Thursday, November 15, 2007
Dear Get Your Science On,
It started a few months ago. You are I were doing good together, but face it, we had become routine. I write you Tuesdays and Fridays, and you…well, you’re a blog so you don’t do much of anything. I’ll admit that my typing fingers longed for another challenge even as we discussed isotopes and iron fertilization and earthquakes and I just wanted something more. Then along came Sketch Writing Class. Sexy, time-consuming, Sketch Class. I thought to myself, “I’ve never been with a Sketch Class before. I wonder if it’s like how everyone says it’s like”. I couldn’t resist the allure of something so different, so non-scientific. I enrolled. I enrolled, but I immediately regretted my decision! My humor doesn’t translate well to a 3 page sketch. I don’t care about “the game” or “buttons”. I don’t want to sit around a table and spend 3 hours listening to other people’s sketches, especially when there’s nobody cute to look at. But the saddest part is that all my sketches were about science and nerds and field trips. I couldn’t escape you. The whole time I was with Sketch Class, I was thinking about you.
I’m so sorry, Get Your Science On!!! How could I ever betray you? I don’t want to be with Sketch Class anymore, I want to be with you. Let’s go back to the way things were, huh? Just forget about all this nonsense and go somewhere nice. Take a vacation together. Please, just take me back and I promise things will be how they were before I met Sketch Class.
I miss you.
Love always,
Tabitha
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Places of Interest
The Salton Sea:
Yellowstone National Park:
Yellowstone is a SUPERVOLCANO! Or Supaire Volcano. Yellowstone Park in northwestern Wyoming sits atop a large caldera that heaves and hoes up and down about 1.5 centimeters per year. This “breathing” in and out of the caldera makes me nervous, for one, but is indicative of what’s going on in the magma chamber below. As pressure increases and decreases, the land rises and falls. This will happen until the caldera explodes and obliterates everything from here to kingdom come. The good news is that eruptions are estimated to be several hundreds of thousands of years apart. We humans can blow ourselves up by then, thank you very much Yellowstone.
Willamette Valley, Oregon:

What’s so interesting about this little valley? Well, besides being a rich and bountiful place to grow agriculture, this valley was formed by the backlogging of water after the Great Missoula Floods. The Missoula Floods are floods of unimaginable proportion that roared across western North America at the end of the last glacial – about 18,000 years ago. Seriously, you can’t even imagine how crazy huge these floods were. So huge that the entire Willamette Valley served as a holding tank for water that was dumping into the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River. Looking at the satellite image gives you some perspective of how much water that must have been. It was a lot. Like, a lot a lot.
See, places can be fun sometimes!
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
I've got a fire in my heart for you, California
If you’ve been living underground for the past week, you’ve missed the pseudo Apocalypse that has born down upon Southern California. FIRE SEASON. I grew up in Southern California and can remember years and years of yellow skies and soot dust and chapped lips and sneezing. Fire Season coincides with the appearance of the Santa Ana Winds, also known as The Winds That Drive Everybody Apeshit.

