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A graphic designer under the pseudonym "A Common Name" has made some beautiful geode street art. Cruise over to their page to check out all the pics. Below are some highlights.

Check out this really cool real-time wind map of the United States . You won't be able to look away. via @jtotheizzoe :  http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/20117881735/unlikelywords-holy-crap-this-wind-map-is

Hutton Unconformity Scotland is thought by some as the "birthplace of geology" as it is where James Hutton developed the theory of uniformitarianism. Well, it looks like the Scottish Qualifications Authority is looking to cut geology from the high school curriculum. A high school teacher is launching a campaign to stop this from happening. I heard about this through this Reddit thread:  http://www.reddit.com/r/geology/comments/rhokw/help_us_rgeology/ The starter of the thread is inviting people to contribute reasons/arguments as to why cutting high school geology is bad. Feel free to post your thoughts on the reddit thread or here.

I posted a link to this talk back when it was streaming live and now it's finally up for viewing. Dr. Jamie Kirkpatrick, a post doc at UC Santa Cruz, gave a talk at the USGS on pseudotachylites and how we can glean information about past earthquakes from the rock record. Watch the talk here.

Sometimes during lunch or breakfast I like to put on a TED talk. Here Regina Dugan gives an inspiring talk about how removing the fear of failure unleashes the impossible.

Last week the Tectonics class I'm TAing had an extra "throwaway" lecture. We decided to let the students build their own experiments to gain some intuition about Low Reynolds number flows, and what the Reynolds number means. First we showed them a video produced by the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films which was an awesome NSF funded project to develop and film these complex and/or expensive experiments (which can be found on YouTube).  One of my favorite aspects of flow is the phenomenon of low Reynolds number flows. Low Reynolds number flows are flows where inertia plays only a small roll. The Reynolds number is a dimensionless number that can be characterized as: Re = (Density * Length * Velocity) / Viscosity or... Re = Inertia / Viscosity. Generally if the Reynolds number is below 2000 the flow is laminar, greater than 2000 the flow is turbulent. To tie it to geology we helped the students work through an order of magnitude calculation of mantle viscosity. ...

So I finally finished my #SciWrite manuscript. I just submitted a manuscript to G-Cubed: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. The manuscript was based on my undergraduate thesis at UC Santa Cruz on the Yellow Bank Creek Complex, the world's largest known exposed sand injectite complex. It's an amazing outcrop. I'll be writing a field trip guide for the outcrop in the near future, a version of which will be posted here. I'm very excited to finally get it off my desk. Now I can get back to blogging! And onto planning summer field work, grading those labs... Northern side of Yellow Bank Creek Complex outcrop. Yellow-tan sandstone is limonite cemented. Blue-grey sand is dolomite cemented. Also, now that I have a submitted manuscript I updated my CV with it and finally set my McGill webpage live . I have a lot of awesome pictures posted there. Check it out. Please if you have any comments about that site (or this site too!) I'd love to hear feedback. Am I missing someth...

Recently I went on a week long field trip to Texas for a Basin Stratigraphy class. I took along my notes as well as some unrelated papers that I needed to read. By the end of the trip I had lost my notes and the papers. One useful student-thing I got in the habit of doing my senior year at UC Santa Cruz was scanning my class notes. There was a color scanner on the office copy machine that would email me pdfs of my notes. Perfect. I could access my notes from anywhere (via DropBox) and if my notebook exploded, I had back ups. I got out of the habit and am regretting it now. With my notes gone, I'm a bit stuck with nothing to reference back to. So as a quick tip: SCAN YOUR NOTES . CLASS NOTES, THESIS NOTES, WHATEVER. Not only will you be able to access them anywhere, but you'll have a backup. Do it.

Artists rendition of a Bergship War brings out the best in people. Okay, so that needs some explanation. What I mean here is that solutions that would normally be labeled ridiculuous or insane are considered plausible and explored with fervor. Which brings me to World War 2, icebergs, aircraft, glacial flow, and an awesome paper from 1948. Note: The following information is taken from Perutz 1948. By the Fall of 1942 a major disadvantage of the Allies was a lack of air support. Any invasion of a far off land would be held back by the lack of air support until the Allies could establish airfields. Therefore the cheap construction of gigantic aircraft carriers was considered. Mr. Geoffrey Pyke submitted a plan in October of 1942 where he proposed that an iceberg should be hollowed out to shelter aircraft and leveled to provide a runway. This craft would travel at a few knots. Pykrete ship design Why make a boat out of ice? Well for one it would unsinkable. Ice is difficult to break w...