The usual excuse for not posting

Yes, I've been hanging about in Egypt again, looking at rocks for my day job. In the absence of any bad science related stuff, here are some pretty pictures.

El Tor, the town where we stayed, at sunset.


Downtown El Tor.


Fossilised burrows in Miocene syn-rift rocks. There's a lot of this in the study area, which usually means that structures that would help to understand the depositional environment are obscured.


Part of the field area. To the right are rocks of the Precambrian basement. In the foreground, a major normal fault separates those Precambrian rocks from Nubian sandstone, Eocene carbonate units, and Miocene syn-rift calc-arenites.

Bloody Elsevier

Some time ago, I had a paper on normal fault evolution in the Gulf of Suez accepted for publication in the Journal of Structural Geology. This is an Elsevier journal, and the paper duly went off to the Elsevier production people to be published. Now, one of the figures in the paper is a large and spectacularly detailed geological map of the study area, done in the late 1990s by my co-author and former University of Manchester post-doc Ian Sharp. This is an excellent piece of work in itself, and it had never been published; we decided that this paper would be a good place to finally publish it. The level of detail on this map is such that we wanted to reproduce it in colour, at A3 size. We knew that this would cost money, but the industrial sponsors of the work were happy to cover the costs.

After a long and generally fruitless attempt at corresponding with the Elsevier production department (which has been outsourced to India, incidentally), I finally received a PDF proof of the paper in which the geological map was reproduced at A3 size. All well and good. Until the final version of the paper was published [paywall: for God's sake, don't pay $31.50 for this...if you really want a copy, e-mail me and I'll send you a PDF], and the map was back to A4 size, with much of the fine detail lost as a result.

Gah!

Now, surely it isn't on for Elsevier to unilaterally make changes to an article without consulting the authors about it. I know some people who have been involved in editing this journal, and it seems they are unhappy with how it is being run by Elsevier. As Dr Aust points out, companies like Elsevier charge large amounts of money for papers, in just about the only example of publishing in which the authors don't want to be paid for producing all the content. Elsevier makes massive profits out of journal publishing, gets to hide all of the content behind ridiculous paywalls, and doesn't even make a particularly good job of the journal production. There must be a better way.

I win the peer review lottery

It's been a good week. On top of the article I had accepted for publication in Homeopathy (and let's face it, they publish any old rubbish), I've just had a paper accepted by a proper scientific journal, the Journal of Structural Geology. I wrote about this paper before, because it initially got rejected. In fact, this is the third time it has been through review, and it's taken about a year and a half, but we've finally got there.

This is how I looked when I found out the good news. I confess that I poured myself a generous Scotch in celebration.


I'm going to be in Norway for the next week for work reasons, so I won't be posting anything over that time, but then posting has been pretty patchy this year. Thanks to all those who have continued to read anyway.

Journal of Structural Geology paper

If anyone is interested in the paper I recently got accepted in the Journal of Structural Geology, there is a short summary of it here...

Result!

I've just had the first paper from my post-doctoral work at Manchester accepted by the Journal of Structural Geology, pending minor revisions.

Beeeeerrrrrssssss!

Sayed Gooda: a tribute

There was sad news for me this week, and for more or less everyone who has done geological fieldwork in Egypt. Sayed Gooda, our driver on our trips to Sinai, has passed away.

Without Sayed, our work would have been a lot more difficult. Sayed didn't just drive us, over bad roads and difficult terrain. He looked after us, kept us out of trouble, made us delicious sandwiches for lunch (the highlight of the Sinai field day), and tried valiantly to teach us Arabic . Practically everyone who has worked on the Gulf of Suez owes something to Sayed. I will always remember arriving in a hot, noisy and fume-choked Cairo for the first time, nerves jangling from an overnight flight from Amsterdam, and being put at ease right away by the big friendly man in the big friendly green jeep.

Sayed was in Saudi Arabia when he passed away, and has been buried there. In the e-mail telling us of his death, his friend Tarek Moustafa wrote "I think he died Happy as this would have been a dream come true to him to die in the Holy lands". We can only hope so. Thanks for everything, Sayed.