Adiabatic compression means that when you squeeze something, it heats up. You should be somewhat familiar with this if you’ve ever pumped up a bike or car tire. Even though you’re not heating the tire directly, pressurizing the gas inside increases the tire’s temperature. The diagram above illustrates this point with a Pressure vs. Volume plot which includes two isotherms (or lines of constant temperature). Any point that lives on an isotherm has the same temperature even if it has a different pressure and volume than a neighboring point. Adiabatic change means that you’re going to jump from one isotherm to another by changing your volume or pressure. Increase in volume and you decrease the pressure, so you’ll jump to a lower isotherm (cooling). Decrease the volume and you’ll increase the pressure, in which case you’ll move up to a higher isotherm (heating).
That’s why the Santa Ana Winds are so gosh darn hot and dry. Until next time, keep safe out there, gang.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Again with the Iron
You might be asking, “Wait a minute, lady. If phytoplankton are so great and iron in the ocean is so scarce, why don’t those phytoplankton evolve already and use something else that is more abundant? Like, Magnesium, or whatever.” Good point. Iron availability in the oceans is down around the part per billion concentrations, so why do organisms still use it? The answer is that iron is such a great electron acceptor, phytoplankton make due with the little that is around. The whole subject of electron donors and acceptors and how biology makes use them gets a little complicated. It deals with things like enzymes and biochemical pathways and other biological topics I don’t really understand. Biologists understand these things, so touché Biologists. You’ve bested me at understanding chemosynthesis, but I’ll smoke you when it comes to Eulerian and Lagrangian water transport.
Iron comes in two flavors: Ferrous and Ferric. Ferrous iron (Fe+2) is soluble, meaning that it will hang out in the ocean until some little critter or phytoplankton snatches it up. Ferric iron (Fe+3) is insoluble, meaning that it will form a molecule with something else (usually oxygen) and “precipitate” out of solution. Ferric iron is pretty much useless to phytoplankton. They are beggars AND choosers in this game.
Up until about 2 billion years ago, the Earth’s oceans were anoxic (lacking oxygen). Ferrous iron was super abundant in the Earth’s early ocean because there was no oxygen around that would oxidize it. All of the little algae and cyanobacteria and whatever else that was evolving prior to 2 billion years ago loved having all this Ferrous iron around, they were in hog heaven! That is, until photosynthesis showed up. Photosynthesis ruined the Ferrous iron party by pumping the atmosphere full of free oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen ended up in the oceans by way of air-sea gas exchange and all that lovely, useful Ferrous iron was oxidized to Ferric iron. It precipitated out of the Earth’s oceans and created something that geologists know as “Banded Iron Formations”
These formations can be found in places like Australia. The bands are layers of iron oxides (rust!) that sank all the way down to the seafloor as photosynthesizers oxidized the Earth’s atmosphere all those billions of years ago. So on the one hand we can thank those prehistoric photosynthesizers for filling our atmosphere with oxygen, but on the other hand they kinda shot themselves in the proverbial foot by creating a world where Ferrous iron is in short supply.But, like I said, iron is so great at what is does that biology makes due with what little is around. Biologists even have a term for the overindulgence of iron by phytoplankton – it’s called “luxury” uptake. Luxury, not in the sense of a Diatom relaxing on the tiniest chez lounge you can imagine, but in the respect that it will take up more iron than it needs and store it for later use. Whenever I hear the term "luxury uptake" I can only think about obese single celled organisms wearing monocles and driving Rolls Royces. Luxury, ha ha.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Iron, man
So what’s the deal with iron anyways? Well, phytoplanktons in the ocean need iron just like you and I. They become wimpy and anemic without iron just like we would. This is a big, BIG topic right now seeing as we (humans) would very much like to increase the amount of primary production in the oceans. Primary production, that is to say photosynthesis, is one way that we might save our asses from the looming Greenhouse Apocalypse because plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into oxygen. Yay plants!

Conditions should be perfect for primary production in the Southern Ocean. Lots of cold water, lots of nutrients, plenty of mixing, and sunlight for part of the year. Problem is those phytoplanktons don’t grow there. Why?A guy by the name of John Martin proposed that phytoplankton don’t grow in these regions because they are limited by iron. I should take this opportunity to say that iron is a really, really, REALLY hard thing to measure in the oceans because you so many possibilities for contamination. It took years for researchers to figure out why their iron numbers looked so wonky. The problem is that iron is everywhere – your boat, your collection devices, your bottles, your cables, your hands…you yourselves are a tremendous source of iron. When you’re measuring iron in parts per billion concentrations, every little bit counts. This problem was somewhat remedied by instituting clean rooms and anal-retentive practices that would limit the amount of iron contamination. But nothing is perfect.
Anywho, John Martin and those folks lucky enough to work with him set sail for the Southern Ocean armed with tons and tons of iron sulfate that they intended to dump in the water and see what might happen. What happened was exactly what he predicted – phytoplankton went apeshit. They grew like crazy and their bloom lasted for weeks. The picture below is a satellite image of chlorophyll (an indicator of phytoplankton) in the region where the ship dumped its load. You can see that the bloom pretty much follows the ship tracks.

