Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Book Review - The Two Mile Time Machine, by Richard Alley


The Two Mile Time Machine

Richard Alley

This book is about how you go about learning the past history of the Earth using the secrets frozen in ice. The flippant title refers to one of my favorite descriptions of a geologist’s job: time traveler. Our job is to understand what has occurred in the past, and communicate that to others. This book is about communicating a specific history revealed through a specific technique: the climate history recorded in ice trapped in ice sheets over the past million or so years.

The stable ice sheets of today owe their existence to a local climate that has more yearly ice accumulation than ice removal. Each year’s snow piles up, with specific differences between the snow deposited during winter and that during summer. This allows direct dating of layers, analogous to the new deposition each year of tree rings. These snow layers are not foolproof; perhaps a time of high wind scours a year away, or an especially dry year isn’t even recorded. These problems increase the farther down you go, as the layers thin out under the pressure of the layers above. Even worse than thinning, they begin to flow out towards the continental edges, increasing the noise to signal ratio.

While any geoscientist is familiar with the basics of how ice cores are used, Alley brings us to Greenland with detailed descriptions of what it was like to be on the ground. This is one of the most powerful parts of the book; it’s easy to look at squiggly lines in a paper and nod serenely in wise acknowledgement at their meaning, but it’s a different thing to understand just how hard that data was to collect. This kind of situation can certainly be engaging (see “The Big Bang Theory”, Season II, finale) but rarely do we get the inside story about how it goes down. That kind of isolated situation is the perfect setup for really engaging stories, but the most sordid tale recounted is that of previous year’s scientists driving a snowmobile into an area they weren’t supposed too. You can help but assume that there were more scandalous tales to be told- but whether they didn’t happen by some chance of group dynamics, or Alley’s careful avoidance of the subject, some more interpersonal conflict might have made the book a bit more engaging.

The key portion of this book, just described, finishes up about halfway through. The rest is filled with an increasingly bland description of the data and what it means. Classic literary theory says that a story should have a beginning, middle, and end – the middle, especially should be characterized by increasing tension which is burst at the end and resolved. Straying from this classic formula can be done, and successfully, but more often than not the classic formula is there for a reason: it works. The fact that this is a science book is not an excuse; Stephen J. Gould’s Wonderful Life not only fits in a beginning, middle and end – but also a hero, the noble (at least to us!) Pikaia. Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene weaves a tale about flesh robots and probability into an expose about altruistic behavior, and when the conventional narrative breaks down, he finishes with a bunch of nearly stand-alone chapters that each hit hard – most notably, he coins the word meme – which has entered the popular consciousness regarding the internet. Alley, in contrast, writes competently about the science but manages not to write an engaging book.

The second half of this book does a good job of explaining the science of ice cores, but doesn’t do it better than I probably could have just reading the abstracts of the important papers from the past decade. In that aspect, I’d recommend this book for the educated layman who wants more, but not for a scientist with the knowledge to understand the primary literature (no matter how far afield). Alley does conclude with an excellent dissection of the current state of climate science in the public sphere – which may very well be worth the price of admission.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Mightiest of the crepes

So, Abby has been on a crepe kick. She keeps on making crepes, and all kinds of interesting things get put in there. Becca, upon looking through the cupboard, discovered the best crepe ingredient ever known to man.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Geology of Florida - the Post Office



I've also decided to do a few posts about the local geology, because well, that's what I do. Driving past the post office today, I decided to stop because it's constructed of these fabulous limestone bricks.




All of Florida is basically made of limestone, which in turn is made up of the calcium carbonate detritus of sea creatures. Since the state is now mostly above water, we can conclude that either the water was higher or the landmass was lower in the past. Zooming into the block, we can see that it has a high percentage of corals in it. This is very informative- for the most part, coral doesn't live as far north as Daytona Beach.



But can we tell even more? In this case, we can. Looking closely, we can identify the specific genus - Montastraea. This is a common Caribbean coral that has been living around here for around 10 millions years (maybe more).



However, one more detail is really useful-- this particular Montastraea shows a columnar growth form in places! That means that we're specifically looking at Montastraea nancyi, an extinct form named by John Pandolfi that lived from 600ka to maybe 85ka. This means that the rock we're looking at is the Key Largo limestone, which is loaded with these kinds of corals. The Miami limestone also has abundant corals - but of different species. This shows how handy paleontology is - just looking at the fossils can tell you not only how old a rock is, but where it's from! Clearly, the architect decided to invest in shipping this rock a long distance instead of using anything more local. I think that was a good choice, since it's a pretty cool rock.

