Depositional facies models - the need to move on?

I am reading John S. Bridge's River and Floodplains, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in fluvial processes and the resulting deposits.  His comments on depositional facies models deeply resonate with me:

Most facies-association models in the literature are inadequate for anything more than a very general qualitative environmental interpretation because: (i) the deposits are normally represented in only one or two vertical sections, normal and parallel to the flow direction; (ii) the information shown in these two-dimensional sections lacks critical detail of the spatial variation of strata thickness and orientation, grain size, internal structures, paleocurrents, and biological features; (iii) the nature of preservation of the strata is not indicated, because the models are not dynamic; and (iv) the models are purely qualitative and many do not even contain scales.  The reasons for this state of affairs are: (i) incomplete knowledge of depositional environments (ii) incomplete knowledge of the evolution of depositional environments and their deposits over time periods in excess of a few hundred years; and (iii) uncertainties in translating essentially two-dimensional (parallel to land surface) information representing a single snapshot in time into a fully three-dimensional dynamic model.

I really agree with Bridge's comments and strongly believe that the principal focus on descriptive and qualitative, amplified by the proliferation of conceptual models in sedimentary geology was and is detrimental to the advancement of the science.  Which reminds me of a Twitter exchange I had with @clasticdetritus a while ago.  It started from my venting over how overwhelmingly descriptive and qualitative sedimentary geology is, and how beneficial would be to have a much stronger link between designing (quantitative) experiments to test concepts.  The Twitter thread is shown below, in "proper stratigraphic order", with the newest comment at the top.

This was a fun exchange, unfortunately for me it was so late in the day, and the 140 character limitation was not helping.
There is a solution to this problem, and I will cite again from Bridge, because he expressed it so well:

The solution to these problems require much more serious, comprehensive studies of modern processes and deposits, supplemented by scale-model experimentation and quantitative theoretical modeling

What are your thoughts on this?

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Stefania Maracineanu

Today is "Ada Lovelace Day", the international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.   My post recognizes the Romanian physicist, Stefania Maracineanu, a woman whose research impacted the field of radioactivity.  She .... almost received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering the artificial radioactivity.  She is inspiring because she represents the struggles that women scientists had to face in the early 1900s in order to have an impact and be recognized in their field of research.

Stefania was born in Bucharest, on 18 June 1882. Very little is known about her early life, except that she had an unhappy childhood about which she did not want to talk. She obtained an advanced degree in physical and chemical sciences at age 28, after which she begun teaching at the Royal Boarding School in Bucharest, a public school for girls from the social elite. In 1922 Maracineanu received support from the Romanian Science Minister to pursue graduate research in France with Marie Curie.

Studying in Paris at Curie's Institute must have been a dream come true, and Maracineanu started her first project focusing on determining the precise half-life of Polonium. One of the first observations she made was that Polonium's half-life depends on the metal onto which the Polonium layer has been deposited. Her explanation of the phenomenon was that the alpha-rays of the Polonium must have transformed some of the atoms of the metal into radioactive isotopes. At the time, this was a very important observation and it is unclear why Maracineanu did not pursue the topic in more detail. Further experiments and documentation would have turned this observation into the first documented example of artificial radioactivity.

After receiving her doctorate degree in 1924, and as a result of the research conducted at the Curie's Institute, Stefania stayed for six more years in Paris to study the effect of the solar radiation on the radioactivity of substances. In 1930 she returned to Romania and studied the link between radioactivity and rainfall, and later the relationship between earthquakes and rainfall.

In 1935, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Frederik Joliot and Irene Joliot-Curie for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. Stefania Maracineanu expressed her dismay at the fact that Irene Joliot-Curie used much of her observations and work dealing with artificial radioactivity without giving proper credit. Maracineanu publicly claimed that she first discovered artificial radioactivity during her research years in Paris.

Stefania Maracineanu is often considered an "ignored Romanian scientist". Was this because of the challenges that women faced in the scientific community in the early 1900s ? Because she did not have a proper network of scientists with which to discuss ideas, and as a result lost focus and pursued research topics on the fringe of science? Was she marginalized in favor of bigger names and interests? Were her scientific methods and observations not careful or focused enough? We may never find an answer to these questions, or the answer may be a combination of all of the above, and then some...

Other references:

Stefania Maracieneanu: ignored Romanian Scientist

Bulletin of the National Research Council, v.10, 1925-1926, The National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC

Martisor - the Spring is here!

On the 1st of March Romanians celebrate the arrival of spring. Many other countries have some sort of spring celebration, but as far as I know, "Martisor" (Romanian pronunciation: [mərt͡siˈʃor])  is a Romanian custom.  A "martisor" is a little object attached to a red-and-white string and is worn pinned to the blouse, or sweater, or whatever you are wearing.  It may look something like this (I received it from my brother last year):

Nowdays it is worn by women and children during the first couple of weeks in March.  It is a symbol of the nature coming back to life after a long winter and it is supposed to brings good luck.  In some parts of Romania, during the first weeks of March the young women used to wear necklaces made of round pebbles collected from a river bed, which they pained red and white.
I don't have the red-white pebbles, but I made my own geology-related "martisor".  It may be too heavy to pin on to my blouse, but it matches the "Romania Rocks" theme.  Happy Spring everyone!

