April 25, 2019 | Natasha Sekhon, PhD Candidate

Art through music and film-making is an integral part of everyone’s daily life. Multiple studies (Ilari et al., 2013; Marsh, 2009) have explored the importance music plays in human existence from educative songs taught to children or exploring different cultures through the lens of music.

Geosciences is no exception to inspiring creative artists! Many movies and songs are centred around geosciences concepts. There are only a handful movies that accurately depict geoscientists, but that’s for another blog post!

The wide-ranging branches of geosciences have motivated numerous songs by an international crossing cultures and languages. I recently had a show at KVRX, 91.7 FM where I played a lot of these tracks. You’d be surprised to learn how many fantastic songs revolve around Geosciences:

1) Cosmo Sheldrake –

Pliocene and Axolotl –

The Much Much How How and I

Cosmo Sheldrake’s a brilliant multi-instrumentalist who uses the soundscape around him to create songs. Pliocene and Axolotl are examples of two songs using geoscience motifs from his debut album. Pliocene talks about extinctions and the cycle of evolution. Axolotl, as the name suggests, is a reference to salamanders. Austinites are well aware of the important role the Austin Blind Salamander (endangered species) has on the Barton Spring ecosystem.

2)Until the Ribbon Breaks –

Petrichor –

Until the Ribbon Breaks

Petrichor is the earthy scent that is produced when first rain falls on dry and warm soils. Two Australian soil scientists who published a 1964 Nature paper, ‘Nature of Agrillaceuos Odor’ coined the term which began the scientific study of Petrichor. Until The Ribbon Breaks’ song is just an example of many that are inspired the first rain’s aroma. Keaton Henson and Ludovico Einaudi are other examples.

3) Rivage (Shore) – Swing – Marabout / Juniore – A la plage (To the beach) – Juniore/  Therapie Taxi – Transatlantique (Trans-Atlantic) – Hit Sale

French singers, Swing, Juniore, and Therapie TAXI are great examples of French songs influenced by geosciences. The three songs detail geomorphological concepts of the shore lines and beaches. Furthermore, the songs could not be more different in genre covering hip-hop, alt-rock, and pop.

4) D. Dumbo – Tropical Oceans – D.D. Dumbo/ Thomas Azier – Sandglass – Rogue/ Johnny Flynn – Murmuration – Live at the Roundhouse

D.D. Dumbo, Australian-based electrical loop genius, sings about Earth’s future. Dark lyrics camouflaged within an upbeat indie-pop song. A Dutch electro-pop singer now based in Germany, Thomas Azier conjures up images of deserts and mirages in his song Sandglass. Johnny Flynn, British South-African folk musician, brings a song about the flocking behavior of birds (murmuration). Interestingly, a lot of active research is being conducted into the reason behind murmuration using citizen science.

5) Delafé y las Flores Azules – Mar el poder del mar – Estonosepara /El Buho – Tecolotin – Cenotes

Mar el poder del mar translates to ‘power of the sea’ and is sung by Delafé y las Flores Azules, a Barcelona-based Spanish band that talks about as the name suggests the power of the sea. Tecolotin from the album Cenotes is by El Buho, an English artist inspired by the sounds of the forests in Latin America. This is obvious by the title of album, Cenotes, which is the Spanish word for sinkholes.

Notable Mentions – Holocene by Bon Iver; The Rip Tide by Beirut; Tremors by SOHN

We’ve created a playlist on Spotify for fellow peers to enjoy and explore songs mentioned in the series.

November 12, 2018 | Brandon Shuck, PhD 2021

Let’s be real, we all love fieldwork. It feels great to take a break from the repetitive days of grinding in the office and go outside to get your hands dirty.

In mid-October I was fortunate to travel to the Mojave Desert and participate in the Mojave Broadband Seismic Experiment. The project seeks to understand how strain is distributed across the Eastern California Shear Zone and how the lithosphere evolved since the Laramide Orogeny. Led by PIs Thorsten Becker, Whitney Behr, and Vera Schulte-Pelkum, the experiment is comprised of 19 broadband seismometers deployed 2 km apart on a single 40 km-long line. The instruments were deployed in Spring 2018 and are set to record seismic events from all over the world for two years. Robert Porritt (UTIG Postdoctoral Fellow working with Thorsten) recruited Kelly Olsen (PhD ‘21), Simone Puel (PhD ‘22), and me (PhD ‘21) to help service the seismometers, which consists of downloading data, making sure everything is working properly, and installing protection to the GPS and sensor cables.

        Overview maps showing location of the seismic instruments in Mojave Desert with regional faults.

