The Chronicles of the Angry Geologist

One of the awesome things about my job is that sometimes I get to see things that a lot of people never even think about.

Take cement. Boring, gray, your house is probably built on it, and you step on it every day. You probably never think about it, one of those icky bits of infrastructure that the general public tend to regard as highly as parasites in an ecosystem. But how it's made...

The heavy machinery in cement plants would make a monster truck fan lose control of his bladder- trucks with tires as tall as I am are required to truck in and move around the limestone from the quarry to the crusher, and over to the kiln. It's mixed with coal and turned in a rotary kiln, a steel tube that you could drive one of these trucks through a few thousand feet long, that spans between two buildings. In this particular plant, the result of this process, called clinker, is slapped on a two-mile conveyor belt to cool on the way to the finishing kiln. I probably haven't gone into half the detail I need to, but the one thing you need to know is that it's incredibly dusty and dirty. The kiln dust and limestone powder gets into and onto everything. I washed my hands for lunch today, and there is now a water line on my hands.

In this area, the limestone is quarried practically on site- there were several active quarries at one point, but two had to be abandoned because they were encroaching on the town. We had to do some water sampling in one, so we drove on the long-abandoned road down to the bottom.

And down...

And down...

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It took us almost twenty minutes to reach the bottom. On the way down, we saw a deer; apparently there is a breeding population down there, protected from hunters and vehicles in a place with plenty of food and water. It's something that you could imagine speciation in a couple of hundred generations down the line.

One side of the quarry was cut along the dip face of the rock; the others are terraced vertically, but the eastern side just slopes gently down in. They had cut across two cave drainages, which we could see discharging along the slope.

We passed an abandoned rock crusher. The plant environmental manager who was with me said that it wasn't that long ago that it was still in operation, even after the quarry had shut down. Before they built the new one, the trucks used to come across from the other quarry and dump their loads over a cliff a few hundred feet down for it to be moved to this crusher.

We finally reached our sampling site- a small pond in the very deepest part of the pit. It looked small, but as I got close to it, I changed my mind. It was a 20 foot deep pool of the clearest natural water I had ever seen; it was like looking into clear blue-tinted glass. And right in the center of it was this little bass, looking up at us from the other side of the mirror surface.

Even looking back on it now, I can't even put into words how lucky I feel to have been there. Even if it was just a job.

This one involves some geology, so the explanation is going to get a little long.

We're siting a well in Maryland, and one of our potential sites is in a park next to the MA & PA Heritage trail- actually very pretty down there. The whole thing was in a bit of a depression near a network of streams, and we agreed that this would probably be a good place to look for water.

Now, there is a geomorphological feature called a "kettle" in glacial terrain- it refers to a marshy depression.

I'll bet you can't guess what my boss said. No. Really. Try.

"Too bad we're not in glacial terrain- then we could call this the "Ma and Pa Kettle Site."

I was on my way home from work today, driving the same way I always do. It was a bit later in the evening, thanks to some last-minute changes on a project, so traffic was a bit heavier and the volume of kids in the playground en route was lighter. I admit that I was on autopilot, staring out the passenger side of the windshield at the soccer field on the hill and thinking about impermeable clay, when something caught my attention and made me turn my eyes front. At the same instant, my right foot moved of its own volition onto the brake pedal. A second later, the car in front of me hit its brakes and signaled a turn.

Oh, cool, I thought, and kept on going.

I anticipated the action without realizing it. Am I psychic? You can bet if I was, I'd be a lot richer by now. No magic here, either, I'm afraid- it was all me. I saw something that told me that car was going to turn before it did- maybe it dropped speed slightly as the driver moved his foot from the brake to the gas, maybe I'd seen it turn there before, maybe he pulled to the right side of the road so he'd be able to make a tighter turn. But I saw something, processed it, and reacted before my conscious mind had a chance to catch up.

This is a normal, documented phenomenon. People of all sorts make decisions without their conscious mind. Might explain why Bush got two terms, but politics aside...

Which brings me to my main point.

There is no magic in dowsing. There are no subtle electrical or gravitational fields affecting the metal rods or wooden stick. And you would have to do some pretty rigorous experiments under controlled conditions to convince me that some people have greater sensitivity to either in the degree necessary to detect flowing water or buried foundations or what have you. And there doesn't need to be, because people are smarter about the physical world than they think they are.

