All Over Bar the Dissertation

California Nebula

Well folks.  It's all over bar the dissertation...   I took my last two exams on Wednesday and Thursday, and I'm not too unhappy about the way they went, so I celebrated last night with a trip to California, that is to say The California Nebula...

Techno Techno Techno...

Cygnus area fron Dark Site X

The patience that must once have been required to be an astro photographer is is definitely of the same order of magnitude as the proverbial saint.  Back in the old days for a start, the astro phot had to know one end of a camera from another - now don't get me wrong - an astro phot still has to know one end of a camera from another, but one of the crucial differences between then and now is that back in the day, the astro phot had to get it right first go, by application of skills and knowledge honed with practice.  Today, the same applies, but if you don't like what you've just taken, you can just delete it and start again.   Even today, your choice of camera can have a big impact on your results.  I used to shoot with Olympus, which, while they were great daylight cameras, were far too noisy for astro.  I am now on my second Canon (they control the noise much more effectively) and I cant complain about the results, and the update (a 550d) is am improvement on my previous Canon - an entry level 1000d.  Back in the day your astro phot had to devise ingenious methods of keeping track of the rotation  of the Earth - that way stars were pinpricks of light not streak - no all you have to do is have the right sort of tripod head - aside from setting it up correctly, all the hard work has been done by the R&D departments at various equipment manufacturers.  Back in the day, the astro phot like as not had to spend hours in the darkroom developing his image, using skills that are rapidly disappearing as there are less darkroom spaces available and less companies making the equipment to stock them.  Besides, now there is Photoshop (for the adventurous) and a host of drag and drop, do it all for you image post production applications for the less adventurous.  Who needs a dark room? 

One thing we all need though is more dark sites.  I have already wittered on about dark sites in an earlier post, so I wont bore you now, but if you find a good one, it may be worth keeping it to yourself, taking time to get to know the locals (so they know who the wierdo standing out there in the dark and the freezing cold is).

A Dance on a Volcanoes Edge Part 1

El Tiede from Los Roques Garcia

One goes through life accumulating ambitions, and some of those ambitions will come to fruition, but quite a lot remain unfulfilled. So to tick off an ambition, even at great financial or personal cost is a good thing, and the first time is always the best, even if subsequent occasions have much to recommend them. Since rebooting my geology ambitions, I have harboured the idea that it would be good to see a live volcano. I'd seen British volcanoes (the most recent of which last erupted when the North Atlantic started to rift), but I wanted to seen the real deal. After a difficult summer of Level 2 geoscience (How naive was I? Thinking level 2 was difficult!), I decided a reward for all my hard work was in order and that ticking off a volcano was that reward.

El Tiede is the tallest peak in Spain and an active (if currently slumbering) volcano. It is situated on Tenerife and stands as an imposing presence at the Southern end of the island. Tenerife is one of the Canary Islands and being far from any plate boundaries is and example of a hot spot volcano resulting from a mantle plume – a flow of anomalously hot mantle material flowing up and out from under the western side of the African continental crust. My trip was planned to coincide with Maria getting back from Sudan, so we could have a holiday together, and tick a whole lot of boxes at the same time – volcano, whale watching, Astro stuff, etc.

Accommodation was a small friendly hostel run by an Austrian named Manfred tucked away on the North side of the island. All we had to do in a restaurant was to mention that we were staying at Casa Manfred and free food and drinks would start to appear on our table – It's not what you know, it's who you know.

El Tiede from Casa Manfred

I had toyed with the idea of going up El Tiede in the cable car like a tourist, but it was shut, so our hand was forced. We had applied for and gotten summit passes, which you have to do, but we were going to have to do it the hard way. Luckily, you can gain about three fifths of the required height above sea level in the car, up the gloriously twisty-turny road up to the caldera. Once inside the caldera things level off and you are surrounded by miles of lava fields, with the main cone of El Tiede always present. Off to the left as you drive up the road is the Observatory, high up on the rim of the caldera, in a place were the sweep of the sky is broken only by the looming presence of El Tiede to its south.

The Observatory on the rim of the caldera

From the parking space, the initial walk up the hill crosses a mass of scoria pebbles – this zigzags back and forth through this terrain for a couple of kilometers before starting to level off prior to the first big climb. This climb slogs its way through one of the more recent lava fields – hell on the knees, and starting to gasp for breath. It's a steep climb in a relatively short distance to reach the mountain refuge at Alta Vista. People will often stop there overnight and then get an early morning start to see the sun rise over the summit – not us though we were on a time line we wanted to get to the top for our allotted slot, as determined by our summit pass. A short break for food, water and photographs, and we were back on out way through the next set of lava fields. Although they were less steep, they did seem to go on for ever, and I was discovering by now that I really was no mountain goat.

