Tag Archives: geology

United States art, science exhibitions in 2013

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From the Smithsonian Institution in the USA:

December 28, 2012

Seven Must-See Art-Meets-Science Exhibitions in 2013

Water tank

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project.

This New Year’s Eve, in addition to the typical resolutions to exercise more or spend more time with family, consider resolving to take better advantage of the cultural offerings of America’s cities and towns. Whether you seek to attend concerts, listen to lectures by authors and visiting scholars or become regulars at area museums, a few exhibitions slated for 2013 on the intersection of art and science will be must-sees in the New Year.

The Water Tank Project

Water tank 2

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project.

The skyline of New York City will be transformed next summer when 300 water tanks in the five boroughs become public works of art, calling attention to water conservation. Artists, including Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Lawrence Weiner, and even Jay-Z, have agreed to participate in the project. Their original designs will be printed on vinyl, which will be wrapped around the mostly wood tanks, which typically measure 12 feet high and 13 feet in diameter, perched on top of buildings. The art will be a welcome addition to the city’s rooftops, while also providing more awareness of the global water crisis.

Teaching the Body: Artistic Anatomy in the American Academy, From Copley, Eakins, and Rimmer to Contemporary Artists

Female torso by Lisa Nilsson

Female torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak.

Naomi Slipp, a PhD candidate in art history at Boston University, is organizing an ambitious exhibition of more than 80 sketches, models, prints, books, paintings and other works that tell a full story of artistic renderings of human anatomy in America. On display at the Boston University Art Gallery, from January 31 to March 31, the exhibition spans two and half centuries, from the very first anatomy text by painter John Singleton Copley, dating to 1756, to works by contemporary artists, such as Lisa Nilsson, who creates paper sculptures depicting cross sections of the human body. ”This exhibition examines both what that study of artistic anatomy meant for these artists and for the way we, today, think about our own bodies and how they work,” said Slipp, in her successful bid to raise funds for the project on Kickstarter. ”In looking at artworks created by artists and doctors, I hope to unite this diverse audience, bringing together people who are interested in art and those who are interested in medicine for a rich, shared conversation about what it means to occupy, treat and picture our own bodies.”

Portraits of Planet Ocean: The Photography of Brian Skerry

Harp seal, by Brian Skerry

Harp seal, by Brian Skerry.

“I believe my most important role remains as artistic interpreter of all that I see. I need to understand the science, but I want to capture the poetry,” writes Brian Skerry, in his book, Ocean Soul. A National Geographic wildlife photographer with decades of experience, Skerry has captured enchanting portraits of harp seals, Atlantic bluefin tuna, hammerhead sharks, beluga whales, manatees and other creatures of the deep. His line of work requires loads of equipment—underwater housings for his cameras, strobes, lenses, wetsuits, drysuits, fins—to get the perfect shot. “While no single image can capture everything, in my own work I am most pleased when I make pictures that reveal something special about a specific animal or ecosystem, pictures that give viewers a sense of the mysterious or in effect bring them into the sea with me,” says Skerry, in a dispatch on Ocean Portal. Earlier this fall, Ocean Portal asked the public to vote for a favorite among 11 of Skerry’s photographs. The viewers’ choice and other images by the underwater photographer will be on display at D.C.’s National Museum of Natural History beginning April 5.

American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount St. Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin

American Vesuvius

Inside Mount St. Helens Crater, Base of Lava Dome on the Left (detail), by Frank Gohlke, 1983. Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

On May 18, 1980, stirred by a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, Mount St. Helens in Washington state’s Cascade Range erupted, forever changing the landscape surrounding it. Separate from one another, American photographers Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke documented the devastation (and in Gohlke’s case, the gradual rebirth) of the area. The Cleveland Museum of Art is bringing the photographers’ series together, side by side, in an exhibit, on display from January 13 to May 12.

Interestingly, the museum will also play host to “The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection,” looking at art by masters ranging from the 18th and 19th century artists Piranesi and Ingres to more modern contributions from Duchamp, Rothko and Warhol, all inspired by the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The exhibit will be on display from February 24 to May 19.

Gogo: Nature Transformed

Gogo, seaweed bracelet

Maine seaweed cuff, 2008. Designed by Gogo Ferguson and Hannah Sayre-Thomas. Photo by Peter Harholdt.