Renaissance for t'other blog

As some of you may know, I have another blog that I use to write about my research, and other things of interest in the geology of sedimentary basins and petroleum geology. Or at least, that was what I was supposed to do with it. Of course, its far too much fun to go homeopath baiting, and so I've tended to neglect it.

I've now got a plan to try and write something for that blog once a week. The first of these posts is up now, and addresses the question of abiogenic oil. I hope at least some of you will be vaguely interested enough to have a look. Future stuff will include some neat bits and pieces from my own research.

Science causes earthquakes...

Further evidence that the Independent will print any old rubbish. Richard Lapthorne, in a letter to the editor, writes:

"Given acceptance of the geologists' explanation of earthquakes as readjustments in the earth's crust, perhaps Bruce Homes (letters, 22 May) would see the sense of attributing them to acts of science rather than acts of God."

Scientific observation has revealed that "readjustments in the earth's crust", along fault zones, cause earthquakes. Ergo, science causes earthquakes. You just can't argue with that kind of logic. But why print these ravings in a national newspaper? I know the Independent is rapidly becoming a joke, but why accelerate the process?

Creationism, language and structural geology

I wrote a little bit about this elsewhere, but I thought it was of interest to a 'bad science' audience. Dr. David Peacock, a consultant with Fugro-Robertson and well-known structural geologist, has just published a letter to the editor [extremely irritating paywall] in the May issue of the Journal of Structural Geology. The letter criticises the use of the term 'architecture' in published articles in the Journal of Structural Geology. In general, structural geologists use the term to describe the spatial arrangement of structural elements within larger structures, such as fault zones or geological basins.

So far, this is just an argument about arcane terminology in a fairly obscure field of scientific endeavour. However, one of Dr. Peacock's arguments against using 'architecture' is that it introduces a 'hint of creationism'. "Who is the architect?", he asks, going on to ask "Does use of the term imply divine construction or a belief in intelligent design?"

The answer to this latter question is clearly no. Geology has always borrowed terms from architecture (for a few examples, see here). This happens because some geological features are similar to features from the built environment (for example, here's a gratuitous picture of some nice folds). That doesn't imply that someone or something intelligent built them. More importantly, it seems to me that we would have to stop talking about structural geology entirely if we accepted Dr. Peacock's contention. The fact that the Earth has structure is what structural geologists study. So if you ask 'Who is the architect?', you also ask 'Who imparted the structure?' I make this point in a reply [paywall] to Dr. Peacock's letter, which at the time of writing is in press. The text can also be found here.

The wider point here is that the idea that any implication of 'structure' is an implication of 'design' is a classic creationist mis-direction. This is a point made eloquently in the context of evolution by Steve Novella. In structural geology, 'structure' and 'order' emerge from naturally occurring processes. There is no reason to think that saying a fault zone has an 'architecture' is also saying that some intelligence designed the fault zone.

Another Sinai field trip...

Monday 3^rd March

Yes, my incredible jet-set lifestyle never lets up. Here I am, in the famous Moon Beach resort in hot and gravelly Sinai once again. This time Paul Woodman and I are leading a field trip, all by ourselves, for a crew of petroleum industry types who are working in the North Sea and the Gulf of Suez. Our task is to give them an overview of the structural style and stratigraphy of the Suez rift, for which we’re getting paid consultancy rates. This is probably the first trip to Sinai that I’m making more money than Sayed, our driver. For Paul, it’s a useful chance to look around the area before he starts writing up his PhD in earnest. For me, the best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks, so it’s good to keep looking.

We fly from Manchester to Cairo via Amsterdam, and take in the bar in Manchester’s terminal 2. It’s bloody awful. They’ve run out of most of the beer they have (no cask, of course), it costs £6.25 for two pints, and the place is strewn with dirty plates and glasses. The Murphy’s pub at Schipol is far nicer, and I get a pint of Murphy’s and a chip butty. We arrive in Cairo at 2am, which is never any fun, but negotiate the visa queue, passport queue, baggage claim, customs and taxi drivers without too many problems. We manage to get a couple of hours sleep at the apartment of some friends of Paul’s in Maadi, Sayed picks us up at 8am, and we drive to Moon Beach, arriving at 12:30 and just in time for lunch. A fairly uneventful trip, as they go, the highlight being an articulated lorry passing us at about 100 km/h with a burst tire strewing rubber shreds all over the carriageway. As far as we can tell, the driver doesn’t stop, but these things have ceased to surprise me much.

