Muon Telescopes Attack…Part IV

For reasons unknown, this article string has the largest number of pageviews for the last month, July 2011. My plan is to cash in on that kind of popular, 5 hits per day OR MORE, for my big comeback. 

I have updates. Mark H has been diligently working on this project in an effort to get some kind of degree in physics or something. The results are amazing. It turns out that if a person takes a series of muon detectors that may or may not have been used in a major neutrino detector experiment located at the south pole…it turns out, that guy sees a relationship between muon detections and elevation and detector orientation. There may also be a relationship between muon flux and the annual calendar.

Amazing...Thanks Mark. Your thesis is awesome.

This kind of measurement also takes a long time. The kind of timeframe that yields graduate-level results in muon detections is on the order of months. So, the next level of measurements is taking a stacked scintillating muon detector and rotate it relative to vertical. This should show the vector relationship between high energy events in the upper atmosphere and detection events at the ground level. The original experiment of separating the detector paddles and looking for a "field of view" relationship between the muon detectors and occurrence was also never completed. Why is that...Mark?  

Go ahead and do this particle physics types, I would appreciate it, and it looks like it will take a long time, so get on it.

There are people in Australia, Spain, Germany, the UK, Russia, and India who have been interested and at least glanced these posts. This is amazing and I hope to someday hear from you people.

Cheers,

John

They don't us Lunatics for nothing

In researching the next post I found this website, www.moonmining.com Pure Gold...er, I suppose that's Pure Moon Dust for the rest of us. Or "Lunar Regolith" for the "scientists" amongst us.

http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar_regolith.html

I have to admire what he has done here. In the introduction he states that "There are no definite processes for extracting metals and gasses from the regolith to be found." I think he is largely correct on that point, but that is where we part ways. The remaining five hundred pages of text are a lot of crazy speculation on blue sky magical thinking about how the human race can eventually reach the stars. The moonmining website is a bit like the goatee-wearing mirror of my whitepaper in the evil anti-universe. This topic deserves an experienced hand and consideration of the technology and resources that could make mining on the moon a reality if enough support ever made it a priority.

The author of this website could, in fact, be the same guy I met at the party in California. I don't know. In all honesty, I will, in fact, be using the references that this author has so diligently researched in advance of my efforts.  

Here is another great idea that I love. At the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference Fries and Steele from the Carnegie Institute propose sending a rover to the moon with a raman spectrometer to look for meteorite fragments in the regolith.

www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/LEA/.../FriesMDF_Lunar_wksp_07.pdf  Warning! PDF

This harkens back to brief but exciting days of my most recent graduate school field work using a portable handheld raman spectrometer to analyze carbonates in the Mojave desert.The absolutely best part of this abstract is that they named the probe Moonraker. Ala James Bond. Brilliant! The next space instrument I dream up to send to Mars shall be called Goldeneye!

Cave Enlargement Pills - No RX-Required to Order

Just the other day Elizabeth and I were watching a documentary about early man, something on the order of a million years old. The archeologists were excavating a cave in Spain and finding neolithic skeletons at the bottom of a pit. The part that caught both of our attention was that the pit was at the bottom of the cave, a 45 minute crawl. It was the kind of location that neolithic man would not have managed to reach let alone gone and died in. The documentary ended by suggesting that the pit was originally open to the ground and the neolithic men were dumping bodies into the pit as a form of early burial. 

The implication is that so much deposition occurred in the intervening years that a hillside was placed and a cave opened up to allow underground access to the pit. All this in a million years. 

Sure, as a geologist, I like to think I have a pretty good sense of time and scale. After all, a 200 foot deposit only needs 0.0024 inches/year over a million years. This is a dust film. The hard part is imagining a deposit that could remain stable and also form a cave. Caves are typically limestone, which only forms under water, usually deep water. That does not make a whole lot of sense in this case. 

This paper is interesting because it suggests that cave formation is more dynamic than many geologists would expect. The waters that carve away at underground openings can also slowly fill in those cracks and deposit material. The point I took from the paper is that the chemistry of the water is crucial. If the water is not saturated in carbonate, limestone will more easily be dissolved. 

Does the paper explain how neolithic man was able to bury their comrades? No, the geology of that excavation seems very interesting and I suspect that the documentary makers made a mistake or the scientists were taking liberties about their interpretation.

River reversals into karst springs: A model for cave enlargement in eogenetic karst aquifers — Geo

gsabulletin.gsapubs.org

Most conceptual models of epigenic conduit development assume that conduits sourcing karst springs form as water that is undersaturated with respect to carbonate minerals flows from recharge to discharge points. This process is not possible in springs fed by

Say that ten times fast

It takes a very special kind of geologist to appreciate this paper. I like it because of the title's alliteration and potential lyrics for a drinking song. The paper no doubt makes some very important conclusions about ophiolites, obduction, and orogenies. 

Timing of ophiolite obduction in the Grampian orogen — Geological Society of America Bulletin

gsabulletin.gsapubs.org

This study addresses the timing and pressure-temperature (P-T) conditions of ophiolite obduction, one of the proposed causes of the ca. 470 Ma Grampian orogeny of Scotland and Ireland. This event gave rise to the main structural and metamorphic characteristics of the Grampian te

Announcement on Gliese 581g; amazing, probably untrue

Buzz About Gliese 581g: Doubts of Its Existence; Aliens Signals Detected | Universe Today

www.universetoday.com

Ever since the announcement of the discovery of exoplanet Gliese 581g, there has been a buzz in the news, on websites, Twitter – pretty much everywhere

This is a space science nut's favorite story in years. A new planet found in the Goldylocks zone in a different solar system. Why not expect it? 

It would not surprise me if in fact there is not one orbiting Gliese but that the nearest three dwarf stars did, just taking into account irony and error associated with the kind of assumptions that are made in this study. 

Interesting fact of the day: when visiting the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, the astronomers hosting our group tell me that the infrared interferometry method they use to make these planet-finding observations are precise enough to detect a star's motion as small as one yard.

Carbonates in magma

Aragonite in olivine from Calatrava, Spain—Evidence for mantle carbonatite melts from >100 km depth.

geology.gsapubs.org

Aragonite, as an inclusion in olivine from a leucitite lava flow, provides evidence for high-pressure crystallization and carbonatitic activity beneath the geophysical lithosphere in Calatrava, Spain. The aragonite occurs as a single crystal within olivine (...

Cool for 2 reasons. 1) The entire paper and all the conclusions about the upper mantle is based on analysis of one grain of olivine, probably less than a mm in diameter. 2) Aragonite can be a weathering product of olivine, I wonder if it is possible that the aragonite crystal is the result of some kind of phyllosilicate weathering reaction? Occams razor says that this paper has exagerated conclusions, but I am always amazed when a geologist predicts an economic deposit from one grain in a piece of core.