My Wonder List

There are things that puzzle GG and this is a partial list that will be updated from time to time.

Mountains that Remade America

For those who come hoping to see material related to the Grumpy Geophysicist’s trade book on the Sierra Nevada, The Mountains that Remade America, here are a few quick pointers. The paperback version came out in February 2020.

Disneyland on the Mountain (book review)

Since GG completed his tome on the Sierra, a few books have come out that fill out some of the history GG had focused on. This is the second one on Mineral King GG has become aware of (after Dawn at Mineral King Valley). While Dawn at Mineral King Valley was tightly focused on the legal action, this book looks more broadly. This is partially possible because the Disney archives have become accessible, and in part because the authors are looking beyond the usual protagonists.

The Mineral King story has often been told in a one-sided manner. The Disney side pretty much wanted to forget it ever happened (as GG noted in his book, an NPS employee who had sought to buy the main parcel from Disney was greeted with a company seeming to not know anything about the purchase), so the volumes on Disney skipped Mineral King or left it as a small sidelight to an otherwise successful career. The cabin residents in Mineral King were sidelined in the stories written from the Sierra Club side, maybe in part because the Club and the cabin owners would disagree after the valley was put into Sequoia. This book helps to overcome those slights.

Counting

Hard to believe that athletic leagues represent groupings of institutions of higher learning…

With the imminent demise of the Pac-12 conference (even if Oregon State and Washington State continue to use the name), we will be left with the uniformly, decidedly stupid naming of three of the remaining four “big” (er, sorry, “power”) athletic conferences. The Big Ten last had 10 members in 1989; it had 11 from 1990-2010, when it went to 12 (while at that same time the Big 12 went to 10 members); a couple years later (2014) it went to 14 and with the demise of the Pac-12, the Big Ten will go later this year to…18 members. Which is, GG supposes, what “10” represents in, um, base-18. Meanwhile, the Big 12, which grew from the Big 8 in 1996 (which had 8 teams) last had 12 members in 2011, when it dropped to 10 members, that number staying constant until last year, when it skipped 12 to get to 14, and later this year will approach the Big Ten with…16 members. Too bad they didn’t get to 18, as “12” in hexadecimal is 18 base-10. It isn’t just counting that seems to challenge these organizations; the Atlantic Coast Conference will be welcoming Stanford and Cal, neither of which is remotely close to the Atlantic coast (but they too will shortly have 18 members and so could score the Big 18 name if they really wanted to…or they could decide to acknowledge geography and drop “Atlantic” from the league name).

(Good luck dropping down to the next level of conferences and leagues where it seems to be musical chairs between leagues for many schools).

Probably the most shocking thing is the big conference that seems to understand both counting and geography is the Southeast Conference, whose school are all pretty much in the southeastern U.S.

You have to wonder if either numerically-named league has contemplated adding just a few more members to become…the Big Score!

Looking back at the Anthropocene

Hi, future geologists. Maybe you’ve stumbled across some million-year old writings that dismissed the idea of an Anthropocene Epoch. Yeah, you’re puzzled because that is a pretty solid division of time from your perspective…of course you also got rid of this Holocene/Pleistocene boundary too, because, really? The Holocene is hardly more than a small burp within the Pleistocene, at least that fragment not in the Anthropocene.

Those old writings focus on whether the line for the Anthropocene was when the first megafauna perished in Europe or Australia or North America. Or when forests were cleared for farming. Or when Roman smelters first led lead to waft into the Arctic. Or when carbon isotopes got really strange, or elements that should have been off the edge of the periodic table showed up. Or when calcite started dissolving at shallower depths in the ocean. From your end of the temporal telescope, this is all rounding error stuff. After all, the extinction event at this time was one of the biggest ever. Sure it took a few years; most of these sorts of things do, so those old arguments seem rather trivial disagreements.