We eat goatburgers (nominally beef, but we have our suspicions) and chips, and spend the afternoon scoping out the sites we’re going the take the trip to. At the first one, a pipeline is being laid by the side of the main road, and the area seems to have become a work site and general rubbish dump, but we think we can spend some time looking at early syn-rift stratigraphic relationships there. The second stop is part of Paul’s study area, and as such is plagued with Bedouin marijuana (‘bango’ in Egyptian Arabic) growers. Last time we were here, there was a very large bango field, but as usual the Bedouin were happy enough once they knew who we were and what we were doing. We need to check out the area to make sure that no-one is going to think we’re army or police and shoot us. This is the kind of thing I still can’t quite believe I’ve found myself doing. Today, though, the area is quiet, not a soul to be seen, and it seems that we can use this site as well.

By now, on a good two and a half hours sleep, I’m done thinking for the day, so we repair to Moon Beach, where I watch the sun go down over Wadi Araba. Even this has a purpose, though: I want to know what time sunset is, so we don’t have to expose ourselves to the hideous danger of driving at night in Egypt.

Wednesday March 5^th

So far so good. We spent yesterday checking out some of the sites we’re going to visit on the trip, to make sure the roads are OK and that there is no bango. It’s all good, except on Thursday we have to go through the police checkpoint outside Abu Zenima. We don’t particularly want to do that, because Sayed doesn’t have a desert pass and we only have tourist passes, but a road is blocked and we don’t have any options.

The field trip people arrive today. We go out in the morning to look at one of the sites we’ll visit, and arrive back at Moon Beach at 11am. The trip is supposed to have left Cairo at 8am, so we expect them here around 11:30 or so. They eventually show up at 2pm. Apparently, there was some misunderstanding with the drivers about who needed to be picked up at Cairo. Then there was a delay at the Ayun Musa checkpoint. This now seems to be a corrupt checkpoint, with the excuse to stop the jeeps relating to a fire extinguisher. I doubt that 1% of the vehicles that go through that checkpoint have working fire extinguishers. They also checked passports. I assume a bribe was being angled for.

We manage to get away from Moon Beach in short order and take in a couple of field stops. The last stop is the summit of Gebel Hammam Faraun, where you can get a panoramic view across the Hammam Faraun fault block. The road to the summit was originally built by the UN and there is now a Vodaphone mast there, so the road is quite well maintained, although very steep and winding. Even so, two of the jeeps get punctures on the way up, the drivers are very slow (“Tourist drivers,” says Sayed dismissively, “not for geologists”) and the ensuing delay leaves us driving through dusk to get back to Moon Beach. The companies are very keen that we get back before dark, for safety reasons (which will make sense if you’ve ever travelled on Egyptian roads in the dark). But, there’s no harm done, although it’s 6:15 when we get back and I’m wiped out. I think I’m a little sunstruck, or I’ve picked up some mild bug. I have a headache and don’t much feel like eating.

Even so, I manage a couple of beers with the field trip people, and eat some Moon Beach buffet, and I feel a little better. The only problem is that Moon Beach has no international phone line at present, so I have no way of contacting Jolan and letting her know I’m OK (and letting me know that she’s OK). Paul let me use his phone to send a text to our landline last night, but I don’t know if that is going to work and I’m worried. But as it stands, there’s nothing I can do about it. I have no mobile and there certainly isn’t any internet here. I think that I’m going to have to get a mobile, and that annoys me unreasonably. Clearly I’m tired, so I turn in.

Thursday March 6^th

Wadi Nukhul today, which is really my show, given that I’ve spent the last two and a half years working on it. We start by looking at some minor faults in the footwall of one of the major block-bounding structures. There’s a spectacular detachment horizon where the faults flatten out into a clay-rich layer. We go to the Wadi Nukhul east face, and as we drive we see a Bedouin hiking through the desert with a Kalashnikov. Who knows where he was going and why he needs a gun for the journey. He waves at us, in our fleet of brand new black jeeps, cheerily enough. The east face is one of the best bits of geology you’re ever likely to see. The participants are impressed.

