How to build a volcano

In spite of last month's post on the difficulties of communicating the real side of doing science to the public and how we should focus more on how difficult it actually is to do anything, this month's is on our latest outreach attempt and being a massive hypocrite. 

So yesterday the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at UEA were filming promotional videos to entice new undergraduates to come here next year; this was mostly interviews with current students and filming lectures but they needed something a bit more exciting. This was provided by one of Jon Stone's (@JonathanStone10) liquid nitrogen-powered volcanoes which are usually the highlight of ENV open days. On the promise of a free lunch, myself and Andrew Rushby (@andrewrushby), along with numerous others were roped into helping out.

How to build a liquid nitrogen volcano (probably best NOT to try this at home):

Ingredients:

• Liquid nitrogen, about 1l
• 2l plastic pop bottle
• Something to weigh the bottle down, we used a custom built metal cradle weighted down with bricks
• A large bin/barrel, this has to be strong enough to withstand the blast - we've lost a few lower quality bins this way; the eruption still works but ends up being more of a Mount Saint Helens style flank eruption rather than directing the blast upwards.
• Enough water to almost fill the the bin (leaving space to sink in the nitrogen bomb)
• Soft plastic balls, representing pyroclastic bombs
• We also added red food dye and strawberry jelly, to make the water/lava more visible on camera

Method:

1. Put the bin a long way, probably at least 10m away from anything or anybody that could be affected by the blast, seriously you don't want to be too near this when it goes off, and fill with the water, food dye and jelly (the food dye and jelly aren't necessary but will look good if you use plenty); now you've got a full magma chamber.
2. Set up an exclusion zone, 10m radius should be fine
3. Add the plastic balls, don't use hard/solid ones they must be soft and hollow 
4. Half fill the weighted plastic bottle with liquid nitrogen (use a funnel, insulated gloves and a blast-proof visor for safety) and put the lid on - now you've got to move quickly!
5. Drop the filled bottle upright into the bin
6. RUN TO OUTSIDE THE EXCLUSION ZONE
7. Wait for the liquid nitrogen to heat up and boil, the rapid expansion will cause the bottle to violently explode. This may take a couple of minutes DO NOT approach the bin in this time.
8. Watch the rather spectacular results.

To film ours (as well as having the professional film crew to make the official video) we used a tree climbing catapult to string up a line about 4m (which wasn't anywhere near high enough to escape the blast) directly above the bin, hanging a waterproof GoPro camera which Andrew controlled via Wi-Fi with his iPad while I filmed from just outside the exclusion zone. This is the resultant footage, edited by Jon:

As you can see, it's pretty impressive, supposedly you could feel the explosion through most of the SCI Teaching Wall, and surprisingly the GoPro did survive, it just got a bit wet.

Now if you read my last post you can probably see why I feel like a bit of a hypocrite helping to promote the department in this way. Unfortunately this kind of exciting stuff is purely reserved for outreach, it's not really what you're going to be doing on a daily basis as an ENV undergrad, but that's just one of those things, you're never going to get a decent intake of students if all you show is undergrads looking down microscopes, doing mineral identification or map work, and for us it was a fun way to spend a day at work - even if the free lunch never did materialise. 

The main highlight was actually just watching the crowd of undergraduates being filmed doing reaction shots after the eruption had already happened - it was painfully clear to see why we all do science rather than drama - hopefully that footage will surface at some point although I somehow doubt it'll be used in the promo video.

Communicating (the soul destroying reality of) Science

After a rather inspiring lecture by Professor Ian Stuart, of BBC’s ‘How to Build a Planet’ and ‘Volcano Live’ fame, on the difficulties of communicating science to the general public, I realised that my attempts had been somewhat lacking of late and thought I best get another blog post out for my regular reader. I’m going to apologise now if this all goes a bit woolly and social-sciencey, if you know me you’ll know that’s never my intention.