Gogo Ferguson and her daughter, Hannah Sayre-Thomas, live on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. Morning, noon and night, the pair walks the beach, collecting interesting skeletons, seaweed and seashells brought in by the tide. “Nature has perfected her designs over millions of years,” writes Ferguson, on her Web site. And so, the artist incorporates these organic designs into jewelry, sculptures and housewares. Her first museum exhibition, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from January 19 to July 7, features more than 60 works, including a six-foot by eight-foot wall sculpture modeled after seaweed from New England and an ottoman fashioned after a sea urchin.

Michael Benson

Photographer Michael Benson takes raw images collected on NASA and European Space Agency missions and enhances them digitally. The results are brilliant, colorful views of dust storms on Mars and Saturn’s rings, among other sights. The American Association for the Advancement of Science Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. will be exhibiting images from Planetfall, Benson’s latest book, as well as his other titles, including Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle (2009) and Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes (2003), from mid-February through the end of April.

Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence

Firefly signals captured in slow-shutter speed photos. © Tsuneaki Hiramatsu. (Right) A re-creation of New Zealand’s Waitomo cave system, with sticky “fishing lines” dropped from the ceiling by glowworms. © AMNH\D. Finnin

(Left) Firefly signals captured in slow-shutter speed photos. © Tsuneaki Hiramatsu. (Right) A re-creation of New Zealand’s Waitomo cave system, with sticky “fishing lines” dropped from the ceiling by glowworms. © AMNH\D. Finnin.

If you missed it at New York’s American Museum of Natural History this past year, there is still time to see “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” at its next stop, Chicago’s Field Museum, from March 7 to September 8. The exhibition highlights the diversity of animals, from fireflies and glowworms to jellyfish and fluorescent corals found upwards of a half-mile deep in the ocean, that use bioluminescence, and the variety of different reasons for which they do. A firefly, for instance, glows to catch the attention of a mate. An anglerfish, meanwhile, attracts prey with a bioluminescent lure dangling in front of its mouth; a vampire squid releases a cloud of bioluminescence to befuddle its predators. The show also explains the chemical reaction that causes the animals to glow. “The one real weakness,” wrote the New York Times, at the opening of the exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, “is that with only a few exceptions—like the tanks of blinking ‘splitfin flashlight fish’ found in deep reefs of the South Pacific—this is not an exhibition of specimens but of simulations.”

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Hare from Ice Age discovery

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This is a video of a snow hare in its summer fur coat.

Translated from Museon museum in The Hague, the Netherlands:

December 19, 2012

The Hague Geological Society shows discovery

A piece of a jaw which this summer was found by Barbara Marsman, a member of the The Hague Geological Society, on the ‘Sand Engine‘ off the coast of Ter Heide, turns out to be a prehistoric hare. In the laboratory of Professor Hans van der Plicht, of the University of Groningen, the piece of bone was dated to an age of 31,000 years. “That means that this hare during the last ice age has walked between the mammoths on the current North Sea floor,” researcher Dick Mol of the natural history museum in Rotterdam says enthusiastically. The hare’s jaw is shown as a special exhibit in the Museon from 18 December 2012 to 17 March 2013.

Mol and paleontologist colleagues have found quite a lot of bones from the last ice age on the bottom of the North Sea. These were mainly of large animals such as mammoths, bison, horses and rhinoceroses. “But this is the first ice age are we know about from the North Sea floor. Never before have we been able to date a hare which has walked simultaneously with mammoths on the North Sea floor, “says Mol.

From the scientific description of the hare jaw:

Summary

For the first time we have been able to identify and date a jaw fragment with a few teeth of a lagomorph from the North Sea floor. The 14C age is 31,140 (+200, -190) BP, Late Pleistocene. In the absence of the hare’s characteristic third premolar (p3) it is not possible to distinguish between the species European hare, Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778, and the snow hare, Lepus timidus Linnaeus, 1758.

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Triassic wildlife after mass extinction

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This video is called Excavating Triassic Fossils in Antarctica.

From ANI news agency:

Ups and downs of biodiversity after mass extinction unveiled

Saturday 22nd December, 2012

Marine animal groups like ammonoids and conodonts already peaked three or four million years earlier, namely still during the Early Triassic, researchers say.

The climate after the largest mass extinction so far 252 million years ago was cool, later very warm and cool again. Thanks to the cooler temperatures, the diversity of marine fauna ballooned, as paleontologists from the University of Zurich have reconstructed.

The warmer climate, coupled with a high CO2 level in the atmosphere, initially gave rise to new, short-lived species. In the longer term, however, this climate change had an adverse effect on biodiversity and caused species to become extinct.