View from Alta Vista Refuge

At a junction in the path, a left turn took me back towards the top cable car station. This again seemed to take an age to come into view, but once in sight, we were on the finishing straight. At this point I was really expecting to see a little Spanish fellow in a national park employees uniform sitting in a shack ready to stamp my summit pass. The reality could not have been further from the truth – the place was deserted. We probably could have gone up without having a pass at all. The final climb up the smouldering cinder cone is one of the most amazing things I have done. Throughout the steep climb, you are surrounded by gases and steam; Black flows of obsidian snake down the slope; exotic suites of minerals crystallise from the continuously venting gases forming light honeycomb structures; the small of the sulphur dioxide stings the throat and lungs forcing you to breath shallowly and shuffle just a few steps at a time before stopping for a rest.

Eventually, the summit ridge comes into view, and you scramble across a jumble of sulphur laden boulders that make up the rim of the crater. The crater steams and belches gas, but the wind whips it away to join with the clouds that are for the first time marring the view. The realisation that I am dancing on a volcanoes edge is quite intoxicating. Below my feet is a pipeline to the depths of the Earth.

An obsidian flow

Looking north from the summit

The Crater

El Tiede eggs

El Tiede and Roques Garcia

A busy bit of the sky

Milky Way in the region of Cassiopeia

It has been a busy old year, what with working on Open University B.Sc Geoscience level 3, and having to hold down an ever more stressful job, hey that's life, and I have found time amongst all that to do a few stargazing sessions (when I could actually see them, which let's face it has not been all that often this summer).  The standard of my imaging kit has gradually improved, and the investments are paying off.  The milky way is a busy bit of the sky and we're in it.  It's our neighborhood.  So from bottom left say hello to some of the neighbors - Heart and Soul Nebula's, The Double Cluster, The Pacman Nebula, Cedarblad 214, and a bunch of other stuff.   It was photographed from Chippy Airfield on a cloudless July night (One of the few).  Below is the Cygnus section of the milky way taken on the same night.  All in all a good night to say "Open Uni work, what Open uni work?"

Cygnus section of the Milky Way

The neighbors in this one are the Elephants Trunk Nebula, the tiny Cocoon Nebula, the North America Nebula, the Pelican Nebula, the Butterfly Nebula, the Crescent Nebula, and the Veil nebula.

Milkyway

It's our galaxy.  The Milkyway is our galactic neighborhood.  The image here is taken with Hydrogen Alpha filtration allowing the camera to see what is invisible to the naked eye.  It is the area of the constellation Cygnus and is very rich with wispy nebulosity - The North America and Pelican Nebulas are at the top left of the image, the Butterfly below and right of them, and right again is the tiny (in cosmological terms) Crescent Nebula.  The whole image is shot through with unnamed gassy wisps, and towards the bottom left is the feint crescent of the Veil Nebula.

Moho Mojo

Serpentine at Dolar Point

Day 1

I woke up. Had breakfast, packed my last bits of clobber – bag with geo hammer, various chisels, hand lens, compass-clinometer, square protractor, surveyors note book, as well as other toys – cameras, astrotrac (incase the clouds clear), ukulele, clothes, fruity malt loaf. All the essentials. Set up various lights on timers so it looked like I was at home randomly wasting electricity. Gave the neighbours the spare key.

The sun was shining, what could possibly go wrong? Four and a half hours later, my car started to make a most distressing squealing noise which stopped for a while when I tapped the brakes and then started up again ten seconds later. Not good. I did the last 20 miles expecting a wheel to fall off.

Coverack was the last word in quaint. It also has zero mobile phone reception. Some people – even me some of the time – would call this a blessing, but right there and then, I needed to call the RAC. Lucky me – Hostels International put payphones in their establishments. Half an hour later the man from the RAC was jacking my car up. He couldn't see a problem with the brakes, or anything else that should make a squeal, so he took it for a spin. Three miles later, he pronounced that there is nothing wrong with it. It's like going to the bloody doctors. Well I didn't imagine the squeal!!

Moho under water

Ah well, I'm was here at least – The centre of the earth. Well not quite. Coverack has the unique distinction of having a sequence of rocks exposed that represent the transition from the earths mantle to the earths crust (known in geoscience as the Mohorovicic discontinuity or Moho for short), and as a geoscientist I was here to see it. A problem immediately became apparent. It was at that moment, under water, and the tide would not be all the way out for another 5 hours. Bugger! Scrambling over the rocks behind the the lifeboat station (now a restaurant) at Dolar Point enabled me to get up close and personal with the mantle, and despite the dire predictions of a salty old sea dog who was fixing his foc'sle or something at the slipway, the tide had turned and after an hour or so there was a widening strip of pebble strewn beach to examine, but as the light was failing, I thought it might be more productive to visit in daylight.

Day 2.