Then we go for a walk through the type section of the Nukhul Formation, but no-one seems particularly interested in that. Perhaps none of the companies are targeting it, or perhaps it’s the heat, but it’s not setting pulses racing. In the afternoon, we look at the Nukhul fault zone itself, and look at the west face. It’s spectacular stuff, and colourful, and I would say that there are few better examples of rift initiation stratigraphy and structure anywhere.

Friday March 7th

Today is ‘Wadi Baba and the faulted Thebes’, as some wag has christened it. This is spectacular geology that can’t fail to impress, so we’re on solid ground. In the morning we look at the Nukhul Formation (rift initiation). In contrast to Wadi Nukhul, the Nukhul Formation here lies directly on Thebes limestone, and no Abu Zenima Formation is present. We look at a section near the footwall crest of the Nezzazat fault,where only the top offshore/shoreface facies of the Nukhul are deposited, and another section in the mouth of Wadi Baba where some of the estuarine tidal facies are developed, although they seem to be much more wave-dominated here. We also look at the syn-rift lower Rudeis Formation, which has fairly extreme lateral variations in thickness and facies. The best part of the day, though, is the afternoon, when we walk along the main Baba fault and then over what we call the cableway col. The cableway was built to carry manganese ore from the basement to the edge of the Baba Markha plain, where a narrow-gauge railway took it to Abu Zenima. We get spectacular views of the growth syncline in the hangingwall of the fault, and the reverse faults associated with it. We do this at the hottest part of the day, and it’s sweaty work, but well worth it. There’s enough mobile reception here for our resident reservoir engineer to receive a wrong number from the UK. Then we walk down the lower Rudeis section, which is much more proximal here, full of conglomerate and with spectacular slump units.

We finish the day at the cableway terminus, where both Israel and Egypt have billeted soldiers at one time or another. The buildings now are largely destroyed with walls pock-marked by bullet holes. The cableway itself is no longer functional, the Leeds steel rusting gently in the baking sun. There is graffiti in both Hebrew and Arabic, and the field trip participants take a few pictures.

At the checkpoint before Abu Zenima, one of the secret policemen wants to stop us, but his colleague tells him we’re from an onshore drilling rig that is on the Baba Markha plain not far from the checkpoint. Sayed says the magic word ‘petrole!’ and they let us through. Another good day, and no more checkpoints now until we head to Cairo.

At dinner, a couple of the guys tell me that they’ve got a lot out of the trip, more than most trips they’ve been on, which is good to hear. You want people to get something out of it.

Sunday 9^th March

The final day of the trip goes OK, although we haven’t really rehearsed what we’re going to do at the last stop. I try to summarise what we’ve done on the trip, but I’m totally knackered, and it doesn’t come over too well. The rocks we see are largely calc-arenites, not good reservoir rocks, and the reservoir engineer gets glummer as the day progresses.

We get back to Cairo, safe but not exactly well. I can’t claim that I don’t deserve it, having stayed up drinking vodka (which I never drink) pretty much all Saturday night after the end of the trip. Paul manages to get me up in the morning, and we’re on the road by 9am. I don’t sleep, amazingly enough, but I’m in a bit of a stupor most of the way. My voice has more or less gone, a combination of yelling at field trip participants and staying up late.

Just after we get to Suez, I see some stopped traffic up ahead, and something lying on the road. I imagine one of the hundreds of overloaded vans and pick-up trucks has lost part of its load, a common enough occurrence. As we get closer, I realise that it’s something much worse. The bundle lying in the road is a dead body, looking pretty shapeless and mercifully covered with a blanket by someone. A motorcycle is lying forlornly near the shoulder about a hundred yards up the road. All the colour drains from Sayed’s face; I’m looking pretty colourless anyway. An ambulance is just arriving, but it’s clear that there’s nothing they can do. We pull over a little way up the road, where an articulated lorry and a few cars are parked, but of course, there’s nothing we can do to help either. Sayed tells us the motorcycle rider was trying to pass between two trucks: one of the trucks clipped him, and he fell underneath the other one. The rest of the trip passes more or less in silence.