Because experiment after experiment has disproved that dowsers can do any better than an untrained person in finding water or an object, that then begs the question, how good are ordinary people? Let's say you were dropped out in the middle of a field and asked where you think some buried foundations of an old barn were. Your conscious mind might say, "Go pound sand, Angry Geologist! There's no way I can do this without help!" But your eyes are looking around at the rolling swales and the vegetation; your feet are picking up vibrations as you walk around the grounds. Eventually, you'll come to a spot that seems to have a different tenor when your feet strike it, a little higher or lower than the surrounding landscape, where the grass is just a little bit greener or a bit marshier in the center. And you'll look down, and see an old block, and say, "Damn, how did that happen?"

You won't have any idea how you did it, just like I didn't have any idea why I hit the brakes before the car ahead of me hit his tonight. But you did it- not the sticks- you. You put together the facts and came to a conclusion, even if you didn't quite realize it- and I really believe that this is what dowsers do, only they try to dress it up in woo to explain things to themselves and try to convince people to hire them again, instead of going with the cheaper option- their own hunch. And I'm sure it feels good for both people- the water seeker is going to be happy he's got his water, and the dowser will get paid and feel good about his abilities. There isn't any malice- just gullibility on both parts.

In fact, the only difference between a geologist and a normal person is that we consciously know what we're looking for. We look for swales and stream valleys because they form along weak parts in the rock, which is where water can flow most easily. We look for green spots in the middle of a drought or wetlands vegetation because we know that's where water is getting to the surface. We look for disturbances in the soil where something might have been dug up, buried and had the earth settle around it, and bring in the magnetometer to check our work. I can tell you what's going on, but you don't need me to put together the pieces- you are smarter about this than you think you are.

I finished two reports today. I should be able to send one out tomorrow, and get the other one into typing. It's really kind of cool. One of the sites is in Baltimore, and I think you can see the effect of sea level rise on the groundwater levels in the wells.

***

Dad had his knee replaced on Friday- he ended up only getting a partial instead of a full (which is kind of like saying you "only" had to have bypass surgery and not triple bypass). But he came home today, so I'm going to call them later and see how its going.

***

The check engine light in my car has come on. D: Probably nothing, but I'm getting it checked anyway. I need to meet one of the managers at the mechanic's- not only was he nice enough to tell me where he gets work done on his car, but he offered to give me a ride. Of course, if my car is really going to explode and it will take a few days to fix, I'm calling Enterprise. Not going to take advantage of someone's goodwill like that.

***

Remember the 1400 foot dry hole, and how the property owner called in a dowser to find another spot? Guess what he found? A 700 foot dry hole! Score one for real science! Of course, that means the last site we're trying is do-or-die. And they're drilling tomorrow. Freakin yay.

So, I finalized most of the figures for the report today- and they all worked, except one: the cross section.

I based my cross section on a variety of sources- the existing geologic maps, some structural measurements and rock descriptions that my boss did, and the drilling logs for the big well. It mostly worked- it shows that one of the wells that we drew down shares a water bearing bedding plane with our well, and better yet, if we just drill him a new one a maximum of a hundred feet deeper down, he won't have any more problems when the production well goes online. However, the other well that we drew down? Not even close.

We have leakage between bedding planes.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing- if we can quantitatively estimate how much water is leaking through, we can get a clearer picture of the recharge area for this well, and possibly get more water out of it. The problem is convincing the regulatory agency that this is indeed what is happening.

Fortunately, there's a neat little mathematical trick that we can use to estimate this. Transmissivity is basically the ease with which water flows through the aquifer to the pumping well, and there are several ways to estimate this. The first two rely on pumping test data from both the pumping and recovery phase, and are estimates of the average transmisivity (these don't always match, so there's a whole new level of agony trying to figure out which number you should use, but fortunately that didn't happen here). The second one you can do if you've drawn down a monitoring well during the test, and that will give you transmissivity in that direction.

We already know that the aquifer is strongly anisotropic- that means that the speed at which water flows through the rock varies greatly depending on which direction it's going. And we have an average value, and two directional values in this case. So, what we can do is construct an ellipse with the transmissivity values and their directions from the well, and that'll give us an estimate of transmissivity in all directions, not just in the directions of wells we know about. From that, we can figure out how long it will take for the water to get to our well, and more importantly, where it's coming from.

Disclaimer: Apparently, this isn't a very common phenomenon- or it is, it's just that the signal from other processes overwhelm it most of the time. But in this formation, it's business as usual- the last time the senior hydrologist had to pull this little trick, it was in the same rock. Go figure.