Serpentine Pebbles

Breakfast at the hostel with a nice family from Wales was followed by a short walk down to the beach. It rained briefly. At last luck was with me – the tide was out and the sun started shining. I started my traverse from the harbour north of Dolar Point. What is immediately apparent is that the simple layer cake sequence I had imagined Peridotite/serpentine – Troctolite-gabbro- basalt, would not be immediately apparent. Hundreds of years of sub-aerial exposure followed by exposure to sea water had ensured that the shore line rocks possessed a routine brown-black colour – that's all of them. This was of course not strictly true. On closer inspection of both the exposures themselves and the adjacent pebbles it was possible to track the differences. The mind blowing realization that I was walking across the Moho (!!!) was tempered by the obvious fact that hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people had already done so at Coverack over the years – it is a small seaside town – there is a beach – the equation is simple enough... (Sloshing seawater) x (sand and pebbles) = (screaming children)/(dog walkers)... But enough ruining my Moho Mojo! I've crossed the Moho and I knew I was doing it – so there!

Bastite Serpentine with Chrysotile (white asbestos) veins

To walk at low tide from the picturesque little harbour to the northern end of the beach takes you from the depths were the mantle peridotite reacted with water and heat to form the more easily flowing serpentine; across the Moho, represented at Coverack by the unfamiliar mottled red cumulate rock troctolite, the boundary between the mantle and the crust; and into the course grained mafic lower crust represented by gabbro and basalt dykes. All of it helpfully squeezed up 10km from the earths depths and laid end on at Coverack beach for those in the know to walk over and wonder at. The reality is not as clear cut. The exact points were mantle ends – Moho begins – Moho ends – crust begins are blurred by erosion, cross cutting intrusions this way and that, and a couple of geological imposters (several huge lumps of gabbro and basalt that appear were no gabbro or basalt should be – the remains of a former coastal defensive structure).

Gabbro Veins

Basalt dyke

Moving swiftly on. A short car journey (in the car with nothing wrong with it!!), in a howling gale and hideous rain shower, took me to the basement, the rocks onto which this slab of ophiolite was thrust at the closure of the Rheatic ocean. This is a sequence of what were once volcanics. The heat and pressure created by the collision of two continent sized sections of crust re-assembled the minerals into forms that were stable in such extreme conditions. The result is seen at Lizard Point itself – Man o war gneiss. This rock has been through a lot, and one look at the painful contortions that can be seen in the rocks at Lizard is enough to tell a double story – First of all the heat and pressure that caused the minerals to reconstitute themselves into gneiss in the first place, and then a pressure so great that it can cause solid rock to bend! The tide was coming in rapidly, and the swell was big, and the shower had started again, so finding a piece of Man o war gneiss on the tiny swatch of beach below the old lifeboat station was exciting, but I got a little bit with a nice s-bend in it to illustrate the meaning of pressure.

Contorted Man o war gneiss at Lizard

During yet another shower, food with the nice family from Wales who seemed to have adopted me by this time was eaten in a cafe at the top of the path. This was followed by a trip to Mullion Cove were exists the geological frontier between the materials from the mantle and ocean floor, and the sediment into which they smashed. The resulting rock is hornblend schist, and the cliffs on the north side of the cove are made of it, whereas those on the south shore are serpentine. By now the tide was 95% in, which left a strip of harbour beach about yeah wide on which to find a sample of hornblend schist, and it was getting more exciting by the second as huge waves raced to meet me and the frequent showers (did I mention the frequent showers?) turned to hail stones. Another bracing British seaside day. After several advances into the fray, and a corresponding number of retreats, I had a worthwhile sample of the hornblend schist and the serpentine, oh and wet feet too. The storm was getting worse, and I thought that discretion was probably the better part of valour. An almost endless phalanx of rain heavy clouds marched in from the Atlantic like an invading army, I was soaked to the skin, and I thought my day was about over.

Serpentine from Mullion Cove

Day 3

I got up. It was raining heavily. I went home.

Global Warming

Fossil Coral (Miocene) from Zanzibar

There's a lot of unnecessary clap-trap talked about global warming.  By that I'm not talking about the patently hilarious, visually stunning scenarios presented by the overblown Hollywood offering The Day After Tomorrow, or the similarly hilarious attempt by ex-vice-president Al Gore to present himself as some sort of eco-warrior (eco-crusader?  eco-messiah?), well intentioned as it was.  I'm not even talking about the barely concealed climate change denial exhibited on an infrequent basis on Top Gear.

No, what I'm talking about is the oft recycled argument that global warming has happened many times in the past and therefore it's not our fault.  The issue here is not whether it has happened in the past or not, the issue is are we a contributing factor.

Many or the people who are the strongest proponents of this point of view are the same American Christian Right-Wing oil baron types who also insist that evolution is a bunch of hogwash and the Lord made the heavens and Earth in six days before taking a break and having a Kit Kat on the 7th - the irony here being that on the one hand they condemn the science of Evolution, and on the other they misuse the scientific evidence of sequence stratigraphy and paleontology to justify their assertion that there is no need to change their wasteful and destructive ways.

The fossil coral in the picture above is from one of those warmer periods in the Earths history - about 25 million years ago - It tells a tale of warm shallow seas, close to a river delta, but the rock strata from which this fossil came also tells a tale of the time scale over which this warming trend happened - tens of millions of years!  By comparison, it has taken about 300 years to warm the Earth in a similar manner since the start of the industrial revolution.  And we have absolutely nothing to do with it?  Really?