We get back to Cairo OK, and are staying with friends of Paul’s in Maadi. We visit GUPCO, where Paul worked for a while, get a bite to eat, and take a nap. I’m about ready to get home. We watch a movie and some DVDs of ‘Extras’, and snatch another 40 winks before the 4:15 am (really) KLM flight to Amsterdam. Except, when we get to the airport at 2 am, we discover that the flight is delayed for ten hours. KLM put us up in a hotel across from the airport. Paul is quoted 25 LE for the ride, all of a couple of hundred yards. In Maadi, 5LE will get you pretty much anywhere you need to go. There was really only one possible response. ‘Magnoon!’ [crazy!] says Paul, and we walk.

We get to Amsterdam Monday afternoon, and have a soothing pint of Murphy’s and a bacon and egg sandwich. I eventually make it home 11 hours late, but at least I make it home.

The first earthquake of spring

Last night, the largest earthquake since 1984 struck Britain. There I was, sleeping, like any good scientist should be at that time of the day (unless they're writing a PhD) when I was woken by the bed shaking. Sometimes this is because of the enthusiastic couple who live in the flat upstairs, but this was different. The room shook for probably 20 to 30 seconds, accompanied by a low rumbling, and I realised it was probably an earthquake. I checked the time so I could look at the BGS website [pdf] this morning: it was 1am.

This morning I discovered that it was a magnitude 5.2 quake, with the epicentre near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire. 5.2 is a pretty hefty magnitude, and it's fortunate that the focus was 10 km deep; if it had been much shallower it could have caused a lot of damage. There was only one injury, a man in Wombwell, near Barnsley, who was hit by a falling chimney pot. As the man's father said 'of all the things to happen-an earthquake!'

If you felt the earthquake, the BGS have a questionaire to fill in. It only takes a few minutes, and they use the information to do science.

As far as the Earth's crust goes, the UK is pretty stable, but earthquakes are not that rare. They just tend to be small. The BGS has a list of earthquakes for the last 30 days here. You'll notice that there has been aftershock, magnitude 1.8, from the Market Rasen quake.

Update

The BGS now reckon that the depth of the main earthquake was more than 18 km. There have now been three aftershocks, with the largest at a magnitude of 2.2.

Bad geology: another pseudojournal

Generally, my own field of geology is not somewhere you find a lot of pseudo-science. So it's nice to be able to comment on some, via the folk at Answers Research Journal. Thanks to Michelle for the heads-up. The journal contains a paper on 'catastrophic granite formation', an attempt to show that granites can form very quickly, quick enough to be consistent with what creationists call 'flood geology', the theory that most of the geology we see was formed in the Genesis flood.

The author is one Andrew Snelling, proud holder of a doctorate in geology from the University of Sydney. It seems that Snelling is happy to use the conventional geological column when working as a consulting geologist, but happy to disregard it when propagandising in favour of creationism.

The 'journal' claims to be "a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework". This raises some questions. Who are the reviewers for the journal, and who reviewed this article? In geology it is standard practice for reviewers to be acknowledged in published papers; reviewers usually identify themselves to authors, unless there are strong reasons not to do so. No reviewers are identified in the article: in fact there are no acknowledgments at all. In the instructions for authors [PDF], prospective authors are asked to suggest at least three referees. The guidelines state that comments will be solicited by at least three reviewers. I wonder if only reviewers nominated by the authors are used? Certainly it's hard to imagine mainstream geoscientists agreeing to review for the journal, or agreeing to the publication of any articles on 'flood geology'.

Why is the journal restricted to "research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework"? The instructions for authors suggest that work will be rejected if it is not "formulated within a young earth-young universe framework". This would be like, for example, a physics journal refusing to accept papers that were not formulated within a string-theory framework. No real scientific journal would restrict itself to publication of work that addresses a single hypothesis, because that wouldn't be science.

The journal is claimed to be a "technical journal", but there's a lot of language in the article that suggests otherwise. For example, in the introduction, Snelling writes that "Each recognizably distinctive granite mass, the boundary of which can be traced on the ground, is marked as a separate geologic unit called a pluton on a geologic map". In a section headed 'Magma Principles', Snelling writes that "The molten material which flows from volcanoes is known as lava and cools to form volcanic rocks. So lavas must be molten rocks; that is, they were originally rocks that melted deep inside the earth underneath volcanoes. When deep inside the earth, these molten rock materials are called magmas because they are slightly different in composition and physical properties due to the steam and gases they have dissolved in them that erupt separately from the lavas through volcanoes". There's nothing in particular wrong with these statements, but they read much more like excerpts from a GCSE level textbook than prose from a technical journal. This sort of basic information is never included in real geological journals: the assumption is that those who read them are already familiar with the basics. The article reads much more like a piece written for a general audience.

