Geology

Energy companies are currently challenged to find enough skilled workers to fill open positions. Maersk has developed a digital game – “Quest for Oil” – to stimulate interest in energy careers.

“I don’t want to start on this process if you tell me its going to take five years for you to get around to my application…”

A recent article in Geology explains how the global distributions of jadeite and ruby are strongly associated with certain types of plate boundaries.

A summary of photos posted on flickr today, tagged with “geology.” Displayed below are 30 geology-related photos were added to flickr today. Similar Posts on Geology News: Daily Geology Photos – June 15 Daily Geology Photos – June 25 Daily Geology Photos – June 1 Daily Geology Photos – June 5 Daily Geology Photos – June 9 The Geology News Blog, 2013. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Who is linking?

This summer will be the last season for guided tours at Sequoyah Caverns in Alabama. It will close to the public on September 3.

“Researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have found that temperatures in the Martian atmosphere regularly rise and fall not just once each day, but twice.” Quoted from the NASA press release.

“Standard atomic weights for chemical elements have commonly been considered as constants of nature, along with the speed of light and the attraction of gravity. Hold on to your Newtonian hat and prepare for the possibility of elementary nuances.” Quoted from the USGS press release.

The presentations from the annual Peer Review of United Stages Department of Energy-funded geothermal projects are now posted online.

Don't buy Sketchup 2013. Trimble, if you're reading this, shame on you. I paid $560 for 2013 Pro. Crashy on my iMac, on my Air, and on my Windows PC (in the "Make" form).Sketchup was (was) a wonderful 3D CAD program that anybody could use. It was free. I've done amazing things with it at LRRD; it's revolutionized CAD..History here. Promoted by Google, then sold to Trimble. If you're running version 8, keep it. Trimble has broken "2013" with licensing. The support I paid for is a joke. I know Trimble, I buy survey-grade GPS stuff from them. Sent them $2,500 for a software update last year so I could keep using a GPS unit. Just keep using it, not improve it. Just make it functional.I hope somebody kills me if: "Your Emriver Em2 is has stopped working? Send us $2,500 and it will start working again. For a while. Sort of"Trimble might surpass AutoDesk, even Microsoft, at putting a needle in your arm and extracting money.Shame on you, Trimble, fix this problem. What I do with Sketchup, or used to when it was reliable.

The most recent of my science failures involves me trying to measure the size of the Earth in the method of Eratosthenes. If you don't know his tale, basically it was this: ~2200 years ago a man named Eratosthenes lived in Egypt. He noticed that the shadows were different lengths based on his location at the same time of day at the same time of year (the summer solstice). He saw that at noon in one location (Alexandria) there was no shadow and at the same time and date at another location further south (Syene) there was a shadow. This indicated that not only was the Earth round, but he could calculate the size of it. Since he knew the distance between the two locations he used the angular difference to calculate the circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes found out that the difference in his angles was 7.2 degs and the distance was 5040 stades. So the size of the Earth was: Circumference = 5040 * 360/7.2 = ~250,000 stadesThe length of a stade is debated but let's say it was 176.4 meters. So he calculated out that the size of the Earth was 44,100 km. The actual polar circumference of the Earth is 40,008 km, a difference of only ~9%. I state polar because Eratosthenes measured locations north and south of each other, hence he would get the polar circumference. -----------------------------------------------------------------This is where I come in. I wanted to measure the size of the Earth this way as well. I realized several things quickly:1. I needed two locations north and south of each other because the angle of the sun would be the same along lines of latitude.2. I needed a measuring stick that was perpendicular to a board to measure the length of the shadow.3. I needed to find out when "noon" was, since daylight noon (the highest point of the sun) is not the same time as clock noon.4. I needed two locations that fell along the same longitude so that I could calculate a direct polar circumference.---------------------------------------------------------------1. Well, I started out. First thing is I constructed a measuring device.And this is where my problems start. The board was warped. I thought this might have been a good thing since I could then level out uneven terrain easier. But it made the board much more unstable. I used the newspaper to level out the board as best as I could.2. Calculating out the time was pretty easy. I found out when the sunrise and sunset were and figured out halfway between them. It tuns out it was about 1:30 pm. 3. The way Eratosthenes calculated out the circumference is that one of his locations had no shadow, so I wasn't entirely sure it would work for me where I had two shadows and I was subtracting the angular difference between the two. (A vs B for Eratosthenes, B vs C for me). But I think there should be no real difference.4. I also figured I couldn't measure the two different locations on the same day so I did one the day before the summer solstice (June 20th, 2012) and one the day after (June 22nd, 2012). That way any differences would average out. I picked my first location as outside my geology building. The second location I drove south for an hour or so and when the time got near to high noon I drove towards the same longitude. The second problem I ran into was I didn't realize that the lake south of Salt Lake City (Utah Lake) was directly south of the city, not off to the west like I imagined. I had to take a measurement as close to the edge of the lake as I could get since I obviously couldn't drive to the center of the city.5. So I went out and measured the shadow at the almost correct time.I marked them on the board and you can see I had some error based on wobble of the board. A little wobble means that the shadow doesn't go directly down the board as I liked, so it took a little work to get everything lined up.---------------------------------------------------------- With the measurements all done, I now had to calculate out the answer. First I measured the distance in Go