Getic Basin, Romania

The Getic basin, also known as the Southern Carpathians foredeep, is a geologic province located in south-central Romania, between the crystalline belt of the Southern Carpathians and the Moesian Platform.

© RomaniaRocks

Pictures from Salatruc,  Topolog River valley, Curtea de Arges, Corbi village, give a feel for how this part of Romania looks like.

The basin formed during Late Cretaceous time (more than 70 million years ago) by flexure of the lithosphere in response to thrusting and crustal thickening in the adjacent mountain belt. During Early Tertiary time (or about 60 million years ago), the Getic basin was an elongated and asymmetrical foredeep, with an axis oriented parallel to the Southern Carpathians orogenic belt, a steeply dipping flank on the orogen side, and a gently dipping flank overlying the platform.
Thrusting in the Southern Carpathians resulted from the interaction between two plate fragments, the Rhodopian and Moesian fragments.

© RomaniaRocks

This interaction had important consequences for the development of the Getic basin and was characterized by continental collision and subduction during the Late Cretaceous, and compression with a component of dextral wrenching during the Paleogene.
The Paleogene-Lower Miocene basin fill consists of siliciclastic, continental to shallow marine rocks in the northern part of the basin, grading basinward (southward) into deep marine deposits. The sediment source area was the Southern Carpathians orogenic belt.

What geology taught me about time

For a geologist the concept of time has a dual character: the time on the human scale, measured in years, months, hours, seconds, and the time on the geologic scale, measured in millions of years.   The beauty of this for me is that I do not completely partition the two scales; instead, because I deal with the time at the geologic scale as part of my profession, I am able to place the human scale in a different perspective.

The planet is about 4.6 billions year old, give or take; the first Homo Sapiens appeared only two (yes, that is 2!) millions year ago.  The recorded human history started only about 10,000 years ago.

If the age of our planet is scaled to the human scale, that would make the Earth ... let's say 80 years old (by using the average life span for people in the developed countries).  That means that the recorded human history started only about 2.5 hours ago, Homo Sapiens is almost 13 days old, and the dinosaurs became extinct only about a year ago (409 days).  (You can build your own geologic time scale metaphors here).

Placing events in a broader perspective is what geology taught me most.  Especially in a time when instant gratification is the norm, I know that focusing on the long term with a constant effort is what has the most impact.

Geology and wine #3

In a previous post, I mentioned that for a country its size, Romania has an amazingly varied geology.  A geologic map, courtesy of the Romanian Geological Institute website shows this complexity.  

And for the third installment of the geology and wine, here it is, side by side, a geological map and a map of the wine regions of Romania, (the later from the Romanian wine website).


I will talk in more detail, in a future post, about the geology of Romania and what the bright colors on the map mean, but for now, it is worth observing the relationship between the two maps.  The Carpathian mountains certainly stand out on the geologic map and they influence the wine regions in many ways.  I already talked about  how geology (and the resulting topography) influences present-day climate, and more specifically how the Foehn-type wind influence the wine making in the Cotnari region.  Geology also has a lot to do with the other elements of terroir, such as soil type and topography.  So when you have the next sip of your favorite wine, try to imagine the tumultuous geologic history that permeates every drop and gives in its "earthy minerality" (yes, that is a common sensory descriptor used in wine tasting).

Mystery trace fossils

During my field research years ago in the Paleogene of the Southern Carpathians (Romania), I found these interesting trace fossils.  They are cylindrical, perpendicular to bedding, and always occur in pairs, suggesting they are U-shaped.  The hosting formation is Eocene in age, consists of silty mudstone deposited in a distal shelf environment and is bounded at the top by a sequence boundary, which occurs immediately above this burrowed interval.

© RomaniaRocks

© RomaniaRocks

My interpretation at the time was that the intensely burrowed interval suggests slow rates of sedimentation, which allowed organisms sufficient time for bioturbation.  Abrupt changes in habitat conditions (e.g. increased sediment content in the water column caused by landward subaerial exposure and erosion) destroyed the animal population.  The abandoned burrows were subsequently filled with sediment (e.g. fine sand and silt) during a time when sediment bypass occurred.

I was never able to clearly identify these trace fossils.  The closest I came to it was "Lanicoidichna", but I do not think this is correct.  A colleague suggested that this may be related to the jackknife clam Tagelus (see pictures here and here).

If you recognize these and can name the type of borrow, please let me know; it would be nice to be able to finally find an answer.