Titled ’50 Shades of Grey: Communicating Rocks’, a lot of this talk was on what the public want and need to know and how important it was to tailor what you wanted to say to your target audience. However, I think he missed something, while most scientific outreach and communication is about new discoveries and interesting things that have been found out, I think pop ‘consumer’ science is focusing on the wrong things, putting out the wrong messages about science and scientists themselves.

Watching any science-based TV show, or reading many science news articles, especially those on the earth sciences and physics which appear to be the most TV friendly subjects, it is too easy to get the impression that scientific research is easy. Exciting breakthroughs come after a relatively short period of work, you bang out a few experiments, check the results, and all goes pretty smoothly. It’s bad enough that all the fictional crime investigation shows do this, sticking a sample in a mass spectrometer which reliably spits out, already analysed, results giving a nice answer to whatever question posed in seconds – anybody who’s ever worked with one of these knows this NEVER happens, without factual documentaries adding to this.

Therefore, in my opinion (which may be slightly biased thanks to the spirit crushing difficulty of getting ANYTHING working in my labs) scientific outreach should be more strongly weighted towards the amount of time and effort doing any good science takes.

A life in experimental science is dominated by constant breakdowns of sensitive, expensive equipment and hitting soul destroying dead end after dead end in your research before (hopefully) something new and vaguely interesting is found out. Even after all of this, it may take much more work to confirm your results, followed by months or even years of reading and writing before a publishable paper can be put out into the literature, when it may just be rinsed by your peers just because they don’t like your research group (scientific rivalries can get pretty nasty).

To put this in context, I finally made an interesting discovery in some samples of modern corals this week (can’t say what yet). This was able to happen as I have finally managed to get some reliable data on the trace elemental composition of these samples using a laser ablation- inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS). This has taken over a year and a quarter of attempts as this machine is one of the most temperamental things imaginable, every time I manage to scrounge some time on it, it breaks.

Since (after a year of attempts) finally working out a reliable method of analysis, I was booked to use this before Christmas, however, a workman in the department managed to cut through one of the pipes for the air conditioning. The lab that this machine is housed in needs to be kept cold due to the sensitivity of the mass spectrometers and so the whole lab was shut down for a couple of weeks. Next time I got booked on the machine the lab was struck by flu and so the technician, who’s baby this ICP is, was busy doing the job of about 6 other people. Of course the machine was then fully booked up for the next few weeks until I managed to get a block of 4 days booked on it the week before last. It takes a whole day to set up and carry out a run along a 40mm long transect of coral so I was planning on just being able to run 4 samples during this period. However, out of the 4 days, one day the computer system controlling the laser ablater crashed in the afternoon and lost the settings for the run that I’d spent all morning setting up, and another day there was a university-wide blackout just after my run had started as someone had exploded something and started a fire in one of the labs over in Biology.

This kind of bad luck is unfortunately the norm in research, the other main piece of equipment I use (another mass spectrometer) has been broken for a month now thanks to a major flood in the lab it sits in. I know of another PhD researcher who suffered a major setback when a (separate) flood washed away a load of irreplaceable microscopic fossils (foraminifera) she’d spent the last 3 months painstakingly sorting through ready for analysis. And of course there was also the disappointing loss of the BLEAT space balloon I wrote about in December.

If the general public knew about all the long hours, suffering and heart break that happened in the background behind each scientific discovery they might be more inclined to trust scientists more and lose the view of the researcher as a mad scientist, down in the lab, doing crazy experiments.

Clearly we still need to put most of the emphasis in the communication on the big, exciting discoveries to keep the interest, but a bit more of the human stories behind the science is definitely needed.

Speculating wildly this, I’d hope, would lead to less scepticism and a more positive view on science. Less people reading and believing the internet ramblings of sceptics and conspiracy theorists, instead listening more to the scientist’s voice of reason, scientific research getting more funding (maybe more out of sympathy than anything) and a greater role of (good) science in governmental policy making. 

