Mars Sedimentary Structures Attack!!

Update...it's Sunday night and I'm finally editing a post that was supposed to be finished Friday.

Yes it is Friday night and I am at home, watching SNL from the 70's with PBF, playing Words with Friends and finally getting around to my expanded post about Mars.  This is the topic I would love to research and study.  It is the part of the reason I came back to school for Geology.  This post is basically a summary of the presentation I gave a few weeks ago. ( By summary I mean lots of pretty pictures!) Relating structures seen on Earth is a great way to start gaining understanding of what we see on Mars. Well, at least we can tell that our planet and Mars has some similarities.

Exhibit 1!  Here is an arial photo of the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.   This is a high altitude sand dune field in the San Luis Valley, Colorado.  The dunes are backed up against the Sangre De Cristo Mountains to the east.

Duney goodness in Colorado!

This is a satellite photo from the Mars Global Surveyor in orbit around Mars.
It's a dune field blown up at the base of a chasm in the Valles Marineris system. Instead of the silt, sand an soil that makes up the Sand Dunes National Park, these are made mostly out of volcanic ash!

Volcanic ash duney goodness on Mars!

Exhibit 2!!
 A close up of the a section of the Grand Canyon. In the upper region, you can see various layers which make up the canyon walls.  This photo is lit from the south west..

A very small part of the Grand Canyon.

Here is a close up of the Terby Basin on Mars.  You can see layers of sedimentary rocks eroded by some force of nature (wind, water, or something).  

  

Exhibit 3!!
Alluvial fans in Death Valley, CA. Think of them as the mountain shedding.

Erosion from the Panamint Range to the west of Death Valley

Alluvial Fans on Mars! These are in the East Candor Chasma in the Valles Marineris of Mars. Notice the falls are more linear. This is because they are not water driven like the ones in Death Valley.

Fans on Mars!

Exhibit 4!!
Mississippi River Delta System! This is in the process of dumping millions of tons of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico each year.

The long "bird's foot" look of the delta is due to the Army Corps of Engineers keeping the channel  clear for ships.

If the sediments above are buried deep enough, they can become lithified.  That is what we see hear in Holden Crater on Mars!

"Fossilized" deltaic system on Mars.

Well, this post was quite a bit less wordy that I can be, the pictures are pretty to look at!  Hehe :)

Mars!

For one of my Geology classes, I was asked to pick any topic in geology and give a 10 minute presentation over the topic.  I chose...Geology..... Of......Mars....!!!  (Meant to be read in your best Pigs in Space announcer voice)  

I'm not too far into my research, but I thought I would post a couple neat sites and articles I have found so far.

This is a press release from NASA concerning the possible origin of some rocks the rover Opportunity found at the Endeavor Crater rim.

This is a link to a picture taken by the martian satellite Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Victoria Crater on Mars. It shows sand dunes in the base of the crater!

Short post today, but as I do more research this weekend, I'm sure I will have more to share!

Back to School

Not that I actually took much time off between summer classes and working, but it is that time of year again.  I'm hoping to get back into a regular posting schedule, though with 18 credit hours and 15 hours of work a week...that may mean a few posts with more links than observations.  Either way, I hope to make it interesting.

On that note, here are some links for you to enjoy!

Ever wonder about geologists on other planets?  Here is one from mars!
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20110901.html

This is a photograph of the earth and the moon from the spacecraft Juno, who is on it's way to the moon.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/news/juno20110830.html

If that makes you feel small, here are some visitors to earth in the next week.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/asteroid20100907.html

Apparently I am feeling spacey today.  I'm going to chalk that up to putting off my Organic Chemistry Lab book.  So for something related to organics...kind of...ok maybe its a bit of a stretch...a picture or three of the garden.

These were supposed to be cherry tomatoes.  Talk about over achieving.

Taken in the middle of August,  this is a very small portion of the new batch of tomatoes.

Not the best picture, but here is the jungle.

The poor plant in the front got hit with spider mites. Nasty little guys who basically suck the plant dry.  We did manage to save all of the tomatoes however, so lucked out there.  The rest of the plants are about five feet tall and doing great thanks to the kindly old man that lives behind us. He saved the day with a miticide he uses for his roses (mites cannot be killed by just insecticide, as they are technically in the spider family and therefore not an insect.) and in return, he and his wife were able to enjoy about three pounds of tomatoes from the garden!