Until now, it was always assumed that it took flora and fauna a long time to recover from the vast mass extinction at the end of the Permian geological period 252 million years ago.

According to the scientific consensus, complex ecological communities only began to reappear in the Middle Triassic, so 247 million years ago.

However, a Swiss team headed by paleontologist Hugo Bucher from the University of Zurich chart the temperature curves, demonstrating that the climate and the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere fluctuated greatly during the Early Triassic and what impact this had on marine biodiversity and terrestrial plants.

For their climate reconstruction, Bucher and his colleagues analyzed the composition of the oxygen isotopes in conodonts, the remains of chordates that once lived in the sea. According to the study, the climate at the beginning of the Triassic 249 million years ago was cool.

This cooler phase was followed by a brief very warm climate phase. At the end of the Early Triassic, namely between 247.9 and 245.9 million years ago, cooler conditions had resumed.

The scientists then examined the impact of the climate on the development of flora and fauna.

“Biodiversity increased most in the cooler phases,” Bucher said.

“The subsequent extremely warm phase, however, led to great changes in the marine fauna and a major ecological shift in the flora,” he said.

Bucher and his team can reveal that this decline in biodiversity in the warm phases correlates with strong fluctuations in the carbon isotope composition of the atmosphere.

These, in turn, were directly related to carbon dioxide gases, which stemmed from volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Large Igneous Province.

Through the climatic changes, conodont and ammonoid faunae were initially able to recover very quickly during the Early Triassic as unusually short-lived species emerged. However, the removal of excess CO2 by primary producers such as algae and terrestrial plants had adverse effects in the long run: The removal of these vast amounts of organic matter used up the majority of the oxygen in the water. Due to the lack of oxygen in the oceans, many marine species died out.

“Our studies reveal that greater climatic changes can lead to both the emergence and extinction of species. Thus, it is important to consider both extinction rates and the rate at which new species emerged,” Bucher added.

The study has been published in Nature Geoscience.

More than 200 million years ago, a massive extinction decimated 76 percent of marine and terrestrial species, marking the end of the Triassic period and the onset of the Jurassic. The event cleared the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth for the next 135 million years, taking over ecological niches formerly occupied by other marine and terrestrial species: here.

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Grand Canyon, from the dinosaur age?

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This video from the USA is called National Geographic – Amazing Flight Over The Grand Canyon.

During the George W Bush administration, there was pressure on scientists to be silent on the fact that the Grand Canyon is much older than the few thousand years of the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible. That flood made the canyon, according to creationists.

All geologists agree that the Grand Canyon is older than five million years. They don’t agree on how much older it is.

Just a few years?

Is it twenty million years old?

Or still older? Today, from Associated Press:

December 3, 2012 at 1:00 am

Controversial study contends Grand Canyon old as dinosaur era

By Alicia Chang

Los Angeles — The awe-inspiring Grand Canyon was probably carved about 70 million years ago, much earlier than thought, a provocative new study suggests.

Using a new dating tool, a team of scientists came up with a different age for the gorge’s western section, challenging conventional wisdom that much of the canyon was scoured by the mighty Colorado River in the last 5 million to 6 million years.

Not everyone is convinced with the latest viewpoint published online last week in the journal Science. Critics contend the study ignores a mountain of evidence pointing to a geologically young landscape and they have doubts about the technique used to date it.

The notion that the Grand Canyon existed during the dinosaur era is “ludicrous,” said geologist Karl Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

How the Grand Canyon became grand — with its vertical cliffs and flat plateaus — has been debated since John Wesley Powell navigated the whitewater rapids and scouted the sheer walls during his 1869 expedition.

Some 5 million tourists flock to Arizona each year to marvel at the 277-mile-long chasm, which plunges a mile deep in some places. It’s a geologic layer cake with the most recent rock formations near the rim stacked on top of older rocks that date back 2 billion years.

Doubting the process

Though the exposed rocks are ancient, most scientists believe the Grand Canyon itself was forged in the recent geologic past, created when tectonic forces uplifted the land that the Colorado River later carved through.

The new work by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and California Institute of Technology argued that canyon-cutting occurred long before that. They focused on the western end of the Grand Canyon occupied today by the Hualapai Reservation, which owns the Skywalk attraction, a horseshoe-shaped glass bridge that extends from the canyon’s edge.

To come up with the age, the team crushed rocks collected from the bottom of the canyon to analyze a rare type of mineral called apatite. The mineral contains traces of radioactive elements that release helium during decay, allowing researchers to calculate the passage of time since the canyon eroded.