Our basecamp was the California Inn in the thriving metropolis of Barstow, CA. The seismic line was located a 1-hour drive east of Barstow near a “town” called Ludlow, which only had a gas station, a Dairy Queen, a small diner, and a Motel 6. Rob described the motel in Ludlow as the “sketchiest thing I’ve ever seen”, so we were all pretty happy to exchange a slightly longer drive for tasty restaurants and comfort in Barstow. Every day we split into two teams with the goal of servicing three stations per team. We quickly learned this is easier said than done in the Mojave Desert! The area is extremely desolate – no roads, no trails, and no signs of life, anywhere. To get close to some stations we drove up dry river channels and through desert shrubs (sorry rental car company). Other stations were located on Mojave National Preserve, so we just had to pull over on I-40 and crawl under barbed wire fences.

Typical Mojave Desert landscape view from instrument K.

The Mojave landscape is breathtaking. The red dirt and basalt colluvium made it feel like we were doing fieldwork on Mars. I am very thankful that it wasn’t summertime when temperatures are commonly 125°F. The geology was astonishing, and I was thrilled to see complex folds and volcanic flows, which was a nice break from the carbonates in Austin. Volcanic rocks dominate the desert – basalt, andesite, and rhyolite flows, lapilli, ignimbrites, and pumices. We also saw mountains of granite, schist, and gneiss, some volcanic breccias and arkose sandstones. Seeing cool rocks was a real treat for me and brought me back to my undergrad days as a geologist. Every desert shrub tried to kill us as we scrambled across this beautiful landscape; we all bled a small sacrifice to the Mojave.

Folds in schists, gneiss, and volcanic lapilli? (top right).

Sweet contact between orthogneiss and biotite schist.

At each station, we used a Bluetooth app to connect with the instrument and receive information, such as its current status, temperature, GPS clock, and the amount of data recorded. We also used the app to make sure the three sensor components were properly working and responding to ground motion (yes, we jumped on the ground like little kids). While downloading data onto our laptop, we installed a blue “fire hose” type material around the sensor cable and then buried it for protection against inquisitive desert critters. Lastly, to secure the GPS and solar panel cables, we wrapped them with $0.25 foam pool noodles (Kelly’s brilliant idea). A quick check to make sure everything was working fine, and we were off to the next station.

(Top left): A content seismometer. (Top right): Analog to digital converter stores data. (Bottom left): Rob digging up the seismometer to change the sensor cable. (Bottom right): Installing the blue fire hose to protect the sensor cable.

Beautiful views at stations K (top left), S (bottom left), B (top right), and J (bottom right – check out the killer folds in the background!).

All in all, our mission was a success, collecting quality seismic data from 18 of 19 stations for analyses back in Austin. Two stations had a severed GPS cable, one had a chewed sensor cable, and one was dead from losing connection with its solar panels. We brought spare cables to replace the damaged ones, and the new fire hose and pool noodle protection should ensure the stations happily record seismic arrivals until the next service run.

Chilling on some coarse granite at station S (Budweiser Springs).

After completing service on all 19 stations, we explored lava tubes at Pisgah Crater, a young (~22 Ka) cinder-cone volcano. I was surprised to find a road that allowed us to drive up to the rim of the crater! Watching the sunset on fresh basalt flows was a great way to end our time in the Mojave Desert. Before we flew back to Austin, we also spent a few hours relaxing at Santa Monica and Venice Beach. After hiking over 75 km through rough desert terrain for six days in tennis shoes, I was happy to dip my feet in the cold Pacific #SendItForScience.

Hanging out on top of Pisgah Crater. Photo credit: Simone.

Hook ‘Em Horns inside a young lava tube.

Relaxing in Venice Beach to celebrate after fieldwork. Photo credit: Simone.

This experience taught me that sometimes the best fieldwork does not have to be associated with your personal research. Even though I may not get involved with the analyses of these data, it was an extremely rewarding experience to learn about broadband seismic instruments and the geology of the Mojave Desert region, and to grow relationships with friends and colleagues.

October 15, 2018 | Megan Flansburg (Ph.D. 2022) and Sam Robbins (M.S. 2020)

From August through early September, we spent four weeks in Russia, three of which were in remote eastern Siberia, doing field work at the slowest convergent margin (i.e., where two tectonic plates are moving toward one another) in the world! We traversed the dramatic terrain of the Verkhoyansk fold-thrust belt between the towns of Yakutsk and Ust-Nera and down the Indigirka River, taking samples for geo-thermochronometric and paleomagnetic analyses as part of the NOR-R-AM international consortium (Norway-Russia-North America, https://norramarctic.wordpress.com/). Our advisor, Dr. Daniel Stockli, is a co-PI of the consortium. (See Sept 12, 2018 Science Y’all post by Margo Odlum (PhD ’19) about NOR-R-AM’s Svalbard program: https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/science-yall/midnight-sun-in-the-high-arctic/).