Cladocora caespitosa; from reefs to crystals (in pictures)

 As this will likely be my last post of the year and nobody wants too much science this close to Christmas, I thought I'd just use it to show some pretty pictures of the corals (Cladocora caespitosa) I've been working on. As you scroll down the level of zoom increases from full reef to microscopic crystal scale, enjoy...

Mljet C. caespitosa bank, Croatia; the only known example of a modern C. caepitosa buildup comparable to a tropical reef (Photo courtesy of P. Kruzic)

Living C. caespitosa with extended feeding polyps (Photo courtesy of P. Kruzic)

Mid-Holocene (6-10,000 years old) fossil C. caespitosa, Mavra Litharia Reef, Greece (trowel for scale), they don't look quite so nice by the time I get to them as they've been dead for a few thousand years and uplifted out of the sea.

Sample hacked off the above locality

Sectioned isolated corallite, ready for analysis (approx. 45mm long)

Optical binocular microscope images of sectioned corallite showing the complex internal structure of the septa, the brown staining is most likely due to contamination from iron-rich groundwaters percolating through the porous septa and so these regions must be removed before analysis to leave just the solid outer wall behind (corallite is approx. 8mm wide)

False colour optical image of a horizontally cross sectioned modern corallite stem showing the spoke-like structure of the septal region (larger sample approx. 7.5mm diameter)

Same cross sections as above but viewed under the scanning electron microscope (SEM) , lower image shows secondary cements infilling some of the pore spaces between the septa showing that these areas do not all grow at the same time.

SEM image of the septa seen from side view

SEM images zoomed right in to see the individual crystals of primary aragonite that make up the coral. The primary aragonite is unstable and prone to breaking down over time, if this happens the original geochemical signals recorded by the growing coral are lost and they are useless to me, but these look like very good samples for analysis.

If the aragonite does break down, more stable secondary calcite crystals (shown here) replace them, this sample would be too altered to be of any use for analysis.

To infinity and...Hertfordshire?

BLEAT logo (by J. Shirley)

So yesterday (01/12/2012) the first mission of UEA BLEAT (the University of East Anglia Balloon Launch and Exploration Team) was carried out.

0500hours: 6hours to high altitude balloon launch

The day started at 5am when Commander Rushby, Admiral von Glasow, Captain Mills and myself (Chief Engineer Royle) loaded up the launch convoy from the University of East Anglia’s Environmental Sciences department. It was dark, bitterly cold and I hadn't been to sleep yet having arrived at the department straight from a party that was still going when I left after 4. Commander Rushby, on the other hand, had spent the night sleeping under his desk in the office, although somehow we were both surprisingly cheerful and optimistic about the day ahead.

5am: Ready to go, once Commander Rushby finishes his breakfast

0530hours: 5hours and 30minutes to launch

The launch convoy of Admiral von Glasow (the only person trained to transport pressurised gases) in the Helium Transport Vehicle and the other 3 of us in the Mobile Command Centre (Captain Mills’s ancient camper van) headed off by 5:30 towards the launch site in Burton-Upon -Trent. Most of my journey was spent napping on the sofa in the back of the van but from what I did see we appeared to get there without a hitch – aside from the very poor decision to eat disgusting microwaved petrol station sausage butties for breakfast.

1000hours: 1hour to launch

We arrived at the launch site, Shobnall Leisure Centre, and, after Commander Rushby had made final pre-flight checks with all the relevant authorities, made final preparations for launch. Inflating the balloon – after having to borrow a bigger spanner from the very helpful staff at the centre as the one we had brought didn't fit around the gas regulator – starting up the cameras, adding yet more duct tape to secure the payload and tying all the components of the 20m long high altitude payload launch and recovery system (balloon, parachute, ‘spacebox’ capsule, radiosonde tracking system) together.

Inflating the balloon by the launch convoy, Mobile Command Centre on left

Me with the balloon

1100hours: 0hour, liftoff

Successful launch from the middle of a football field, watched on by confused dog walkers and runners – although none more surprised than us that it worked perfectly. As we watched the balloon climb rapidly (at around 8m/s) and disappear into the sky, the tracking system kicked in and, once the radio receiver was taped to the roof and the mobile command centre was set up in the back of the van, we were ready to go.