Their interpretation: The western Grand Canyon is 70 million years old and was likely shaped by an ancient river that coursed in the opposite direction of the west-flowing Colorado.

Lead researcher Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado Boulder realizes not everyone will accept this alternative view, which minimizes the role of the Colorado River.

“Arguments will continue over the age of Grand Canyon, and I hope our study will stimulate more work to decipher the mysteries,” Flowers said in an email.

More number disputes

It’s not the first time that Flowers has dug up evidence for an older Grand Canyon. In 2008, she wrote a study that suggested part of the eastern Grand Canyon, where most tourists go, formed 55 million years ago. Another study published that same year by a different group of researchers put the age of the western section at 17 million years old.

If the Grand Canyon truly existed before dinosaurs became extinct, it would have looked vastly different because the climate back then was more tropical. Dinosaurs that patrolled the American West then included smaller tyrannosaurs, horned and dome-headed dinosaurs and duckbills.

If they peered over the rim, it would not look like “the starkly beautiful desert of today, but an environment with more lush vegetation,” said University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz.

Many scientists find it hard to imagine an ancient Grand Canyon since the oldest gravel and sediment that washed downstream date to about 6 million years ago and there are no signs of older deposits.

And while they welcome advanced dating methods to decipher the canyon’s age, Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico does not think the latest effort is very accurate.

See also here.

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Why were dinosaurs big?

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This video is called Tribute to Theropod Dinosaurs.

From the Geological Society of America:

Were dinosaurs destined to be big? Testing Cope’s rule

GSA Annual Meeting Presentation: Testing Cope’s rule and the existence of an upper bound for body size in non-avian dinosaurs

Boulder, CO, USA – In the evolutionary long run, small critters tend to evolve into bigger beasts — at least according to the idea attributed to paleontologist Edward Cope, now known as Cope’s Rule. Using the latest advanced statistical modeling methods, a new test of this rule as it applies dinosaurs shows that Cope was right — sometimes.

“For a long time, dinosaurs were thought to be the example of Cope’s Rule,” says Gene Hunt, curator in the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C. Other groups, particularly mammals, also provide plenty of classic examples of the rule, Hunt says.

To see if Cope’s rule really applies to dinosaurs, Hunt and colleagues Richard FitzJohn of the University of British Columbia and Matthew Carrano of the NMNH used dinosaur thigh bones (aka femurs) as proxies for animal size. They then used that femur data in their statistical model to look for two things: directional trends in size over time and whether there were any detectable upper limits for body size.

“What we did then was explore how constant a rule is this Cope’s Rule trend within dinosaurs,” said Hunt. They looked across the “family tree” of dinosaurs and found that some groups, or clades, of dinosaurs do indeed trend larger over time, following Cope’s Rule. Ceratopsids and hadrosaurs, for instance, show more increases in size than decreases over time, according to Hunt. Although birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs, the team excluded them from the study because of the evolutionary pressure birds faced to lighten up and get smaller so they could fly better.

As for the upper limits to size, the results were sometimes yes, sometimes no. The four-legged sauropods (i.e., long-necked, small-headed herbivores) and ornithopod (i.e., iguanodons, ceratopsids) clades showed no indication of upper limits to how large they could evolve. And indeed, these groups contain the largest land animals that ever lived.

Theropods, which include the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, on the other hand, did show what appears to be an upper limit on body size. This may not be particularly surprising, says Hunt, because theropods were bipedal, and there are physical limits to how massive you can get while still being able to move around on two legs.

Hunt, FitzJohn, and Carrano will be presenting the results of their study on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 4, at the annual meeting of The Geological Society of America in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA.

As for why Cope’s Rule works at all, that is not very well understood, says Hunt. “It does happen sometimes, but not always,” he added. The traditional idea that somehow “bigger is better” because a bigger animal is less likely to be preyed upon is naïve, Hunt says. After all, even the biggest animals start out small enough to be preyed upon and spend a long, vulnerable, time getting gigantic.

England’s Jurassic Coast, video

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This video from Britain says about itself:

Aug 22, 2012 by JurassicCoastWHS

A fabulous light-hearted any python-esque 5 minute animated film about the Jurassic Coast, England’s only natural World Heritage Site. The Jurassic Coast stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset and shows 185 million years of the Earth’s History in just 95 miles – covering the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of geological time. The film is made by Tim Britton from the wonderful Forkbeard Fantasy… you’ve got to love ‘em!