Ok, enough procrastination, O-Chem here I come!

Something for Thought

Just a quick note to make you think, inspired by this post over at Mountain Beltway. (Check out the comments to see what the rock actually from).  I had forgotten, but the top of Mt. Everest is made up of dolomite which is only formed at the bottom of the ocean. In fact, a lot of Mt. Everest is made up of ocean-based sedimentary rock. There are fossils of trilobites, a purely ocean dwelling animal, in the tallest mountain on Earth.

Think about that for a second.

The highest point on our planet, is made from rocks formed in the deepest parts of the ocean.  Plate Tectonics is a pretty darned amazing thing.

I'm back!

I decided that two months is too long to go without a post. (So I'm getting one just shy of two months)  Between two classes and work (that's right I'm gainfully employed now!) this summer has been flying by. I'm working as a math/geology/statistics peer tutor for my school and will be able to continue to do so during the school year. I'm really enjoying helping other students and it is definitly solidifying my desire to become a teacher.  Now that I am back in a routine however, I should be back to regular posts. This one is about the garden PBF and I have been tending.

We live in an apartment so there isn't much room for a normal garden but we have a small back patio with enough room for a few tomato and pepper plants.  We started the garden indoors in March. I believe I have a few pictures up from then.  Finally towards the end of May we were able to transplant the pepper and tomatoes into their final destinations, five gallon buckets from Home Depot.

Here they are looking a little sickly from being stuck in small containers for far too long.

They get about 6-8 hours of sun a day, and after about three weeks, they had grown to this!  I do wish I had a picture of what the weeds in the area looked like before I finally got to pulling them all.  They were starting to overgrow the buckets.

Tomatoes to the right and center and peppers to the left.

The bushy guy in the front center is made up of three cherry tomato plants in the same container.  The plan is that the three plants will support each other without a tomato cage and once the outdoor growing season is over, we can bring them inside with a grow lamp and keep them going through the winter!  Homegrown tomatoes year round!

They have all done amazingly well, and here is what they look like today!

They are growing so fast!

The count as of Monday was at least 50 tomatoes that are at least the size of a dime (and about 10 that are close to full grown), and 10-15 peppers. I'm hopeful that within the next two weeks we will be able to harvest the first batch!

Not bad for starting from seeds.

Seedling starter tray back in March.

Yum salsa garden!

Another short post

In the last week and a half I have completed finals, gone camping, started my intensive Statistics class and had my sister out to visit for a few days.  Tomorrow, I leave for Denver to visit family, so no big post until next week.

I would liketo put up a short post on a current event. Here link to the blog of a Geomorphologist from Illinois and his takes on the problems with current media coverage of the disastrous flooding along the Mississippi.  http://lrrd.blogspot.com/   There are quite a few posts, so I will put up a couple which I think are important.

This one explains the reasons for a floodway.
http://lrrd.blogspot.com/2011/05/floodways-are-for-floods.html

This one breaks down poor media coverage of the flood with an article from The New York Times.
http://lrrd.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-york-times-falls-down-on-this-flood.html

See you next week!

Study intermission!

Down to my last final tomorrow and wouldn't you know it, I got distracted looking around the USGS website (What do you mean I don't have time for that while studying the entire 4.6 billion year Geologic history of  North America?).  Lucky for you, I found some exciting pictures and videos of recent volcanic activity in Hawaii.

This video shows the collapse of the Pu`u `Ō `ō crater.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/archive/2011/Mar/PuuOoCollapse_20110305_small.mov

This video shows lava pouring from a volcanic fissure into a large crack running through the surface.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/archive/2011/Jan/20110306_0675_torr_small.mov

Here is a picture of the above in case Quicktime is being a pain.

Here is the main site if you want to peruse some more lovely photos.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/images.html

Ok enough exciting vulcanism (no, not this kind)...back to studying.

Just kidding, one more quick movie.  This is of a phenomenon called "gas pistoning" where lava is pushed up by underlying gases which ends up looking like the piston of an engine.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/gallery/kilauea/volcanomovies/movies/Drainhole%20pistons%20night%20-%20Jun%203,%202006-small.mov

Ok, I'm done...or am I?
Yeah, I am.