Commander Rushby and Admiral von Glasow readying the launch

And it's away

1130hours: 0hours 30minutes flight time

We sped down the M11 tracking the balloon in real time, passing the sporadically gained balloon’s elevation, azimuth and distance-from-launch-site data on to Science Officer Chylik at Mission Control. Here this data was converted to latitude and longitude data and constantly updating predictions were made about the balloon’s flight path and landing area. As all we had to go on was the pressure and temperature data to guesstimate heights we just headed SW and carried on relaying the data as it came in.

1200hours: 1hour 00minutes flight time

After a rather relaxed morning and a pub lunch somewhere near Harlow, the Chase Team (driven by Captain Gooch, led by Tactical Officer Surl and completed by Ensigns Huezé, Davies and van der Weil) set off fearlessly in hot pursuit of the balloon which had been predicted to come down between Welwyn Garden City and Cheshunt.

The Chase Team having a very taxing morning (photo by L. Surl)

1243hours: 1hour 43minutes flight time

As I sat in the back of the speeding (not literally) Mobile Command Centre, intensely staring at the computer tracking readouts, the pressure and temperature data which had both gradually been falling and had reached around 13hPa and -67^oC respectively suddenly started increasing; burst had occurred at approximately 28,210m over Northhampton. The slow rate of increase suggested that the parachute had deployed successfully and this was confirmed when the radiosonde started to report actual altitude data showing a perfect descent rate of 4m/s. Science Officer Chylik came into his own at this point, constantly updating predictions while we parked up at Watford Gap services to increase radio signal accuracy.

Professor von Glasow attempting to boost signal accuracy

Mobile Command Centre in action trying to pinpoint the balloon's last known loacation

1315hours: 2hours 15minutes flight time

Unfortunately we lost radio contact around 0115hours at approximately 2500m altitude and so the landing predictions were somewhere within a rather large ellipse around Oaklands Forest, Hertfordshire. The Chase Team were rapidly deployed to search this area and Mobile Command sped down the motorway to assist.

Chase Team in action

1350hours: 0hours 40minutes after losing contact; 2hours to sunset

The chase team arrived in the predicted landing area and proceeded to search on foot, splitting into 2 search parties to cover ground more quickly.

1500hours: 1hour 10minutes after losing contact; 50minutes to sunset

Mobile Command also reached the search area, searched the dense woodland below the balloon’s last known location and tried to recruit as many passing dog walkers as possible to keep an eye out for it. Even though we knew the odds were greatly against us finding anything in this terrain we continued tirelessly until it got too dark to see around 1600hours and were finally forced to concede defeat. Headed to the local pub to meet up with the Chase Team, having to rely on someone finding the box for us and the contact details on the side having survived the trip.

2000hours: 6hours 10minutes after losing contact; been awake for 37hours

Finally arrived back at ground control for commiseration drinks and pizza, while we did not recover the box on the day all is not yet lost and Hertfordshire’s local police and media have been notified in case anyone reports seeing anything strange in the sky or actually finds it. Also, this was still a very successful shakedown flight showing us that the payload delivery, high altitude tracking and landing system worked very effectively and that for future missions we need to develop a way of tracking the box’s ground position – most likely by investing in a cheap Android mobile phone with an app that can relay its co-ordinates by text message.

Full live tweet coverage of the launch and recovery attempt can be found at @UEABLEAT and will also be covered in next week’s issue of Concrete, all photographs I took on the day are here.

One small step for man, one giant leap for Norfolk

So for the last few months the main item of procrastination within the department has been to form The University of East Anglia’s space program. This is a collaboration project of UEA PhD students and faculty members who have formed an organisation codenamed BLEAT, the Balloon Launch Exploration and Analysis Team, and also known as ARSE, Andrew Rushby’s Space Explorers (our website). Since Commander Rushby (see his blog to see just how much he really loves space) first proposed the idea of establishing Norfolk’s long overdue position in the race to commercialise spaceflight back in March we have been putting a lot of time into making this dream a reality. This is unlikely to aid anybody’s actual work, we’re just doing it for an excuse to do some exciting science in space, because we can and basically (to paraphrase Mallory before he attempted the first ascent of Everest) because it [space] is there.

