That's right... I'm moving my posts off of LiveJournal and onto my own webhost and domain. I'm also shifting the focus. I used this blog to talk about what I was learning with respect to (mostly) Geology. But why stop there? My new blog is for recording what I learn on all sorts of subjects ( Read more... )

I'm at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union here in San Francisco, California. I find that I recognize, and even understand, more and more of the session title keywords each year, like "flat slab subduction" and "seismic tomography" and "vadose zone." I definitely still speak Geology as a second language, but it's satisfying to note ( Read more... )

And finally TEWNA draws to a close. We'd covered so much material in the class that it seemed impossible to determine which handful of topics our professor would select for his final exam questions. That mystery has now been resolved. The topics were:

1. Label a bunch of stuff on a map.
2. What happened at 750 Ma? (Ma = Mega-annum or "millions of ( Read more... )

I just slogged through three lectures of material, studying for the final for this class (bringing my total to six of 12 lectures reviewed). There's a certain surreal feeling about paging through the slides (60-100 slides per lecture) and finding it almost impossible to imagine what kind of exam questions they might inspire. Is he going to ask us ( Read more... )

Yesterday was our final class of the semester. It focused on the Columbia River Flood Basalts and the Yellowstone hotspot -- exciting, fascinating stuff, made all the more so due to the rampant arguments and dissension that surround these topics! There seems to be no consensus about how continental flood basalts actually form, and whether ( Read more... )

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Class on 10/18 began to move us from the Mesozoic into the Cenozoic. The lecture focused on a variety of different hypotheses about what was going on at the western edge of North America in this time period, including:

• Forearc slivering caused by oblique subduction: This is a rather basic analysis of what happens if the subducting plate comes in ( Read more... )

Class on 10/11 covered some puzzling areas of the western coast of the U.S., most of which involve rocks that are significantly out of place. (The puzzles involve coming up with explanations for how they got there. No deus ex machinas allowed.)

1. The Franciscan Melange. "Melange", according to our professor, is a French word for "dog's ( Read more... )