Austerity Axes Geological Survey in Greece

Impending financial difficulties in Greece threaten closure of the Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration (IGME).   As part of current austerity measures, IGME is apparently on the list for immediate shutdown, as perhaps are other national laboratories.

For those who have worked in Greece, IGME is well known for its maps, laboratories, staff and scientists, and a willingness to provide permits for research.  Over the past 59 years, IGME geologists have mapped the complex terrain that is Greece – that work is invaluable if you’ve ever attempted to understand the wonderful complexity that the rocks and tectonics of this area present.  The organization has expanded into every aspect of the geosciences, has become a leader in publicizing natural hazards and their mitigation, is the national repository of earth science data for the region, in addition to being the protectorate of natural resources for the country.  IGME also provides permits to foreigners (especially non-EU scientists) for geological/geophysical research in Greece.  As a Greek colleague commented:  ”One outcome is that the work of decent foreigners may be disturbed, because I do not want to think who will issue the work permits!”

In every respect it is the equivalent to any national survey organization such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the British Survey.  Restructuring and downsizing seem a better solution than complete elimination.

It is unclear when this may occur.  One decision date seems to be 5 August of this year (according to otyposnews.gr  [in Greek], whereas other sources in the Greek bureaucracy claim there are no firm decisions for closures as yet… apparently meetings are ongoing and recommendations for closures will be made in September at the earliest.

While it is not for us to meddle in these internal politics, we must be concerned when such prominent and significant professional organizations are threatened with political actions that speak to expediency while ignoring excellence, and take such drastic measures to pacify political problems.  Closing such a national resource as IGME needs commentary from the international community – strong letters of support have come from a number of geological surveys in Europe.  To view these letters, and to provide your own, please go to the IGME website.

Floyd W. McCoy
Professor in Geology, Geophysics & Oceanography
University of Hawaii – Windward
Graduate Faculty, Geology & Geophysics
University of Hawaii – Manoa

 

Rock and Roll in CHCH

Posted courtesy of  Thomas W. Gardner, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, who is on sabbatical at Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand.  This  e-mail was sent to his colleagues on Tue, 22 Feb 2011 , at 14:49:37.

That was a big one, 6.3 -10 km south of city and less than 5 km deep!! I was on the 3rd floor of the Gesoc building. Building started shaking, dust, then tiles fell from ceiling.  I fell off my chair and couldn’t stand up.  Looked out window across quad and saw another 5 story building swaying and glass shattering. I hid under the desk. It was to the point where I was actually thinking that the building would collapse if it got any worse!!!  It lasted for about 10 seconds I think (time moves in strange ways when the earth shakes).

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Everybody evacuated outside to parking lot.  We were just standing around and a 6.0 aftershock hit. Could barely stand up for that one also. Cars were doing a crazy dance and we had to dodge them bouncing around!!!  We watched the building shake and the communications towers sway back and forth. It was unreal!!!

Uni was evacuated, so I went home to my flat. All lamps and dressers were on the floor and book cases toppled. Toilet bowls had spilled water everywhere.  I lost all of my bottles of wine, but one, broken on the floor (that was serious!!!!). Many big aftershooks 5+ every couple of hours and little ones every 30 minutes or so.  I immediately got my camera, a bottle of water, a flashlight and headed out to record the chaos.  People were wondering aimlessly in the street and the roads out of the city center were in gridlock. I walked about 5 km to get to the city center where I could see smoke rising.  Roads buckled and lots of liquefaction and houses toppled into the streets.  Cathedral spire on Cathedral square toppled killing many.  City center was blocked off, and I couldn’t get closer.  Attached are a few picts of the adventure. Power was out all nite. When it got dark it was really interesting and a bit scary.  Sirens and helicopters everywhere.  Too many aftershocks to sleep.  A couple were big enough to knock the lamps back off of the tables.  I have left them on the floor!!!  WOW just had another shaker made the glass rattle and table move!!!!!!  Rock and roll.

All uni communication services are down so I walked to a nearby motel with broadband wifi. I’m sitting in the restaurant with a lot of other people wondering what to do.  I’m trying to find a bike so I can go explore more, but phone lines are not working so I can’t call to get one.  We can only do texting.

Anyway, I’m fine and thanks for everyone asking.  It has stopped raining (that was making everything more ominous) and the sun is coming out.

 

Geology in the rough

I was pretty sure that the conditions could have been more miserable but I didn’t know exactly how. I was soaked to the skin and my pants were caked with smelly black organic muck–part soil, part sheep dung, and part rainwater–as I slogged up a muddy trail with a heavy pack through the seemingly endless South Asian monsoon and towards the Himalayan timberline. At least I was warm inside my rain jacket as long as I kept moving. The rest of the day would bring roiling streams, a disconcertingly flexible bridge of lashed saplings and pine boughs set across some raging rapids, and one last set of rocky switchbacks to the blustery crest of a moraine set in a remote glaciated valley. And tea. Hot masala chai for warmth at the end of the day’s trek.

A collection of geoscientists from the University of Cincinnati, Purdue University, and the University of Bayreuth, our group was spending two weeks on foot to collect samples for cosmogenic surface exposure and luminescence dating of glacial deposits high in the Garhwal Himalaya of north central India. We’d also take some soil and water samples to learn about carbon and nitrogen cycling in this remote region. For reasons that gave little comfort at the time, our trek coincided with the last gasp of the wettest monsoon season in anyone’s memory. Talk about drawing the short straw.