What of the actual science? It's actually not too bad in the main. The issues surrounding the production and emplacement of granite are quite well set out. The point of the article is that granites could be created and emplaced within a timescale of 6000-7000 years. This seems like a reasonable conclusion, at least in some cases, though I'm not convinced that it applies to every intrusive granite body on the planet. The problem is that Snelling then jumps to the conclusion that this is consistent with the Genesis account of creation. At this point, the article is no longer talking about science, but is trying to provide evidence for an answer that has already been decided on. The argument that the earth is a lot older than 7000 years does not depend on granites taking more than 7000 years to form and become emplaced. It relies on pretty much everything we know about geology, but particularly on radioisotopic dating. How does Snelling get around this? He simply states that isotopic dating is in gross error because it fails to account for the acceleration of decay. This is a load of rubbish, as you can see here.

The dead giveaway, though, is the section devoted to 'Evidence from radiohalos'. A radiohalo is supposedly a zone of crystal damage surrounding a crystal that contains radioactive substances, for example zircon crystals that are relatively common in granites. Snelling claims to be able to identify radiohalos associated with decay of three polonium isotopes. The argument is that the isotopes of polonium have very short half lives: 3.1 minutes (²¹⁸Po), 164 microseconds (²¹⁴Po), and 138 days (²¹⁰Po). Therefore cooling of the granite has to be rapid, because otherwise the polonium would decay too rapidly to form halos. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is drivel. There's a useful summary of why it's drivel here.

Snelling has come to an initially reasonable conclusion about the potential rapidity of formation of some granite bodies, and then extrapolated wildly to suggest that this is the case for all igneous rocks, and that most of what we know about geology is wrong. Still, he is happy to ignore that conclusion in his consultancy work and publications in real scientific journals. Like Homeopathy, Answers in Genesis is a pseudojournal: it's designed to look superficially like it is publishing real science "from a different perspective", but it is not. It is a creationist propaganda organ, and it is publishing creationist propaganda.

Sinai again...

Back in one piece from Egypt, once again. This time I wasn't really collecting any new data. Instead I was helping a field trip to the study area for the industrial sponsors of the project. The trip went well, I think: it's such a great area that it would be difficult to make it uninteresting.

I'm going back in a few weeks with another field trip, so it's also good practice.

"City view" at the Maadi Towers Sofitel, Cairo.

Strange weather. It was cold, cloudy, windy and occasionally rainy. This is Gebel Hammam Faraun lurking through the weather from Wadi Wasit.

The bakery at Abu Zenima.

Recognition at last

It transpires that my PhD thesis (labouring under the title 'Structural geology, tectonic history and fault zone microstructures of the Upper Palaeozoic Maritimes Basin, southern New Brunswick) has won the Jack Henderson award. This is an award given out by the Structural Geology and Tectonics Division of the Geological Association of Canada. They give out two awards a year, one for a MSc thesis and one for a PhD thesis.

This is an honour, and I'm very happy about it, especially as it's really the only award I've won during my academic career (at least so far). Naturally, I'm also inclined to minimise it somewhat. I doubt they get that many theses to read in an average year, for one thing. I reckon it's a good job that I finished it last year, as this year there's already Stef's thesis to think about, and Paul McNeill and Andy Parmenter must be coming soon. On the other hand, it might the first time in living memory that a soft-rock thesis has won. And it is a prize that in the past has been won by such luminaries as Yvette Kuiper.

Apparently, the award will be anounced officially at the GAC conference later in the month. I've caught myself wishing I could make it to the conference (oh vanity), but this year it's in Yellowknife, which would be a long way to go even if I still lived in Fredericton. And do you really want to go to Yellowknife in May? It's no doubt still dead winter there.

So, I'm resting on my laurels a bit today, and might have one or two pints of mild later on...