(image from http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/oceangard/images/soiree.jpg)
Is the story over? Fuck no, but I have to get back to work. Tune in on Friday for more on John Martin and oceanic iron fertilization…
PS: This article has a pretty cool description of John Martin and his research. Check him out. He was a cool dude who unfortunately passed away in 1993 right as his work was coming to fruition.
Friday, October 5, 2007
This abstract really needs to lighten up
My advisor surprised me this week by telling me I “should really” submit an abstract for this conference dealio in early March 2008. Something I’ve learned over the past 2 years is that when an advisor says “ You should really ______”, it means “You have to _______” in advisor-speak. Advisor-speak is a dialect that spans all human languages and is only understood by graduate students. It takes time and patience to understand this dialect and by the time you fully comprehend its subtleties, you’re done with grad school. Anyways, the conference is for the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography – ASLO for short. ASLO is a nice conference for oceanographers because you get to see colleagues from around the nation and check in on what fun and interesting things your buddies are up to. The only catch is that it’s being held in Orlando. ORLANDO, FLORIDA. Blech. My family and I went to Orlando once when I was young and did all the requisite Disneyworld business. I can’t say I remember much about it, but my grown-up opinion of Orlando is not a good one.
My abstract was submitted in time (a whole 4 hours before the cutoff time!), I paid my registration fee, so I guess I’m in it to win it. I thought I’d give you all a sneak peek at what it’s like to write a real scientific abstract. Here you go!
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TITLE: Where does high Si originate in Cascadia Basin?
Deep waters in Cascadia Basin have silicic acid concentrations that may exceed 200 uM and show progressive enrichment northward, from the 180 uM in water entering at the southern end. The two possible sources of silicic acid in the deep ocean are (1) dissolution of biogenic opal in seafloor sediments and (2) hydrothermal seeps. These sources have different germanium to silica ratios and δ30Si values. Ge/Si ~ 0.7 umol/mole and δ30Si > +0.9‰ for biogenic sources. Hydrothermal sources have Ge/Si of 11-35 umol/mole and δ30Si ~ - 0.3‰. Core incubations determined the average silicic acid flux from seafloor sediments is 0.81 ± 0.05 umol m-2 day-1 and benthic flux is characterized by a mean Ge/Si of 0.6 – 0.7 umol/mole. The observed values in deep waters (>2500m) indicated inputs with Ge:Si ratios of 0.7 umol/mole and δ30Si of +1.4‰ (similar to that measured for sedimentary diatoms and more enriched than other deep Pacific and hydrothermal waters). These results indicate that opal dissolution must be the dominant source of silicic acid added to Cascadia Basin.
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Droll, huh? Nary a fart joke to be had.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Time is what you make of it

It would be fair to mention that I DO know some of these Eras and Periods. I know that the Cambrian was the time where all sorts of life appeared on our planet. The Cambrian Explosion was the explosion (!) of life in a very anticlimactic way. It was during this time that we find lots of fossil evidence of worms and sea-bugs and sponges and even more worms, but this time with teeth. Earth sounds like a pretty gross place back in the Cambrian, right?
So the Cambrian explosion occurred around 544 million years ago and I’m going to ignore (for now) the times before the Cambrian which are the Proterozoic, Archean, and Hadean. These 3 are Eras when the Earth was juuust forming. Most Paleontologists ignore these times in Earth history because it’s really really hard to find shit that’s 2-3 billion years old. The life that did exist were things like algae, bacteria, single celled organisms, viruses, and so on. Borrrring.
Moving on, the Cambrian/Precambrian boundary was around 544 million years ago, and then the next exciting thing was the Permian/Triassic boundary which was about 248 million years ago. An aside here: Paleontologists have a pretty clever way of defining the boundary between eras and periods. What they do is look at some sedimentary rock formation that’s got fossils in it, start at the bottom of the formation (where the oldest fossils live), work their way up to the top of the formation (where the youngest fossils live), and wherever older fossilized critters disappear they go “Aha! There must have been some cataclysmic event around this time that wiped out most life on Earth and allowed all these new critters to take over!” I don’t exactly know where they get the numbers from – must be by age dating rocks within the formation using some radioactive isotope. Reason # 122 why I'm not a Paleontologist.
We’ve covered the Boring Era (Precambrian), and then the Gross Period (Cambrian), and then we get into more exciting Eras and Periods like everyone’s favorite the Triassic and Jurassic (248 mya and 206 mya, respectively). Maybe at this point we should create a mnemonic device to help us remember most of these. If we can’t get the dates right, we can at least get the order right. Starting from the oldest first...
A…………………..Archean
Pizza……………….Proterozoic
Comes……………..Cambrian
On………………….Ordovician
Sunday,…………….Silurian
Delicious!..................Devonian
My…………………Mississippian
Pizza……………….Pennsylvanian
Precludes………….Permian
The…………………Triassic
Jaggoff………………Jurassic
Competition.…….Cretaceous
Put…………………Paleocene
Everything…………Eocene
On………………….Oligocene
My…………………Miocene
Pizza……………….Pliocene
Please, …………….Pleistocene
Harold…………….Holocene
Uh, well. That's a start. You know what? I'm just going to keep this chart handy in case I'm in a life threatening situation where I need to know when the Pennsylvanian was EXACTLY. Yes, that sounds like a good plan.
Happy Friday!

