Exogeology ROCKS!

Wow! An eruption; that ROCKS! Only, it doesn’t at all. All flights to and from Iceland were postponed, including mine. It turns out I’ll have to wait a few more days before going home. The Icelandic volcano Fimmvorduhals near Eyjafjallajoekull glacier erupted just recently on March 21. It was a small, relatively harmless eruption. There was ash,  flights were canceled, and there were evacuations, but there wasn’t much damage done considering what could have happened. Yesterday it erupted again–and I was there. Well, not there precisely, but in Iceland, so I was affected by the eruption (just a canceled flight).

Don’t ask me how to pronounce the name of the glacier; I have no idea, even though I’ve been hearing it on all the television and radio channels (I’m not a linguist). The volcano is just as difficult to pronounce. Somehow I manage to get the locals to understand me when I’m pronouncing local cities and words. It helps to know that “j” is pronounced like “y”…

I wish I’d been nearer to the volcano, but on the other hand, I was far enough to be out of harm’s way. Even still, I would have loved to see it erupt (from the sky)! Not only was there lava, but this time there was flooding due to the fact that the volcano was under a glacier! The March eruption wasn’t directly under the glacier, so there wasn’t any flooding. But yesterday’s eruption was in the main crater, which was underneath the icecap. I should figure out what would happen if a volcano erupted under the north Martian ice cap…

There might even be another eruption. There’s another volcano, Katla, which is more destructive and has an easier name. It could affect a larger area than Fimmvorduhals, even causing global damage! Fimmvorduhals, which was the one that erupted yesterday, had ash that spread all the way to the UK and stopped flights to and from there. A colleague of mine in Ireland told me that her flights were canceled due to ash there (the ash can cause a lot of damage to airplane motors)! Wow, ash can go a long ways! The lava itself seems to be less of a problem than the ash and flooding. I hope I get to see something from above when I fly home.

I guess I’ll have a bit more time to look around as a tourist before I go, and time to do more research, too, of course. Isn’t it awesome that geology can be so exciting? It’s not all just looking at rocks. Exogeology is pretty exciting, too. I mean, Io has more volcanic activity than any other body in the Solar System. And ice on Mars is being studied for traces of water ice, which is part of what I’m doing right now! Exogeology most certainly ROCKS!

To find out more about the recent Iceland eruption, read these articles:

• BBC News
• Yahoo News
• Channel News Asia
• Global Times

The last link has a great photo; it really shows the scale of the eruption.

An important part of exogeology is exploring! Rovers on the surface and orbiters up above the surface both tell us a lot about the surface of Mars.

The Mariner spacecraft were the first to provide closeup photos of another planet. That’s really impressive. There were a lot of flybys and orbiters since then, and now NASA has an amazingly good photograph of how Mars looks from space.

The other part of mapping Mars is actually going down and looking at everything close up. Rovers and landers like Viking and the Mars Exploration rovers worked hard to do that. The Viking missions were the first successful Mars landers, and there’s a picture Viking 2 took in the photo gallery.

The Mars Exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been exploring Mars for a lot longer than was expected, and I’m still receiving data! Someday there will even be astronauts going to Mars! Exogeology ROCKS!

Yes, on Earth! Even though I mainly study other planets, Earth is a great place to see all sorts of geologic formations! Let me tell you about some great things to see on Earth that I’ve seen on the planets and moons.

• Craters

Wait, craters on Earth? I thought there were only craters on the Moon! No, actually there can be craters on just about anything (as long as it has a solid surface; there aren’t craters on jovian planets). Earth has relatively few though, because smaller meteors burn up in our thick atmosphere. But some of the few meteor craters there are on Earth can be quite something to see! It’s almost like you’re on the moon! Barringer Crater in Arizona is the best example. Most craters on Earth are a bit less dramatic though, after being eroded for thousands of years. It gives you a great sense of what you’re dealing with to go and see a real crater.

• Canyons

Canyons are usually carved out by rivers, so why would they be in a list of exogeology related formations? After all, Earth is the only planet with such a large amount of water. Well, I’ve added them for a couple reasons. The first is that there are some formations that can best be described as canyons, even though they’re not made in the same way as the canyons we’re used to seeing. Take Mars’ Valles Marineris. It’s the largest canyon in the Solar System, but it’s a rift valley (a type of fault). On the other hand, there are channels on Mars that might have been made by the flow of water, like dried up riverbeds. I’ll talk about that more in a later post.