Figure 1. Our three-week traverse overlain on GoogleEarth satellite imagery. The team collected 85(!) samples for geo-thermochronology and over 60 samples for paleomagnetic study. The Kamaz truck was our mode of transport for most of the trip, but we did take a four-day excursion down the Indigirka River in a trio of small boats.

Our nine-person team was composed of five Russians and four Americans (one American is a Research Associate at CEED at the University of Oslo and represented Norway). Our journey began in Yakutsk (62°N, 129°E), the capital of the Sakha Republic and the home of the Diamond and Precious Metal Institute of Geology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The turn-around point for our journey was ~100 km north of Ust-Nera, along the north-flowing meanders of the Indigirka River (65°N, 143°E). Our traverse covered ~1000 km between the southwest to the northeast points.

Figure 2. Sam Robbins (M.S. ’20), Megan Flansburg (PhD ’22), and Kseniya Mikhailova (PhD, Univ. of St. Petersburg) cheesin’ as they hike through the thick taiga vegetation searching for late Neoproterozoic to earliest Cambrian (635 – 535 Ma) strata. (Photo from Daniel Stockli)

The trip was certainly unlike anything we had done before! From hiking through dense taiga vegetation and soggy bogs to fording rivers in thigh-high rubber boots (see Figure 3, below), we quickly got a taste for Siberian-style field work. The scenery and the geology were nothing short of jaw-dropping and the people were fantastic. Despite being from two nations involved in a complex political relationship, the camaraderie among the geoscientists proved that people will watch out for one another, and bond over shared interests (i.e., geeking out over rocks).

Figure 3. A. Sam Robbins (M.S. ’20) sporting his field fashion sense in thigh-high waders. B. Drs. Danny Stockli (UT) and Andrei Prokopiev (Yakutsk) posing in front of sub-vertical Triassic (252 – 201 Ma) strata.

 Figure 4. Typical scenes of the taiga environment throughout our trip.

Along with our detailed structural observations throughout the traverse, the goals of the Verkhoyansk project are threefold:

1. Use paleomagnetic analyses to constrain the position of eastern Siberia, particularly in the Triassic and Jurassic (252 – 145 Ma) where previous data are sparse.
2. Use thermochronology to determine the timing of uplift (southeastern Verkhoyansk-Chersky and south Verkhoyansk belts)
3. Use detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology to refine provenance analyses (i.e., use the ages of zircon crystals within sedimentary rocks to derive their likely source areas), particularly on both sides of the Adycha-Taryn fault zone (the proposed, but debated, suture between the Siberian craton and the North American craton). Additionally, the ages of late Mesozoic (~174 – 66 Ma) arc magmatic rocks will be refined with zircon U-Pb geochronology.

Geochronology and thermochronology utilize the known decay rates of radioactive isotopes to determine the ages of minerals within rocks. For example, it takes ~4.5 billion years for half of a known amount of ²³⁸U to decay into ²⁰⁶Pb. This amount of time, known as the half-life of ²³⁸U, is constant, so by measuring the ratio of ²³⁸U to ²⁰⁶Pb in a mineral, we can calculate how long that mineral has been “losing” ²³⁸U and accumulating ²⁰⁶Pb. In the case of the mineral zircon, this amount of time is coincident with the age of the zircon crystal. Because tectonic plates are moving across Earth’s surface, pinning down a plate’s position (latitude and longitude) through geologic time can be tricky. Paleomagnetic studies utilize the alignment of magnetic minerals within a rock to calculate the angle between the rock and the Earth’s magnetic pole at the time the rock formed (i.e., the rock’s or formation’s latitude on Earth’s surface at the time it formed).

Both paleomagnetic and detrital zircon data should allow the team to ascertain whether the proposed Oymyakon Ocean existed between the Siberian craton and the amalgamated terranes to the east (i.e., those terranes comprising the suture between the N. American and Eurasian plates). While the samples are being processed through mineral separation at the University of St. Petersburg, we look forward to gathering the zircon geo-thermochronometric results here in the UTChron Laboratory!

Figure 5. A. An aplite dike (K(?)ap) cross-cuts chevron folds in Bajocian-age sedimentary layers (Jbs) along the Indigirka River. B. A boudinaged Devonian diabase dike (Ddb) within Ordovician carbonates (Ols) in the western thrust sheets of the Verkhoyansk fold-thrust belt.

Figure 6. A fading double rainbow over the middle of the Verkhoyansk fold-thrust belt signaled the end of our field work and a great display of international scientific collaboration. Four of the five Russians are on the left and the four Americans are on the right. (Photo from Daniel Stockli)