[Farnsworth] Good news, everybody! [/Farnsworth]

After sitting down with the staff hydrogeologist, we have figured out why the method I used to determine well efficiency didn't work, and found a method that did!

The method I tried first involved using data from the step test- that's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You pump at a given rate for an hour, then step up your discharge to find out how the aquifer behaves. There's a mathematical relationship between discharge, drawdown, and the resistance to flow within the aquifer that can be deduced from step test data. I don't understand the physical basis behind this well enough yet to explain it, but under normal circumstances, you can use figure out the percentage of resistance to flow from the aquifer into the well, and get your well efficiency.

There's a number of reasons why it might not have worked in this case. Our initial step might have been too high, and the relationship that should have been linear turned exponential- but we would have only seen the linear part of the curve. Another possibility may be that the well was actually developing itself- clearing debris from the fractures- during the pump test. It probably was the character of the rock more than anything. After doing a little bit of research, we found that the specific capacity (Discharge divided by drawdown) of wells drilled into this formation tended to be remarkably low.

In any case, the hydrogeologist clued me into a second method, one that I can see the physical basis for much more easily, and therefore one that I like. This one uses the recovery period after the constant rate test ends, and as I understand, it goes something like this:

You have a well that you've pumped to approximately steady state, and you have a nice cone of depression going. If you take a cross section of it, you'll find that the water level in the aquifer just outside the well is not the same as the water level inside the casing. This well loss is because water experiences more friction when entering the well. I am not certain why, but I am sure it has something to do with pirates and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In any case, an efficient well minimizes the difference between the water level outside and the water level inside.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Now, let's shut the pump off. Water that's entering the well will continue to flow at the same rate until it's at the level of the water in the aquifer. That all has to do with gravity- groundwater, like surface water, flows fastest down steeper gradients, so if you have a rolling shallow cone of depression followed by a sharp cliff into the well, guess which one will get filled up faster? This period is fairly quick- a matter of minutes for our well- and after that, recovery is mostly due to water trickling back down the cone of depression until the aquifer recharges completely.

Plotting up a graph of drawdown against T/T' (T- time since test ended, T'- time since test began) yields a curve that looks like an old chair's armrest with a beveled edge. The steep end of the curve toward the end represents the recovery from well loss. The flatter, more linear part of the curve extending to zero drawdown is all due to water trickling back through the formation. After you figure this out, you can divide drawdown due to formation loss at the end of the test by total drawdown, and you'll get your well efficiency.

The verdict? The well is 80-85% efficient. And the better news is now I know where the water is coming from.

And there was much rejoicing!

Hammers and screwdrivers are hand tools, and they're both used in conjunction with nails and screws to fasten things together. They work well for their own specific purpose, but you wouldn't want to drive a nail with a screwdriver or vice versa. The analogy fits for a lot of things, but the bit I have in mind is groundwater hydrology.

( Tools for Understanding )

There was a brown bag lunch at work today, where the presenter discussed a new technology for imaging aquifers using a magnetic survey. Now, magnetic surveys are nothing new- you take a magnetometer and go around a grid, measuring the field at each point. They've put such instruments on satellites, as in the mourned, unreplaced MAGSAT. These surveys are limited in that they detect everything contributing to the magnetic field at the surface, from the earth's core to the underground electric cable. But these guys have gotten around it in an ingenious little way to image at the very depth they want: they create an electrical circuit in the aquifer.

As was explained at lunch today, they accomplish this by putting electrodes connected with a wire down two wells anywhere from 500 ft to five miles apart, hooking the assembly up to a small generator, and firing it up. The water in the aquifer conducts the electricity (with varying degrees of efficiency, depending on the concentration of electrolytes within) and creates its own magnetic field, which crews can measure at the surface with a magnetometer; if the aquifer has preferential flow paths, the current will follow them as well. They take the field data back to the lab, and more or less run Monte Carlo simulations varying the resistivity, local magnetic field, etc. until they get something that most closely matches the field data.

This, like most new technologies, is almost prohibitively expensive for the type of work that I do. But the ability to see flow paths is key, whether you're tracing contaminants, looking for the source of a dam seep, or trying to find new groundwater resources. I kind of hope that as it becomes more popular, the cost to do this kind of work will go down.

I also found it hillarious when the MBA that was giving the presentation mispronounced "fast Fourier transform."

I can't really tell you about the details of this project, but please rest assured that it is made of awesome, and that I am incredibly lucky to get in on it this early in my career.

