technique to generate compelling data relating to the trends of these elements with magma evolution.  This dispels the earlier, intellectually unsatisfying notion of a fugitive fluid or vapor phase, clearly showing that magnetite crystallization triggers sulfide saturation by changing the magmatic fO2.

The use of more, higher quality data to reject a long held but data-poor assumption is a hallmark of Dr. Jenner’s research.  Although she has continued to analyze selenium for the purpose of constraining sulfide saturation and chalcogenide behavior (Jenner et al., 2012; Patten et al., 2013), her next major achievement was to roll out the same approach to the rest of the periodic table, and a wider variety of sea floor volcanic glasses.

Jenner and O’Neill (2012b) is a primer for how to analyze most of the periodic table in mafic glasses, with corrections for interfered elements and methods for how to minimize analytical difficulties.  While the analysis of volcanic glasses by LA-ICPMS is not new, this study is remarkable in its thorough examination of issues of normalization and reproducibility which have not necessarily been presented in a single unified study before.

Jenner and O’Neill (2012a) then apply these techniques to hundreds of ocean floor volcanic glasses, yielding a rich, high quality dataset that allows them to realize (O’Neill and Jenner, 2012) that the mid-ocean ridge fractional crystallization model that we were all taught as undergraduates decades ago cannot explain their new, higher quality data, and needs refinement.

Once again, Dr. Jenner and her colleagues develop new tools illuminate a previously underconstrained system, yielding a novel explanation with greater predictive power. This changes the way we think about the main type of magma generation on Earth.

There are quite a few talented young geoscientists who develop new analytical techniques.  And many of them apply them to known areas of scientific debate, to build up or tear down evidence for one or more prevailing hypotheses.  But Dr. Jenner is unusual in having both the analytical skills to devise new approaches and the intellectual agility to find entirely new geological interpretations, which were not even part of the debate before her studies were carried out.

And although Dr. Jenner is very much an analytical geochemist, it is her ability to find the natural rocks to use her procedures on which underpins her success.  While she collaborates extensively with experimental petrologists, she mostly analyses natural samples of diverse provenance.  Working from the Greenland Eoarchean to modern submarine volcanics, her areas of study span more than 95% of the terrestrial rock record in geologic time.  Her onshore field areas range from the periglacial west coast of Greenland to tropical Samoa.  While ocean drilling programs do not fit the stereotypical mold of outcrop hammering and rock licking, they are none-the-less the only way we currently have of accessing the ~70% of our planet’s surface that is under water. And it is her ability to choose the right sample or samples for her new analytical methods which allows her to discover novel petrologic processes.

Finally, it is worth noting that in a competitive field like academic geology, there is an element of luck which is often a contributor to success.  Whether it is happening on just the right rock, or simply having jobs appear in a manner that allows a stable, productive workflow, simple good fortune can often be the difference between a discovery and a confirmation. Dr. Jenner has had, by far, the worst luck of anyone I know with an advanced geology degree.

I have worked in industry and government for the past seven years, so I know many of the situations which result in a person leaking out of the academic pipeline.  Dr. Jenner has experienced a large number of these “career-terminal” events.  But unlike the rest of us, she has forced her way back into the pipeline with a combination of intellectual firepower, gritty determination, and the most dedicated work eithic of anyone I have met in any field. This has allowed her to not just stay employed, but maintain control of her career trajectory, despite her three postdocs and her faculty job being on four different continents.  And despite her hardships, she is one of the most enthusiastic, positive, energetic scientists I know.  This, as much as her academic record, makes her a role model for all young scientists. Frances Jenner would be an inspirational choice for the GSA committee as the inaugural MGPV division Early Career scientist.


Jenner, F.E., Arculus, R.J., Mavrogenes, J.A., Dyriw, N.J., Nebel, O., and Hauri, E.H., 2012, Chalcophile element systematics in volcanic glasses from the northwestern Lau Basin: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 6, p. Q06014.
Jenner, F.E., Bennett, V.C., Nutman, A.P., Friend, C.R.L., Norman, M.D., and Yaxley, G., 2009, Evidence for subduction at 3.8 Ga: Geochemistry of arc-like metabasalts from the southern edge of the Isua Supracrustal Belt: Chemical Geology, v. 261, no. 1-2, p. 83–98.
Jenner, F.E., Bennett, V.C., Yaxley, G., Friend, C.R.L., and Nebel, O., 2013, Eoarchean within-plate basalts from southwest Greenland: Geology, v. 41, no. 3, p. 327–330.
Jenner, F.E., Holden, P., Mavrogenes, J.A., O’Neill, H.S.C., and Allen, C., 2009, Determination of Selenium Concentrations in NIST SRM 610, 612, 614 and Geological Glass Reference Materials Using the Electron Probe, LA-ICP-MS and SHRIMP II: Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research, v. 33, no. 3, p. 309–317.
Jenner, F.E., and O’Neill, H.S.C., 2012a, Analysis of 60 elements in 616 ocean floor basaltic glasses: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 2, p. Q02005.
Jenner, F.E., and O’Neill, H.S.C., 2012b, Major and trace analysis of basaltic glasses by laser-ablation ICP-MS: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 3, p. Q03003.
Jenner, F.E., O’Neill, H.S.C., Arculus, R.J., and Mavrogenes, J.A., 2010, The Magnetite Crisis in the Evolution of Arc-related Magmas and the Initial Concentration of Au, Ag and Cu: Journal of Petrology, v. 51, no. 12, p. 2445–2464.
O’Neill, H.S.C., and Jenner, F.E., 2012, The global pattern of trace-element distributions in ocean floor basalts: Nature, v. 491, no. 7426, p. 698–704.
Patten, C., Barnes, S.-J., Mathez, E.A., and Jenner, F.E., 2013, Partition coefficients of chalcophile elements between sulfide and silicate melts and the early crystallization history of sulfide liquid: LA-ICP-MS analysis of MORB sulfide droplets: Chemical Geology, v. 358, p. 170–188.