Rural and small town Texas

Yesterday we spent the day on our six-acre property west of Houston, near Brenham.  It was a beautiful January day, sunny and crisp, the type of weather I wish Texas would have more of.

© RomaniaRocks

 We purchased the property a couple of years ago, to be our way to escape the life of the big city.  It is about half-way between Houston and the hill country, at the point where the topography is just escaping the flatness of Houston and starts to roll a little. At the time we bought it, the property was badly overgrazed (previous owner kept miniature horses) and we vowed to bring its beauty back as soon as possible.  After two years, we made good to that promise.  Yesterday we planted a few more bushes and trees, a New Year tradition which we try to keep.

The geology of the area is fairly "uneventful"; our property sits on the Miocene Fleming Formation, which consists primarily of clay, with rare stringers of sandstone.  The predominance of clay makes the soil fairly awful for planting.  These rocks allegedly  contain Cretaceous invertebrate fossils, but we did not find any yet, nor did we make a concerted effort in that direction.
The Bluebonnets are gorgeous here in early spring, I promise to share a post with nice images at peak season this year.

Below are a few other images from the area.

© RomaniaRocks

© RomaniaRocks

© RomaniaRocks

A New Year family tradition

We do not have too many traditions in my family.  We are pretty unconventional and non-traditional (I will spare you the boring details).  We do have one New Year tradition, however, we always watch the New Year's Concert from Vienna.  I started watching the concert in the 80's; as a teenager living in Romania, the event gave me a sense of connection to the free world.  The "Blue Danube Waltz", one of the signature pieces of music performed every year at the concert, offered me the certainty that the world is connected, even when stupid political barriers are imposed on people.  After all, the Danube flows through Vienna and makes its way all the way to Romania, ending its course in the Black Sea.

I brought the tradition with me to the US, my adopted country.  Now, when I am part of the free world, the concert offers me a different sense of connection: the connection to the free-spirited world of my youth and young adulthood, full of idealism, where everything and anything was possible.

This year again, I enjoyed a glass of Champagne listening to the music of the Strauss family and feeling connected the the past, present and the future.

A happy and prosperous New Year to everyone.

Geoscience articles on my current reading list

Quantification of the degree of confinement of a turbidite-filled basin: A statistical approach based on bed thickness distribution - Felletti et al -- method attempting to predict the degree of confinement of a deep-water system by using bed-thickness distribution; study area is in the Tertiary Piedmont Basin of Italy.

Facies controls on the distribution of diagenesis and compaction in fluvial-deltaic deposits - Hammer et al --  facies controls on diagenesis and compaction trends in the Triassic-Jurassic Are Formation of mid-Norway.

Lacustrine turbidite channels and fans in the Mesozoic Songliao Basin, China - Feng Zhi-qiang et al. -- documentation of delta-fed lacustrine turbidites, including dimensional data.

Fascinated by uncertainty

I have always been fascinated by uncertainty.  Maybe because is part of my background, or maybe, as Dennis Lindley says (quote below), because uncertainty is everywhere.

You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.

I also suspect that uncertainty is to some degree responsible for my passion for the Earth Sciences, where lack of certainty is the norm. When you are not sure of the outcome, there is always the thrill of possibility, the excitement of anticipation, the prospect for the unconquered horizon.

Pinnacle Park, Western Australia

Last year I had my first trip in the Land Down Under.  I was in Perth for most of the time, but my first escape to the bushland was to visit the Nambung National Park and to see the pinnacles.

© RomaniaRocks

The trip in itself was awesome: my friend and I took off from Perth, driving "on the wrong side of the road", checking religiously the gas level in the tank to make sure we are not stuck on the road, no gas, in the middle of nowhere.  The car windshield cracked midway there... you get the picture, it was a blast.  The trip was fantastic, the geology great.  The pictures show these pinnacles, which are believed to be syngenetic karstic geomorphological features formed by karstification and lithification of aeolian calcarenite.  The origin of these features is controversial, which explains why I was confused reading the info in the park, but here is a recent paper discussing the subject. The pillars are produced by

simultaneous karstifcation and lithifcation of aeolian calcarenite

Eolian calcarenites are sands consisting of fragments of carbonate-skeleton organisms such as foraminifera, mollusks, red algae, echinoderms.  These skeleton fragments were transported by wind and deposited as dunes or other eolian land forms.  Shortly after deposition, these sands were affected by karstification (dissolution) and lithification (the process of turning a sediment into a rock), resulting in the formation of the pillars.

© RomaniaRocks

© RomaniaRocks

Cool Science #1

(image source http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/fractal-genome/)
A team of researchers in the Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology found a way to resolve the 3D structure of the human genome.  They used a method dubbed Hi-C, which involves: 1) bonding together gene-sequences situated close together in the 3D-structure but not in the linear sequence, 2) breaking the genome into million pieces, 3) marking the ends of the bonded genome fragments, 4) glue the ends of each fragment together, to form a circle of DNA and 5) sequencing of the marked pieces to visualize which pieces of DNA were physically close together.

I know I am off topic, but this is not only amazing in itself, but a similar method may be applied/addapted to visualize and understand many other complex systems.  And geology certainly has plenty of such systems.

More on this may be found here and here.

Romanian-born German wins 2009 Nobel Prize

Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist won the 2009 Nobel Prize for literature.  She grew up in communist Romania and lived part of her adult life there. I relate to that experience, I left Romania when I was 25-years old.  My circumstances were different, and my adopted country was different, but I recognize many of my experiences in her writings. Ms. Muller's modesty and down-to-earth attitude when interviewed after she learned of the award stuck with me:

"I am the person that I am, I am now nothing better and I’m nothing worse. It’s O.K., it’s nice, but it won’t change anything for me. My inner thing is writing. That I can hold on to."

This is a great!  The typical news from Romania these days are not great, usually "no news is good news".  This is truly extraordinary, and makes me very happy and proud.