But what I'm doing for it is working with the surface water on the site- there is [insert nasty element here] from a certain testing activity, and it's our job to make sure it doesn't get off the site. We have controls in place to protect the stream from the certain nasty element (other nasties that pose a fair bit more than an chemical hazard from said testing activities can still get off site, and I KNOW the stream gets enough discharge going to move them, but we are unfortunately not being paid for dealing with them), but the locals are (understandably) concerned about the groundwater- I would be, too. This certain nasty element has a history of behavior unbecoming a heavy metal in the presence of iron and organics. However, the bedrock is... weird. It's fractured limestone, so it's got the whole epikarst thing going on- for you non-speleophiles, that's the semi-weathered limestone that usually is sandwiched between the topsoil and the mostly-unweathered karst aquifer; someone who does soils might call it a regolith, but we geologists are spechul. Anyway, this limestone is fractured, but only to a certain depth- about 30 ft. After that, it's incredibly solid.* Our job is to figure out if most of the water going offsite is passing through these streams, or if it's being transmitted through the aquifer, in which case we'll have a whole other ballgame on our hands.

If you ask me, the easiest way to do this would be dye testing- that's when you inject this bright green unmistakable dye into a well or sinkhole, and look and see where it comes out. However, dye testing is incredibly expensive (not that our client doesn't have enough money), and, well, you try telling well owners that their water might turn day-glo green for a few days when they're already worried about a certain nasty chemical, and see how well that goes over. If you're lucky, it won't involve high-velocity lead poisoning.

So, we're looking at the streams first. The USGS has put out two freeware programs called PART and RORA. PART uses streamflow partitioning (breaking up the hydrograph into its components of precipitation, overland flow, and baseflow or discharge from groundwater) to find the amount of water an aquifer discharges into a stream in a year, month, and quarter. RORA uses the Rorabaugh method-basically fitting curves to the baseflow part of the hydrograph- to estimate groundwater recharge by the stream. The PI wanted me to do this, because his traditional method was separating the hydrograph by graphical means, AKA eyeballing it.

As it turns out though, eyeballing it appears to be the way to go. The programs are spitting out very strange numbers, and I'm starting to wonder if I've found a limitation. These streams are prone to something akin to flash flooding. Their hydrographs look more like urban drainage ditches than anything else- there's a spike when it rains, and then down to almost nothing. I wonder if for the methods to work, you need more than just 2-4 days of hydrograph decay before the next precipitation spike, and we're just not getting that.

Not to mention that our year of measurement included one of the driest summers on record for that county- a drought started in May and didn't let go until the middle of November. Several of our streams, including the big one, had no discharge for the entire month of July.

I'm really not sure what wall I'm hitting here or why, but we appear to get reasonable results for the graphical method. Perhaps hydrograph filtering might be a better way to go about this. I'll see if I can download the program tomorrow.


*I don't use the phrase "solid as a rock" anymore.

No, this is not about the upcoming performance review, though I feel more confident about that than I think I normally would. I guess defending a thesis does that to you. That which doesn't kill me...

This is about the reason why I got into environmental work in the first place.

( It's a long story... )

Happy Old Rock Day everyone!

I should blog this next year...

A few years ago, I worked on a project on the Cuyahoga River- you can read about it here. My undergraduate advisor was contracted to make sure that the sediment in the dam pool wasn't going to kill anyone with heavy metal poisoning when the dam was lowered or removed, and suffice it to say that I did the grunt work. I visited the old dam site yesterday. The whole thing turned out very well, I have to admit! They extended the bike trail, and built an ampitheatre using of the curved Berea sandstone blocks that used to make up the dam. The old cornerstone takes pride of place in the parking lot flowerbeds. Finally, they built an observation platform overlooking the rapids where the dam used to be. B and I went there last night, and watched the swallows skim over the riffles, catching whatever unlucky bug that was attracted to the water there.

The Cuyahoga River was used and abused for a century, so the Munroe Falls Dam was neither the first dam built, nor was it the last to fall. Not more than a few miles downstream is Cuyahoga Falls, where the river is eating away at the remnants of low head dams in the gorge. I really don't have a clue how these were even constructed in the first place: the gorge walls are steep, making the riverbed all but inaccesible. Perhaps they diverted it somehow through the canals? I haven't a clue. In either case, they're broken and crumbling now, and whatever industry they fed is long gone, replaced by hotels and restaurants capitalizing on the view.