Bleat Logo, designed by J. Shirley

The first mission, with launch scheduled for 10:00 hours GMT tomorrow (01/12/2012) is a preliminary mission to send cameras and a GPS tracking system attached to a weather balloon up 30km to the edge of space. As well as hopefully getting some cool photos this should allow us to test our methods of launch and recovery so future missions can have a more advanced payload – there’s talk of developing an ‘air-core’ unit to sample the air column at varying heights and also to maybe send some single-celled organisms up as Norfolk’s very first astronauts.

Scale schematic of the space balloon launch and recovery system

As Chief Engineer, it’s been my primarily my job to develop the launch vehicle and make it space worthy. This has mostly involved scrounging materials from the labs and building the ‘Spacebox’ the (hopefully) space-proof capsule that will contain and protect our payload from the hostile environment of near-space. At ≈33km up (the maximum our balloon can reach before exploding as it expands to 20 times its launch diameter) It will have to survive low pressures that would make your blood boil and tissues explode and temperatures down to -80^oC, and then survive the ride back to Earth attached to a rather small parachute, so it’s been heavily insulated and securely duct-taped to perfection (although it has to still be able to vent excess pressure so is not completely air-tight).

'Spacebox' launch capsule (photo courtesy of H. Chylik)

The top-secret launch site – a field in Burton-on-Trent – has been carefully selected by our team of resident Meteorologists led by Tactical Officer Surl. Using computer simulations (developed at Cambridge University) to predict the balloon’s path as it is strongly influenced by the weather conditions and changes in the jet stream this is the closest location to Norwich we can launch from if we want any hope of our payload still landing in East Anglia. Just in case, attached to the capsule are multi-lingual instructions for its return in English, French and Dutch, kindly translated by members of our international team, although if it does not land before reaching the coast it is likely it will end up on the bottom of the North Sea.

Today the final preparations have been put in place, after we finally got CAA approval yesterday, first thing this morning we tested whether it would be possible to transport the balloon fully inflated – to get around regulations on transporting pressurised gasses – but unfortunately it was too big to fit it Captain Mill’s balloon transport vehicle (BLV aka camper van). Luckily however Admiral Professor von Glasgow is fully trained in pressurised cylinder transport and has kindly volunteered to separately drive the helium up for us while we follow in the BLV.

Once launched we will track the balloon’s progress using the GPS system and, orchestrated by Science Officer Chylik running ground control out of UEA and predicting the flight path, the chase team led by Captain Gooch will fearlessly race across East Anglia to recover the payload, or to hopelessly watch it crash (possibly in flames) into the sea.

None of this project would have been possible without the time and dedication by many more people than it has been possible to name above nor the money kindly donated by the UEA (with surprisingly little begging involved. A further mention needs to go to the journalist Michael Brown who has been following us for the last few weeks to put together press coverage for Concrete (UEA’s student newspaper) and has also been instrumental in securing extra funding from the Student Union.

(most of) the BLEAT Team (photo courtesy of H. Chylik)

An update on the outcome of the launch will be posted next week, although you can follow our Twitter feed for exciting live updates, but I thought I should write this pre-launch just in case it all goes wrong while we’re still relatively optimistic and nothing has yet crashed and burned. However, whatever we do, it's never going to be as cool as this by some students from Harvard:

Abuse of power

So, now the students are back, for the last month or so my work’s been pretty much on hold while I've been demonstrating non-stop for the undergraduates. Somehow I've ended up helping on second year module practicals for both Tectonic Processes and Sedimentology, subjects I've not gone anywhere near since being a confused undergrad myself.

