Check out this article: http://www.lajollalight.com/life/266876-one-cool-gift-bassoonist-hopes-to-thank-benefactors-with-trip-to-arctic
Dr. James Swift, from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, is offering up the chance to go on the Coast Guard icebreaker, the Healy, for a research cruise up in the Arctic. All you have to do is donate 25,000 smackaroos or more to the La Jolla Symphony, and you get entered in to the drawing.
Sure glad I study the ocean; I got to go for free :)
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
R.I.P. ABE
This past Friday, March 5, 2010, the AUV ABE was lost during a dive off the coast of Chile. Here is the formal WHOI obituary, I mean announcement, and here is an nice exert highlighting some of ABE's many accomplishments during his life:
Built as a prototype, ABE quickly became a workhorse. It was the first autonomous robot to make detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges, the 40,000-mile undersea volcanic mountain chain at the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates where new seafloor crust is created. It was also the first AUV to locate hydrothermal vents, where hot chemical-rich fluids spew from the seafloor and sustain lush communities of deep-sea life. ABE explored seamounts, undersea volcanoes, and other areas with harsh, rugged terrain. In addition to researchers and students from the United States, ABE advanced research for scientists and engineers from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Italy, Ecuador, and most recently Chile.
Built as a prototype, ABE quickly became a workhorse. It was the first autonomous robot to make detailed maps of mid-ocean ridges, the 40,000-mile undersea volcanic mountain chain at the boundaries of Earth’s tectonic plates where new seafloor crust is created. It was also the first AUV to locate hydrothermal vents, where hot chemical-rich fluids spew from the seafloor and sustain lush communities of deep-sea life. ABE explored seamounts, undersea volcanoes, and other areas with harsh, rugged terrain. In addition to researchers and students from the United States, ABE advanced research for scientists and engineers from Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Italy, Ecuador, and most recently Chile.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Chilean Earthquake Shortens Earth Days
Scientists now estimate that our Earth days are ~ 1.26 millionth of a second shorter. Here is a nifty blog post explaining why.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Look Ma, I Created an Anaglyph!
I just stumbled across a pretty sweet Matlab-framework tool called Mirone that allows you to do all sorts of analyses to various grid/image formats.
If you do not have Matlab, there is a standalone version that runs on Windows. For Mac folks, it will run under Snow Leopard if you have Matlab 2009, but sadly does not seem to work in Matlab 2007 on 10.5.
I am currently running it on my Windows desktop at school using Matlab 2009b and I am pretty impressed. It has a bunch of image processing/geophysical tools at its disposal. In just a few minutes of playing, I was able to open a GMT grid and plot plate boundaries and earthquake epicenters on it.
What mainly got me excited about it was that I was also able to generate a pretty sweet anaglyph. If you have a pair of red-blue glasses, give it a looksie! The area is the Carlsberg Ridge in the Indian Ocean. I recommend double-clicking the image to open it in full-size.
If you do not have Matlab, there is a standalone version that runs on Windows. For Mac folks, it will run under Snow Leopard if you have Matlab 2009, but sadly does not seem to work in Matlab 2007 on 10.5.
I am currently running it on my Windows desktop at school using Matlab 2009b and I am pretty impressed. It has a bunch of image processing/geophysical tools at its disposal. In just a few minutes of playing, I was able to open a GMT grid and plot plate boundaries and earthquake epicenters on it.
What mainly got me excited about it was that I was also able to generate a pretty sweet anaglyph. If you have a pair of red-blue glasses, give it a looksie! The area is the Carlsberg Ridge in the Indian Ocean. I recommend double-clicking the image to open it in full-size.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Maybe I should work at Google...
I love my job. Well, more precisely, I love being a graduate student in oceanography. I get to do amazingly cool research, and get to go to amazingly cool places as well (even the Arctic! - no pun intended). However, every now-and-then I come across something that causes me to daydream about what it would be like to be in a different field. Today's daydream came courtesy of Google and their Google Lat/Long blog.
Recently they rigged up a Google "Street View" snow mobile to give us a true 3d look at the slopes for the upcoming Winter Olympics. People actually got paid to snow mobile around the slopes for a day!!!
Street View Hits the Slopes at Whistler
Recently they rigged up a Google "Street View" snow mobile to give us a true 3d look at the slopes for the upcoming Winter Olympics. People actually got paid to snow mobile around the slopes for a day!!!