Even further downstream is Gorge Metroparks- that place kept me sane when I was taking mineralogy. I used to go down, sit at the deck overlooking the dam, and do homework. It's still my favorite of the Metroparks, winter, summer or fall. The Gorge Dam, also known as the Ohio Edison Dam, once fed the cooling pool of a coal fired power plant run by the company of the same name. The building still sits at the intersection of Howe Ave. and Gorge Rd., and has that turn-of-the-century architecture that I wish was more prevalent in industrial buildings today. It's made out of red brick, which bore the coal dust and soot quite well. High, arched cathedral windows stretch up the side of the turbine housing, culminating in black steel smokestacks, which have since been capped. Outwardly, despite years of neglect, it's in pretty good shape. If they could clean up that site and make it into a museum or an office building... but I digress.

The plant has been defunct for years, meaning the dam serves no apparent purpose, except to bury the falls of the Cuyahoga River under a dam pool. Kayakers, obviously, are not very happy about this. The Cuyahoga river contains world-class rapids- if it were opened for that use, paddlers would come from around the world to test their skill in the gorge. They try now, but they have to sneak around. Because of these damn... dams... the river doesn't meet water quality standards for dissolved oxygen and bacteria all of the time- meaning that the EPA and the Metroparks by extension can't open the river for swimming, boating, and paddling at any time.

At this point, you're probably saying, "Hell, what are they waiting for! Tear the thing down!" And if I didn't know better, I would too. However, it all comes back to the power plant- it was built in 1915, well before anyone knew what heavy metals and PCBs would do to biology (or at least before anyone cared), and a little under 60 years before the Clean Water Act (which, by the way, was inspired by another reach of the Cuyahoga). I can't say this for sure, but I'd lay my last dollar on it- all of their drains led directly to the river, meaning that whatever was in that plant is now in the dam pool sediments. I wouldn't go out there and play in the mud from that reach without a Tyvek and a respirator.

As it turns out, the dam does serve a purpose- it's a makeshift landfill for all that... nastiness. If it were just to magically fail or be removed without dredging, it would create an unmitigated environmental disaster for all points downstream. Unfortunately, like most dams that have outlived their purpose, no one really wants to take responsiblity for either its upkeep or its dredging and removal.

I'm kind of embarrassed that I missed this. Apparently not too long ago, there was a permit submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to turn the dam into a power generating plant, much to the dismay of Gorge fans like myself. It probably wouldn't have done much- the Cuyahoga has neither the drop, nor the discharge (for most of the year) to generate much more power than would keep the lights on in the plant, but it would have cost the park road construction, views, and probably a good bit of the hiking trail. The permit was terminated not too long ago, but I have mixed feelings about that, too.

Dam infrastructure in this country sucks. That's really the only way to put it. I'm absolutely shocked that the last infrastructure disaster was a highway bridge collapse, and not a catastrophic dam failure. And while the Gorge Dam appears to be in good shape, it's only a matter of time before it too deteriorates, and becomes a danger to everyone downstream. The Gorge Dam can't be removed with the current budget. It would cost too much in dredging, and would divert funds away from other, more urgent projects. I would have felt better seeing someone responsible for its upkeep and maintenence, even if that meant that I had to give up my favorite park in Akron, for the safety of those downstream.

However, as it stands, I guess the Gorge is still in limbo. I hope that someone eventually finds a solution.

All right... this is a blog entry that I've been wanting to write for a while: The History of the Finger Lakes.

( Cut because it's really FREAKIN LONG and may bore some people. No... not MY friends... )

I'm sure by now that you've heard of the six miners trapped in the Utah coal mine. My dad was a coal miner, and this is the first generation that at least one male in my family wasn't, so this is kind of personal. I'm hoping and praying that they're alive, but I don't hold much hope this late in the game.

However, we're not getting the whole story here.

The mine operator, Robert E. Murray, is swearing up and down that an earthquake caused the collapse.

Of course, according to him, the collapse has nothing to do with the fact that they were pillar robbing- for those of you who don't know, pillar robbing is the last thing they do before they close a mine. Pillars of coal, which hold up the roof, are whittled down until it no longer becomes safe to be in the room, which they then seal off. This, naturally, is one of the most dangerous kinds of coal mining, and while I'm not certain of the statistics, I wouldn't be surprised if it results in the greatest number of underground mine casualties.

However, an earthquake.

Does he really think we're that frakking stupid?