Tectonic processes was definitely the most fun of the two, with half of the practicals involving messy experiments, such as using cornflower paste (which one student did keep eating), strips of plastic and wooden canes to look at how varying the rates and amounts of applied strain affected how different materials deformed as analogues for various rock types in the Earth’s crust. The most impressive was using wet sand to produce a half graben by piling the sand on top of plastic sheets and then pulling them apart, which, if the sand had exactly the right moisture content, worked really well, producing a nice series of stepped faults perpendicular to the direction of applied stress. Although trying to keep a straight face demonstrating this with my supervisor at the front of the class while the students on the front table made horrific innuendoes about the shape of the faultzone I was sticking my fingers into kind of failed.

The best part of demonstrating for gullible, trusting undergrads is definitely being able to tell them whatever you want and they will believe you so long as you keep a straight face. The other week they were looking at faulting around the North African craton (paper here) and had to work out why the faults were going around it rather than through it by looking at this figure:

Stress envelopes of the lithosphere around the East African Rift System (Albaric et al., 2009)

As can be easily seen from the strength envelopes, the real reason the faults go around the craton is because it is much stronger down to greater depths than the surrounding (younger) crust. However, it was too easy to convince the students that the faults were going around the craton because Lake Victoria is in the middle of the craton and you obviously can’t fault through a lake as water does not deform in a brittle manner. I did have to eventually go back and help them get to the real answer as otherwise they would have ended up writing that bollocks in their exam or coursework. Although this still isn't in the same league as managing to convince the girlfriend the other week that if the proposed badger cull had gone ahead, swan populations would spiral out of control, as the badger (with its semi-aquatic lifestyle and massively strong jaws) is their only natural predator…

My favourite question from one of the students, in one of the Sedimentology practicals, was a guy asking if the ichnofossil (I think it was a cruziana; an arthropod feeding trace) he was looking at was in granite. If I hadn't already spent half the class arguing with one of the professors over whether one of the samples was actually a sedimentary rock or not (I thought it was an igneous rock (a gabbro) rather than a very immature breccia which she eventually convinced me it was) I should have attempted to convince him that strange thermophilic arthropods did actually live in magma chambers, rather than just admit it was a slightly metamorphosed sandstone/quartzite. Although the majority of these practicals were rather like pulling teeth, how hard is it to describe a mudstone?

Could evil, intelligent magma dwelling trilobites have left tracks in granite?

This Saturday I ended up on a fieldtrip to look at coastal sediments on the North Norfolk coast, as is customary for any geology trip I was hungover and the weather was horrific, cold, wet and windy. This was especially fun for the undergraduates who had decided they wouldn't need waterproofs – although one did bring an umbrella which I'm amazed survived the whole day. Luckily both myself and the other demonstrator were only there to make up the numbers for health and safety purposes, as neither of us knew anything about what was being taught. So, basically, it was like we were undergrads again, stood at the back of the group learning about how cynobacterial mats consolidate sediments, what life is like for a diatomaceous slime and the formation processes of various forms of ripples, while actually getting paid for it. It was nice to get information spoon fed again, I didn't realise just how easy being an undergrad is – it seemed a lot harder the first time round!

This week the students are off on their ‘reading’ week (nobody ever reads), so I should be back doing my own science. However, my mass spectrometer is, of course, broken again. I had to dismantle it a couple of weeks ago and I've now been waiting for the workshop to lathe me a new part for a fortnight. I do think this is a good thing as it means I've actually got very little to do other than play about with old data and prep samples for when it’s finally up and running again, giving me a much needed break from swearing at the damn machine and plenty of time to mess about with other projects as we’re currently in the middle of something rather special, but there’ll probably be more on that next time…

How does this go back together again?

To boldly do geology where no man has done geology before

So it’s been a while since my last post as the university has been pretty quiet over the summer and it’s been a good time to get my head down and crack on with some serious sciencing without the disruption thousands of undergraduates bring. However, after seeing this morning that the Curiosity Rover had been doing some sedimentology on Mars,, I couldn’t help but get a little bit overexcited. Doing geology in space must be every lithophile’s (see one of my previous posts) dream job and so here’s a post of my ramblings and ill-informed opinions on Curiosity and space geology and why it’s the best thing ever (and also why I hate it).