Of course, the arguments in these old writings is about the Anthropocene Epoch, but you have the Anthropocene Era, a higher level distinction. Or maybe you prefer Anthropozoic, as after all, the big extinction events bounded the Mesozoic on each end and it seems these Eras like to be “-zoic”s. Of course your name is likely different. After all, the Cenozoic, the “Age of Mammals” is not the “Age of Chicxulub” or “Age of Deccan Traps”, so probably this Era shouldn’t be the “Age of Humans”…but from our end, it is hard to know who the winners will be.

So kind of just was well we didn’t adopt that Anthropocene title.

Remember when…?

Yeah, GG is old and feeling it these days. Maybe some of you remember:

• pay phones?
• asking directions in a strange town?
• when “tick tock” was spelled that way and meant “hurry up already!”?
• when phones were used for talking to people?
• when you’d worry about people talking to nobody near them? [Hmm, maybe that is coming back]
• states actually provided the bulk of financial support for state schools?
• when you could walk to an airport gate with your friend who was the one traveling?
• when you named something and then worried about an acronym?
• (LA special) when you’d say you’d drive on the Ventura Freeway, the Santa Ana Freeway, the San Diego Freeway, etc?
• camping in Yosemite without an advance reservation?
• test patterns after television sign-offs?
• er, sign-offs?
• moon landings? [hmm, maybe that is coming back, too]
• cash registers?
• cash?
• coins?

There’s plenty more (easy pickings: restaurants, hairstyles, clothing) but these just struck GG as he was walking around today and thought you might be cheered up if you don’t feel as old as you did before reading this list…

Trivia

Just what is trivial? And is it the same as trivia? If you’ve engaged in one of those bar trivia contests, you’ve probably been trying to remember a song lyric, a movie star’s least significant role, the year some country changed its name and so on. And you know, that stuff is trivial in so many ways. So what does that say about the stuff they don’t dare ask about because nobody would get the answer?

About as close to GG’s research as these questions are apt to get are things like “what is the layer between the crust and core in the Earth?” or “which of the following minerals is an ore for iron.” Odds are pretty solid that you won’t see questions about the deepest Moho in the U.S., or the age of the Rockies. So does that make this stuff sub-trivial, of absolutely no value, or is it something else?

The Earth Transformed: Book Review

Reading this book took GG back to his grad student days. At one point GG decided that there was an important story in the geology of the Sierra Nevada, and so he read everything about that geology (both easier and harder than now, as the literature is now larger but the access so much easier). He then cobbled it all together in a manuscript that he gave to his advisor to read. And said advisor drowned the manuscript in red ink, but the main point was to say, how did all this combine to produce some new insight? While many advisors would have simply shrugged and allowed such a thesis chapter to go forward as an unpublishable demonstration of having read a lot, GG’s advisor saw some utility and pointed out ways to take all this reading and make a scientific paper out of it.

Having plowed through Peter Frankopan’s encyclopedic The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story, GG is very much reminded of his red-ink-soaked draft from years ago. Frankopan in essence is recovering all human history in slightly under 700 pages. With all footnotes banished to the web (what would be a normal addition of 212 pages), GG is impressed that Frankopan is described as a best-selling author (he is suspicious that the metric is pounds of books more than numbers of books, but even so, far beyond GG’s reach). Now online reviews laud this as scholarly and timely and vast. It is all those things. GG would add, it is also in need of both an editor and a real sense of how to develop an argument.

A Subtle Transition

Been busy with other things, but have been watching for this exceptionally subtle moment in the sky.

We are very sensitive to sunrise and sunset. So we in the northern hemisphere do notice when sunset starts getting later in December well before the solstice. And, as you might recall, this is largely a function of solar noon getting later in the day in December. Unlike sunrise and sunset, solar noon doesn’t exactly make a big impression. But it is going to tweak sunrise and sunset and so the change in noon is worth notice.