A little primer in seismology- earthquakes happen when two bodies of rock move relative to each other along a fault line. We can get an idea of how these blocks of rock moved by looking at a distribution of strain in the crust. A strike-slip fault where the blocks move past one another will exert more force at the ends of the fault, while a dip-slip fault will exert more force on the sides. Either way, there's an anisotropy to the distribution of forces in an earthquake. On the other hand, when there's an explosion underground, the force is distributed in all directions pretty much equally. We've known this for years- it's how we knew that North Korea tested their bomb, instead of a really big earthquake.

Now, I'm not a seismologist- I haven't seen the seismogram from this "earthquake", and I probably wouldn't be able to correctly read it without help from my seismologist friends. But when the scientific community says it wasn't an earthquake, I'm inclined to believe them.

Murray stands to lose from this, so he's making up a story. He is hiding something. May it come to light very soon.

ETA- I just found out some other shitty things Murray has done. He assaulted an environmental activist in 2001. He sued the Akron Beacon Journal for libel after they painted him in a less-than-flattering light (which is VERY easy to do with this individual). And worst of all, he's anti-union- the same union that would have fought for the safeguards in the mine that would have prevented this tragedy.

This guy needs to be tarred and feathered yesterday. I hope that after this, some justice will make sure he loses the majority of his money and power, and is never in a position to hurt anyone again.

So, one major part of my project is figuring out the deglaciation of the Finger Lakes region to get at when incision started. Ice sheet melts, incision starts- simple, right?

Well, yeah, it would be- if it weren't for glacial lakes.

When the ice sheet started to melt back, massive proglacial lakes formed in front of the retreating ice front. You can see their modern counterparts in places like this one. Because of the Valley Heads Moraine to the south, these lakes couldn't drain that way, and just kept building up as the ice melted. The lakes coalesced, and became Glacial Lake Iroquois.

Finally, just before the ice sheet melted back toward the Mohawk River Valley, the lakes reached a high stand. This wasn't because any more water was being added- a lot was about to be taken away. As soon as the ice melted past the Mohawk River Valley, a good portion of Lake Iroquois rushed out through the valley and into the Atlantic Ocean- catastrophic drainage number one.

Eventually, the water found a level where the Mohawk River Valley was just an outlet- not a catastrophic outlet. After that, things aren't quite as clear. Right on top of Watkins Glen lies two deltas, one on top of the other. It's not a proglacial delta- for one, there's not enough silt and clay in it to convince me. Plus, the orientation of the delta foresets really makes it tempting to think that it was formed by the stream that has since eroded through it- it's exactly what you'd expect. This really makes me think that the lower delta might be another lake stage, one that's been documented in the literature.

After the Mohawk Valley catastrophic drainage, the level of Lake Iroquois would have remained relatively stable. As more ice melted, any extra water that wouldn't fit into the increased volume left by the ice would have just drained into the Atlantic Ocean through the Mohawk River, until isostatic rebound made it too high to get to (note- look into that). However, there was one more valley to the north- the Hudson River Valley. After the ice melted past that... well, end of the party for Lake Iroquois. It pretty much drained away to almost nothing; only Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain remain of a massive body of fresh water that once covered most of Upstate New York.

This is a really tantalizing explanation of what I'm seeing, and it would really make the determination of when incision began much easier. The last catastrophic discharge is considered to have triggered the well-constrained Intra-Allerød cold period, and when that drained out, incision would have pretty much started right then. However, from reading the literature, it doesn't look like Lake Iroquois had a shoreline that far south when it drained out of the Hudson. One interpretation puts it close-within a couple of tens of kilometers- but it wasn't quite there.

But if it wasn't there, what am I seeing?

UPDATE: I spoke with my advisor this morning- he feels I'm correct in making the argument that the deltas were from Lake Iroquois, and suggested I write a paragraph about it in my thesis. Well, that saves me a lot of time, but I'd still like to sit down and look at a few of these things.

We made a bit of a deal- if he supports me this summer, I graduate in August. Well, I was going to do that anyway, but if it means I get support now...

The BBC Climate Challenge!

I have played this frakking game over ten times since yesterday. Basically, you run Europe for 50 years, and you pick from different policies. The object is to lower carbon emissions, but there are always trade-offs. Not only do you have to keep an eye on your carbon emissions and money, but there are the possibilities of food and water shortages (hint: upgrade infrastructure early), energy shortages (hint: look at fusion), and the ever present spectre of getting voted out of office. This is the hardest little flash game I have ever played! I think I'm going to assign it to my students!

Bonus points if they can end the game without crashing the economy.