This morning’s news report on Martian conglomerates (here, and here) is some serious proof that a significant amount of flowing water must have been present at some point on the surface of Mars. Very poorly sorted (i.e. those with a wide array of particle sizes) conglomerates with sub-angular to well-rounded clasts, as can be clearly seen in the photos, can only be formed by deposition from (relatively) fast flowing water. Wind transport, which does occur due to the high Martian winds (see here) and also creates well rounded clasts, generally creates a well sorted deposit such as an aeolian sandstone as smaller particles are winnowed away and larger pebbles don’t roll so far.  A poorly sorted deposit could have been formed by some sort of terrestrial gravity flow, a slump or a slide, however, this would produce a breccia with highly angular clasts as these terrestrial flows do not travel a great enough distance for transportation processes to erode the particles enough.

Curiosity's photo shows Martian conglomerates look just like Earth ones

The calculation that "From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," [Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley] put me straight back to undergraduate sedimentology lectures and the Hjulstrom Curve. 

Hjustrom Curve

This graph (see above image) is a well-used tool by sedimentologists studying fluvial transport processes in Earth systems to allow the back-calculation of the velocity of water flow that deposited the sediment by showing what size material will be entrained, transported and deposited by different velocities of flow. From both the description of this shallow, fast moving stream and looking at the deposits I’m put in mind of braided river channels in upland areas arid areas like this (but without the shrubs):

Braided river system (image from http://faculty.gg.uwyo.edu/neil/teaching/geologypics/braided.jpg)

Now for a little rant, but first I’ll put this all in context with my work. I work on high resolution geochemical analysis of fossil corals and half of what I have been trying to do for the last 12 months is high resolution trace elemental analysis. For this I stick my coral stem into a machine called a laser-ablation-inductively-coupled-mass-spectrometer (LA-ICP-MS for short), which is a room-sized, very expensive, serious piece of kit. In short, this machine uses a laser to vaporise the carbonate, this  vapour is entrained into a gas which is superheated to around 10,000K and ionised to form a plasma which then goes into a mass spectrometer where the proportions of ions of various elements that make up the sample are analysed. This is done along a tract of the coral wall, producing over 3000 readings for a sample less than 50mm long and should, in theory, let me see seasonal changes in trace element composition allowing me to investigate growth conditions (see this paper where they've managed to do it on modern samples). I say ‘in theory’ as I have yet to get any meaningful data from this technique, all I have produced are noisy squiggles of data which cannot be calibrated to any quantitative figures. So while I can see what elements are present, I have no idea of the proportions they are in, and thus cannot draw any conclusions, and I have no real idea why.

Now, with that in mind, you may see why Curiosity annoys me. This little robot travels over 120 million miles through space, successfully lands on another planet, drives around a landscape no human (and very likely nothing else) has ever set foot on, and finds a rock (named ‘Coronation’). All in all a very impressive feat of human engineering which we should all be proud of. But then it, and for obvious reasons this is what I can’t deal with, it fires a laser at the rock, ablating it and producing an ionised plasma in the exact same way I do here, and using it’s ChemCam spectrometer it analyses the elemental content (shown below) of said rock from the produced light spectra of the ions in the plasma, and discovers it to have the composition of a bog-standard lump of basalt (details here). Ok, so the rover may be analysing at a lower resolution and using light rather than mass spectrography, but still, how can it get real, meaningful results in space, at a distance, outside the laboratory, in a non-vacuum, uncontrolled environment, using a machine maybe a hundredth of the size of mine, when I can’t???

Unfortunately, the answer is funding and expertise, things NASA has a hell of a lot more than I do for my research (even with the generosity of NERC and UEA). So, as I can’t do anything about this I’ll end this rant with a plea; please NASA, let me be a space geologist too (as if you can’t beat them, join them).