Street View Hits the Slopes at Whistler
Evidence confirms mud-volcano was man-made
Mud Volcano Was Man-Made, New Evidence Confirms
This Wired.com article discusses the findings of Richard Davies, director of the Durham Energy Institute and co-author of a new paper in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology. The results of his analysis is that the Lusi mud volcano in Sidoarjo, Indonesia was indeed caused by the drilling company when they pulled their drill out from an unstable hole. Since its first eruption May 29, 2006, Lusi has dumped out 100,000 tons of mud a day. It now covers almost 3 square miles to a depth of 65 feet, and displaced thirty thousand people. The drilling company maintains that an earthquake that occurred 175 miles away on May 27, 2006 is the real cause of the mud volcano, although there is plenty evidence to the contrary.
One of the things I find interesting about this story is that both scientists working for the drill company and independent scientists have papers about this very issue in the journal of Marine and Petroleum Geology. The scientists working for the company all find that the real cause of the volcano was the earthquake, which in turn means that their company should not be held financially responsible. The independent scientists all find flaws with that reasoning and claim that the earthquake could not have been the cause. Clearly, the drill company scientists have every reason to be biased. If their results indicate the drill company was at all responsible, not only would they probably be out of a job, but they would be setting the company up for a huge financial burden. So how can we as a reader, or the journal for that matter, look at this article objectively? It is hard to see it as just another scientific exploration and discussion of a dataset. Furthermore, I am curious if this article mentions that the authors work for the company in question. Surely that disclosure should be made somewhere where the reader can easily find it, shouldn't it?
This brings up whole other questions for me about how science deals with conflict-of-interest pieces such as this. Should journals have more strict peer-review requirements for articles they suspect of having a conflict-of-interest, or should the burden of knowing exactly what we are reading and by who be on the reader? How would this type of issue be handled in a medical journal?
This Wired.com article discusses the findings of Richard Davies, director of the Durham Energy Institute and co-author of a new paper in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology. The results of his analysis is that the Lusi mud volcano in Sidoarjo, Indonesia was indeed caused by the drilling company when they pulled their drill out from an unstable hole. Since its first eruption May 29, 2006, Lusi has dumped out 100,000 tons of mud a day. It now covers almost 3 square miles to a depth of 65 feet, and displaced thirty thousand people. The drilling company maintains that an earthquake that occurred 175 miles away on May 27, 2006 is the real cause of the mud volcano, although there is plenty evidence to the contrary.
One of the things I find interesting about this story is that both scientists working for the drill company and independent scientists have papers about this very issue in the journal of Marine and Petroleum Geology. The scientists working for the company all find that the real cause of the volcano was the earthquake, which in turn means that their company should not be held financially responsible. The independent scientists all find flaws with that reasoning and claim that the earthquake could not have been the cause. Clearly, the drill company scientists have every reason to be biased. If their results indicate the drill company was at all responsible, not only would they probably be out of a job, but they would be setting the company up for a huge financial burden. So how can we as a reader, or the journal for that matter, look at this article objectively? It is hard to see it as just another scientific exploration and discussion of a dataset. Furthermore, I am curious if this article mentions that the authors work for the company in question. Surely that disclosure should be made somewhere where the reader can easily find it, shouldn't it?
This brings up whole other questions for me about how science deals with conflict-of-interest pieces such as this. Should journals have more strict peer-review requirements for articles they suspect of having a conflict-of-interest, or should the burden of knowing exactly what we are reading and by who be on the reader? How would this type of issue be handled in a medical journal?
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Geodesic Distance in ArcMap
One of the things I like about ESRI ArcMap is the ease with which you can measure features in your data. Recently I wanted a a simple way to measure geodesic distances of some projected data. The measure tool in ArcMap, by default, measures distances in projected units in projected data, and geodesic distances only for data displayed in geographic lat/long. If you hold down the shift key while measuring a distance, Arc will calculate geodesic distances regardless of projection. What I really wanted to be able to do, however, was to be able to draw lines in a shapefile, and then have Arc calculate the geodesic distance of those lines. This is something that Arc cannot do, without you first unprojecting (or more correctly, reprojecting) your data to geographic coordinates.
Luckily, I found this: http://137.227.239.67/pigwad/tutorials/scripts/
Luckily, I found this: http://137.227.239.67/pigwad/tutorials/scripts/
Looks like some of the folks at ESRI got together with the USGS a designed a plug-in that will let you, among other things, calculate geodesic distances from projected data. It uses the parameters specified by your projection to unproject the data into geographic coordinates and then calculates the geodesic distance on the fly. Since it uses the semi-major and semi-minor radii that you specify in your projection, the distortion should be minimized. This tool is definitely a time saver, as it does the reprojection for you only on the data you are calculating, and enables you to keep your whole project in projected space.
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