• Ice

Ice fields are the only formation on this list I have yet to see. I’m actually going to be flying to Iceland for a few days to study glaciers. Because of this, posts over the next few days will be automated while I’m gone. Ice has been found all over: in comets and asteroids, on moons (Europa in particular), and on Mars. The gas giants are theorized to have icy cores. But not all this ice is actually frozen water. Europa might have water ice, but we don’t know for sure. Comets have water ice though. Water is so important on Earth that I think everything with water is exciting! Water is necessary for life, and that’s something I’d be thrilled to find. Could you imagine? I’m a huge science fiction fan, and that inspires me to think about big new scientific discoveries like life or undiscovered planets all the time. I’m getting off topic. Let’s get back to those awesome rocks!

• Sand Dunes

Sand dunes can be found wherever there is sand, wind, and a dry climate. I went to the White Sands National Monument recently, and it was beautiful! As soon as you drove into the park there were sand dunes as far as you could see. The field of dunes was comparable to some of the dunes on Mars. An even better comparison is Utah’s Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. The reddish sand makes it feel as if you’re really on Mars. Dusty parts of deserts are also good places to look for dust devils, a common sight on the red planet.

• Minerals and Rocks

Yes, I know, I was supposed to tell you about formations and not minerals. But minerals are important too! You need to look at the big things and the little things. There are a whole bunch of rocks and minerals that occur on Earth and also in space. One of my favorites is hematite. That’s an iron based mineral common on Mars. It comes in a few different forms. One form of hematite is red and rocky, and another is silvery gray and metallic. Iron in rocks is what makes Mars red! Moon rocks are pretty cool too; a rock from a lunar mare is made of the same thing as lava rocks on Earth! That ROCKS!

• Volcanoes

Volcanoes have been found on Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Io. And on Titan there are cryovolcanoes! There are active and inactive volcanoes all over Earth that are fascinating to see in person. I try to go to as many volcano sites as I can during field research.

• Plate Tectonics

Plate tectonics is the process that makes the continents move. They spread apart like at the mid Atlantic ridge, and move under each other (called subduction) in places like Japan and the Aleutian islands of Alaska. The Earth’s surface is changing! And what’s more, there used to be plate tectonics on ancient Mars, and there still are on Titan!

• Strata

Strata is just another term for rock layers. There are strata everywhere! That’s because rock layers can form all sorts of ways, like an ocean depositing sand on a beach or volcanoes erupting new lava flows. Strata can show a lot about that geographical area’s past. One time I looked at the strata in the Grand Canyon to figure out what order things happened in. I could easily see that the layers on the bottom formed first, then were tilted, and then that surface was eroded flat. More layers formed, and finally the Colorado River eroded the rocks away to create the Grand Canyon! How cool is it that you can tell what was happening for millions of years just by looking at rocks? I say that ROCKS! I do the exact same sort of thing when I look at strata from anywhere.

Can you believe so many of the same things happen on Earth that happen on other planets? I think it’s amazing. Exogeology ROCKS!

Photograph by NASA, found at http://marsdata1.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/photoContest/index.cfm?pollContentID=7&getDetails=Yes&showHeader=Yes

I’ve been getting  some data from my favorite planet–Mars!

Mars being researched right now by people looking for water; traces of it in the past, and water today.

Water leaves traces in a bunch of ways. There are minerals that can only form when there’s water around, and there are geologic formations that water can form. I look for both kinds of evidence for water.

Some of the minerals I’ve found that require water are hematite and carbonates. Hematite can form without water, as it has all over Mars. But what I found that shows there must have been water are called hematite spherules. These are tiny spheres of hematite, embedded in a martian rock. They’re more commonly called “blueberries”. They could have formed as concretions, which only form when there’s liquid water, but the blueberries still don’t definitively prove the existence of water on Mars. There are other ways they could have formed, like as martian tektites.

There are other minerals that can only form with water, such as carbonate minerals like calcite and limestone. The Spirit rover has found evidence of carbonates in the Gusev Crater. You know what this means? Water! Rovers rock!

Channels on Mars were discovered a long time ago, yet exogeologists are still debating how they were made. One theory says that the channels are riverbeds, so they would have been made by water. But another says that the channels were made by lava. I’m still trying to decipher the history of the channels. But I’m hopeful that water had something to do with it.

The Phoenix rover took part in the search for water. It looked for water as part of its mission, and actually found some! I’ll say it again, rovers ROCK!

I’ve found lots of evidence for water on Mars, but I need more proof before I can say for sure that any large amounts of it existed on Mars. I think that “follow the water” is a great goal for the Mars program. I’ll have to keep searching!