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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • “You see,” my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

    From, They Thought They Were Free











  • What an exciting study. The TL;DR:

    GEOlogy is the study of the earth and how it changes over time. At a high level the Earth is sustained by the geodynamo - electromagnetic fluid movement in the core and mantle that sustains mantle convection and plate tectonics. The Moon doesn’t have any of that, so geological processes on the Moon is of intense study. In this paper they found pretty good evidence of contractional tectonics - the surface wrinkling from the Moon shrinking and changes in orbit - effecting all sides of the Moon in the form of scarps which induce moonquakes. This has implications for mapping the surface for future exploratory missions and long-term habitation (don’t want to have a colony in a seismically unstable place).








  • Hot springs are the surface manifestation of subsurface groundwater being indirectly heated by geothermal heat, usually magma (magma is underground lava, lava is magma erupted at the surface). Environments where hot springs occur are associated with their eruptive counterparts called a geyser. Subsurface rock with fractures and wide pore space between grains are more conducive to the geostructual plumbing that characterize hot springs/geysers. More acidic and biologically active hot springs are called mudpots. The groundwater will reflect the environment it circulates in and can have wide range of dissolved ions. Once vaporized or brought to the surface groundwater and mobilize any number of compounds. Most geysers are coated in Geyserite, which is a hydrated silica mineral sourced from silica rich bedrock that groundwater interacts with. Some environments, called fumaroles, will have no circulating liquid water and will be dominated by volcanic vapor and groundwater steam. Fumaroles are the nasty ones because they tend to have vaporized hydrochloric acid and sulfur oxides in the steam. These emitted gases derive from cooling of complex magmas that contain sulfur, fluorine, hydrogen, and carbon.


  • So tsunamis are definitely a threat generally from earthquakes and an earthquake of this size can make it deadly. Unlike the San Andres faults that cause most California earthquakes ( which wouldn’t produce significant tsunamis) this earthquake occurred in a discordant part of the pacific oceanic crust called the Mendocino triple junction - the intersection of the San Andres fault, Cascadian subduction zone (where the Pacific crust is plunging under the North American continent, feeding features like Mt. St Helens), and the Gorda plate (the last remnant of the precursor to the pacific plate, the Panthalassic Ocean that surrounded Pangea).