Meteorological vagaries aside, geology offers many of us the opportunity to travel to places like the Himalaya and do things like map landslides inside a collapsed caldera in Papua New Guinea. On another day, I might be using airborne laser scanner data to identify areas subsiding above abandoned underground coal mines or working with photorealistic 3-D computer models to help prevent rockslides along an interstate highway. Still later, maybe reading up on wavelet transforms or spherical statistics. Or, at a more elemental level, explaining to a homeowner why his house is cracking apart and what might be done to solve the problem.

Being useful is, at least to me, the most satisfying part of the compensation package. The variety, adventure, and intellectual challenges are fringe benefits. Sure, sometimes the conditions are miserable and the problems seem intractable, but in the end it’s quite a career and beats having a real job.

Our trek continued for another week and a half. I’d slip and fall, and fall again, walk up a glacier in a blizzard to cross a high pass, and then limp down in pain on a wobbly knee. We’d eat amazing food–fresh goat curry high in the mountains and spicy samosas in a tea house along the trail–and meet incredible people. We’d get soaked, spend a couple of nights in a wretchedly cold and damp unheated hostel, and surreptitiously buy a duffel bag full of cold beer in a holy city where alcohol is supposed to be forbidden (but can be had just around the corner from another questionable joint offering cooked chicken to anyone who’d made their way down the narrow unmarked alley). In the end, once the samples are analyzed and the papers written, we’ll know a little more about the glacial history, neotectonics, and environmental chemistry of the Garhwal Himalaya.

And the guy with the cracked house? He was the unwitting victim of expansive soil and a dry summer, a situation likely exacerbated by a neighbor’s large tree.

 

Where on (Google) Earth #219?

In early 2007 Brian Romans of Clastic Detritus inaugurated what was to become one of the Geoblogosphere’s longest running series Where on (Google) Earth. Today, to celebrate of the GSA Annual Meeting in Denver, it makes its first appearance here at Speaking of Geoscience.

The object of Where on (Google) Earth is to identify the locality of the image below (latitude and longitude will generally suffice), but also to explain the geological significance of the site. Since very early on it has been the tradition for the winner (first person to correctly identify the location and geologic significance of this WoGE) to host the next challenge on their own geoblog. If the winner has no geoblog, then they are responsible for starting a brand new geoblog of their own – it’s really not that hard, just ask if you need assistance – you may be surprised how much fun it can be to blog about a subject you love. The winner is further responsible for posting a link to the next challenge in the comments of the previous one as soon as the new challenge is posted. In this way we are able to maintain a chain of links to the most current incarnation of WoGE. (If you’re not willing to shoulder the responsibility of hosting the next challenge please refrain from posting your answer until someone who’s willing to host the next one has answered – otherwise it becomes something of a mess to keep the chain intact.)

I think WoGE #219 will be tricky enough to locate that I’m not going to invoke the Schott Rule, where previous winners need to wait an hour for each WoGE they’ve won before answering. The Schott Rule is invoked at the discretion of the geoblogger who posts the new WoGE. Easy challenges generally merit a Schott Rule invocation, whereas more challenging ones generally do not. The main purpose of the Schott Rule is to allow new competitors a fair chance to participate by keeping previous winners from dominating the game.

I’ll present two views of the current challenge, a standard overhead map view:

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and an oblique view (what’s the fun of Google Earth if you don’t take advantage of its 3D capabilities):

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Good luck in your search and enjoy the Annual Meeting in Denver, or the interesting geology that surrounds you wherever you may be!

If you want to see why they call it the Schott Rule, come visit my blog Ron Schott’s Geology Home Companion Blog. You can also follow me on Twitter @rschott. And with that, I’m off to GigaPan some Front Range roadcuts!

 

(Re)Discovering The Field

A common image of geology is a person or group poised in front of a nice outcrop or panoramic scene of a classic locality. We show pictures like this on our websites and tout opportunities for students to be exposed to the field. However, the last 15 years or so have been a hard time for geology programs in many ways. Enrollments have often been down, many departments have closed or merged with others, budgets have been tight, faculty members are experiencing increasing demands on their time, and universities have become more risk adverse. During this time, field camps have closed, and the number of opportunities students have, especially undergraduates, to get into the field have been significantly reduced. My recent involvement at meetings and in committees suggests that the academic community, professional organizations, and industry, have all noticed the harmful effects of this decline in field experiences. The question is, what and how much are we doing about it?

The quote below is from the 2009 AGI (American Geological Institute) report on the status of the geoscience workforce:

Over the past 10 years, there has been a decrease in the number of departments offering traditional summer field courses. These courses, or field camps, have traditionally served as a central part of undergraduate geoscience curricula. Employers across all sectors of the geosciences continue to either require or desire field camp or comparable field experience in new hires. The overall decline in field opportunities has increased the challenge of identifying fully-qualified new hires.”

There are almost 700 schools listed in the AGI Directory of Geoscience Departments, but the report shows that only 15% of them offer summer field camps, down from 35% in 1985 and 1995. The good news is that the total number of students enrolled in a field camp has been on the rise for the past 10 years. The bad news, I suspect, is that the way this is being accomplished is by increasing student-teacher ratios, which is particularly undesirable in what is considered a capstone course in most curricula.

I believe that there are many opportunities for field experiences besides field camp, and that students are ready and willing to participate. For example, we recently found it was easy to identify 42 students from 12 different universities willing to help with a large seismic experiment in Oregon. Classes, of course, take field trips that are very effective, but we need to do more to encourage this, as money and commitment from administrators and faculty are required. There are also many summer opportunities for internships at organizations like IRIS and UNAVCO, and summer field experiences offered by industry.

The first step in a situation like this is to recognize the problem. Having done this, we now need to do more to make the problem go away. It will require effort, commitment, and resources across the geological community.