Now for the past three and a half months, solar noon has been getting later. As a result, the gains in length of day have been asymmetric. Sunset here in Boulder is 5:40 pm, about an hour later than at 4:35 when the earliest sunset occurred in early December. But sunrise of 6:47 am is only 34 minutes earlier than the latest sunrise of 7:21. Basically the motion of solar noon getting later stole about 15 minutes from sunrise and added it to sunset. A most welcome cosmic decision for many of us in the darkest days of the year.

But that is now changing. Solar noon has started to drift back; about five days ago it hit its latest time of about 12:14 pm MST. With the sub solar point now nearing the equator, the daily motion of that point isn’t enough to overcome the tilt and rotation of the axis (see the graphics here). So going forward, while both sunset gets later and sunrise earlier, the early bird will see the effects of the changing seasons more rapidly. So at the equinox in a month, sunrise of 6:04 am MST (7:04 MDT) is 43 minutes earlier than sunrise now while sunset will only advance 31 minutes to 6:11 pm MST (7:11 MDT). This will continue into early May, when solar noon will be at its earliest and start to once again become later, which at the summer solstice will push the latest sunset out a week after the solstice.

In a way, both early winter and early summer steal some late day sunlight from spring and fall because at both solstices the solar noon is getting later. (There are differences remaining due to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit). So now it is payback as sunrise gets the extra light…

If you come across a really thorough sundial, you will see all this in the panel showing how to correct for the migration of solar noon (in this case, the sundial at CU Boulder has a flat panel on either side showing how to correct sun time to standard time).

The John Garrey Tippit Memorial Sundial at UCB Boulder. Morn, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Fault that Didn’t Slip

One of the more famous observations of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes was to recognize that something that should have happened did not happen: a dog didn’t bark when some people entered a building. Recognizing the absence of an event is just as significant as observations that are unusual (and more typical of the genre).

So GG would like to offer the case of the fault that didn’t slip.

Oops

Every now and then we’ll do some science and publish it and then march on…only to stumble across something we neglected. Then the question is, is what we did wrong? Does it matter? Is it really a modification, a clarification?

Yeah, this is where GG is at the moment.

OK, the back story. Grumpy and his colleagues and students have worried about the origin of the High Plains now for awhile and his then-student Kyren Bogolub and he published a paper that sought to see just how much of the modern elevation is unexplained by the additional sediment piled on top of the last pre-Laramide sea level deposits. To do this, we took out the weight of the sedimentary rocks above this marker unit (the Dakota Frm) and let things pop back up, doing this with a 2-d flexural approach. The net result was that areas like Denver east to Limon sit about 1 km higher than they would have back in the Cretaceous. This kilometer of excess elevation we termed cryptic topography and is presumably caused by changes to the lithosphere in the past 80 million years or so [GG tends to dismiss modern dynamic topography here owing to the near zero free-air gravity anomalies across the plains].

So far, so good. What did we leave out? Well, there were always a lot of caveats, especially with removing the load from the mountains to the west, but that was all mentioned. What wasn’t mentioned was that we never restored the Dakota and underlying units to their mid-Cretaceous thicknesses. (Reviewers also missed this, though they were asking about compaction effects in the modern densities used to estimate the post-Dakota load). Does this matter?

Crazy Grades

Grades are one of the negative aspects of teaching. In some ideal world, you’d not get grades, you would just have learned stuff. Maybe not as much as others, maybe more, and it would show up when you tried to use that material. Be that as it may, for most of us university faculty, grades are a reality. So we try to make it so that those who have mastered the material get As and those who have managed to grasp some of the material get Cs or Ds. Fs are usually reserved for those who simply aren’t there.

Students put far more weight on grades than they should (probably because parents and financial support people care so much). How much do they worry? At a professional committee meeting, one of the members, when introducing themselves, added “oh, and [GG] over there gave me the only grade below an A in my career.” That was about 20 years ago. Obviously that non-A long ago didn’t crater this individual’s career…but it certainly was remembered. Which is probably why we do stupid things with grades.