March 17, 2005

• …better than going to school.

  Google is better than going to school.  That’s the thought I
  had this afternoon as I was using my unexpectedly free Thursday to
  follow up on some things I’d been wondering about.

  I didn’t learn much in school.  Relatively speaking, I mean, I
  have learned much more on my own, out of school, than I ever was taught
  by anyone.

  The basics of math and reading I learned from my father, at my request,
  before I started to kindergarten.  He never planned to “teach”
  me.  He just held me on his lap in the evenings after work as my
  mother was cooking supper, and answered my questions as I pointed to
  words in the newspaper.

  Numbers, I picked up that way too.  When I wanted to know how he
  did the adding and subtracting for the plans he drew, we sat at that
  same kitchen table with a bowl of cherries.  Two cherries out of
  the bowl onto the table, and then two more and then count them all –
  then one cherry into each of our mouths, and I’d learned 2+2=4 and
  4-2=2.  I love both cherries and math. 

  [Aside:  I managed to hang onto
  that love of math despite all the best efforts of a couple of bad
  teachers to make me hate it.  One doddering old fart in eighth
  grade algebra used to send me to the principal's office for correcting
  the mistakes he made in the equations he wrote on the blackboard. 
  That didn't stop me.  Each time I saw him chalk it out wrong, I'd
  start gathering up my books and papers, then raise my hand.  Even
  at that young age I was more into truth than political
  correctness.  And, of course, after the first time he punished me
  because I was right and he was wrong, it became a fun game to me to see
  how often I could do it  I'll bet none of his other students paid as much attention to him as I did.].
  
  
  Geology, geophysics, seismology, tectonics and associated fields are of great
  interest to me.  There’s a shortcut in my browser’s toolbar to NEIC, the National
  Earthquake Information Center, so that I can quickly get the location and other
  details of every earthquake I feel.  I subscribe to the BIGQUAKE  notification service so I’ll get immediate emails about every significant seismic event on the planet.

  
  BIGQUAKE is the reason for today’s Googletrip.  In recent months,
  I noticed a series of quakes centered along the East Pacific
  Rise.  That’s a place that fascinates me.  It’s the planet’s
  fastest area of seafloor spreading.  More new crust is formed
  there than anywhere.  I don’t suppose I’ll ever get a chance to
  visit it, but if I were a sea animal, I’d be a galatheid crab living in
  a wormfield by a black smoker on the East Pacific Rise.  Imagine
  living and thriving in boiling water!

  Today, I finally got around to searching for recent news and detailed
  info on the Rise.  One of my discoveries is that Garner Ted
  Armstrong, on his End Times website, has a list of recent big
  earthquakes.  I found a lot of things, including the fact that
  right now the Rise is not as active as it had been a few months
  ago.  I saw that there had been a big quake there three days
  before the Dec. 26th quake and tsunami in Indonesia.  Between
  those two, there was a big one off Macquarie Island. 

  It’s all connected, y’know?  Long ago, I noticed that swarms of
  quakes along the rise are followed by swarms of quakes here on the
  northern edge of the Pacific Plate.  That makes sense, eh? 
  New crust formed down there has to go somewhere.  It pushes the
  Pacific Plate up this way, where it forces itself under the North
  American Plate.  That’s why this ground is so shaky, and it’s
  related to the fact that we have Denali, the big mountain otherwise
  known as McKinley, and several active volcanoes.

  One of the things I found today was a technical paper, Imaging the transition between the
  region of mantle melt generation and the crustal magma chamber beneath
  southern East Pacific Rise with short-period Love waves,
  by Robert A. Dunn and Donald W. Forsyth.  I know those guys didn’t
  write that for me.  They wrote it for geophysicists.  I don’t
  even have time to finish reading it today, because I have to keep
  stopping to look up words I don’t understand, but that’s okay. 
  I’m learning all those new words and when I get the jargon of
  geophysics then I can start putting it all together.

  Here’s a sampling of some of what I learned today:
  
  
  asthenosphere The weak or “soft”
  zone in the upper mantle just below the lithosphere
  , involved in plate movement and isostatic adjustments. It
  lies 70 to 100 km below the surface and may extend to a depth
  of 400 km. Corresponds to the seismic low-velocity zone
  .

  I learned about Pierre Bouguer and the Bouguer correction:

  “The adjustment to a measurement of gravitational acceleration to account for elevation and the density of rock between the measurement station and a reference level. It can be expressed mathematically as the product of the density of the rock, the height relative to sea level or another reference, and a constant, in units of mGal:”
  
  …and the Bouguer gravity anomaly:

  “Strictly interpreted, the Bouguer correction is added to the known value of gravity at the reference station to predict the value of gravity at the measurement level. The difference between the actual value and the predicted value is the gravity anomaly, which results from differences in density between the actual Earth and reference model anywhere below the measurement station. ” (source: Oilfield Glossary)

  Neat name, Bouguer, isn’t it?  I can imagine the snickers if one
  were to try to teach a class of jr. high students about his work.

  “Love waves” sorta got my attention, too.

  
  A Love wave is a
  surface wave having a horizontal motion that is transverse (or
  perpendicular) to the direction the wave is traveling. (USGS)

  Dunn and Forsyth were investigating anomalies, observations that
  did not conform to expectations.  They found that the Pacific
  Plate (west of the Rise) is moving more slowly away from the area of
  spreading than is the Nazca Plate to the East, and that temperatures
  under the Nazca Plate in that area are higher than under the Pacific
  Plate — or was it the other way round?  Damn you Liz Dexia! 
  I’ll have to read it again.  I guess I should take notes.
  

  • 10:50 pm
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