PS- The species name "nancyi" means, literally, more than one Nancy. It's names after two well known Nancys that are preeminent in the world of fossil coral - Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institution, and Nancy Budd of the University of Iowa - my MS adviser.

One way to fill time


I picked up a big bag full of delicious on the way home yesterday. What could be inside?



We need to get just a little closer...



Holy smokes thats alotta oysters! A half bushel was 20 bucks at the seafood store, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. Opening oysters isn't difficult, but it does take time.





Grandma took one look at the oysters and started make gross faces. She doesn't like them, but she refuses to try them. Ilmars, on the otherhand, loved them. I earned about 1,000,000 good nephew points.

Grandma continued to pet the cat and look at us woefully while I made my way through several dozen. Need to remember to get more lemon.



Saturday, June 19, 2010

Grandma's room

We started here...



And now we're here.






Yes, they're the same area. You can tell by the lamps.

The other side of grandma's room also needs work. The office is also starting to come together.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Cleaning up

Today was nicely productive. I started cleaning up in Grandma's room, and in the office. Ilmars worked all day in the office, trying to get everything organized.

He came out of the office with a little folio he found, and offered it as a gift.



Pretty cool.

I also found this picture in a broken frame.




I wonder who drew this ship? We'll look a little more closely...




How adorable. Ilmars said he wanted to keep hold of it.

A/C at the other place is supposed to be fixed tomorrow morning, and I need to make a quick run to the hardware store. Everything else seems to be going alright!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Grandma's smile

Meanwhile, a week later...

At this point, Ilmars has made a complete turnaround. I think he’s off alcohol. We’ll see how long it lasts.

The other house is completely rented out, the lease is signed, and I just have a handful of other things that need to be attended too. The A/C guy is coming this afternoon.

This morning, Ilmars got up, did the dishes, made coffee for grandma, put out the recycling, and from there kept on taking care of business. He put some moisturizing lotion on grandma’s face, which was sort of humorous. Ilmars was shaking, and grandma was giving him a face the whole time like a cat in a shower.

The main reason there hasn’t been much writing over the weekend is that I wasn’t here. I spent it in Detroit with Abby’s family. Two big events were happening there; her cousin Ethan was having an engagement party, and her grandmother is moving from there to California. Abby’s grandmother has developed some serious health problems and needs to get surgery. The prognosis isn’t particularly clear, but it’s not good for her. Sadly, I was surprised when we saw her and she knew exactly who I am. I’ve gotten too accustomed to Natalie’s near incoherence.

The only other thing I’m going to write about this weekend is that I’m shocked and aghast at how condescending Abby’s father is towards her brother, Sam. Sam did a really good job at getting into trouble during high school. He is a lot of fun, and also quite awkward. Not surprisingly, he fell into a crowd during high school that was accepting of him and appreciated his fun-loving qualities. What is surprising is how criminal this crowd was.

In any case, flash forward to now, and Sam is in college. He’s joined a fraternity with a dry house, and has dedicated his energies towards that. It’s working great for him. He even has a summer job on campus.

And Abby’s father basically treats him like a moron. Just about anything that comes up in conversation is followed with him questioning, “Do you know what that is, Sam?” The truth is, he’s really interested in the things he’s interested in and knows lots about them. He’s doing landscape work, and he spent a lot of time over the weekend pointing out various plants he knows. It doesn’t really matter that he isn’t up to date on current events; when the time comes that they’re important to them, he’ll master them. Let me master what he wants to. Don’t condescend at him because he has different interests.

It’s obnoxious.

Anyways, back to today.

I get home after a long day trying to get some details squared away at the other place, and Ilmars is having dinner with grandmother. He went grocery shopping, and I help put the food away. We exchange bad beats stories; his about trying to get his car’s brake lights fixed, and mine about trying to get the A/C working over at the other place.

Finally, the first time since last week, I see him get a beer to drink. I wonder if he just naturally does a switch up – one week on a bender, one week off? We hang out and watch the Yankees gang. I make grandma tea before she heads to bed, and we chill. Ilmars is joking and generally pleasant to be around.

Jason called long time family friend Mark Jones, and Mark is really concerned about what’s going on here. At the state Ilmars is right now, I think things would be alright with a little additional effort. We may just need a near-full time person there. Right now, Ilmars seems okay with that. I hope that this works out.