DeepEarthScience

Plate tectonics is a theory that is only 60 years old. Before this time, people were seeing Earth as a solid un-deformable piece of rock. Imaging you being a geophysicist in those days (ok, if you are currently not a geophysicist this is even more difficult, but in comparison try to explain the wonders of the internet to your grandparents.), having trouble to explain most of the things that where observed. In those times a civil engineer, educated in Delft (my university :) ), went on a submarine voyage, measuring the gravity field of Earth. Wow, they should make a movie about this (I think they even did)! With his own designed pendulum equipment, the Dutch engineer could measure the gravity field with an accuracy up to a few mGal (which is very impressive, just trust me). Who is this brave, 2 meter tall (which I like because I am the same height), submarine-sailing hero? Born on 30 July 1887 in The Hague, he was named Felix Andries Vening Meinesz. I am currently work...

This week I received a package from the USA, containing my own Crookes radiometer (only a few bucks at ThinkGeek.com (Yes, I am a geek, but the good well developed kind ;) )). This device is a small mill with black and white vanes in a vacuum pumped light bulb which turns around when you put it in sunlight (any light works!). It looks like this (pictures speak a thousand words, well in my case a few dozen) My physics teacher used this device to explain that light particles have momentum (he should have known better), and due to the different reaction with the white and black colored vanes, the mill would turn. During my whole life, I was really sure about that this explanation was the effect causing the light-mill in vacuum to turn. Until this week. My old master supervisor (not that he is old, but I am no longer a master student, he is my colleague now) entered my office room with a cup of coffee (this is of course essential for the story) and saw the Crookes radiometer...

A few years ago I was obsessed about Einstein's theory of gravity. I wanted to know everything about it, so I browsed a lot on the internet, trying to find information about the topic (I could have gone to the library, however I was still in the frame of mind that everything on the internet is correct). So one day I came across the following website: Bending Spacetime in the Basement . Wow, can one do this at home?!? First take a good look at the website. He's got a point by stating that he is bending spacetime. It unfortunately has nothing to do with warp-drives and wormholes (Which was what I was looking for), but his experiment is quite cool nonetheless. It somehow proves (I will discuss this later on) that the theory of gravitation found by Newton, not only works for planet and stars, but also for smaller everyday objects. Everything attracts each other. Impressed by the simplicity of the experiment and the fact that it is about gravitation (I think this is one of...

This weekend we watched the fourth part of the Ice Age movies, called Continental Drift. Scrat the squirrel, always finding a spot to bury his beloved acorn, breaks a mountain and falls into the core of Earth. Arrived at a very small and solid core, he accidentally rotates the core, causing old continents to break up and drift appar, forming the current continents (Australia, Antarctica, Africa, Europe, South America and Asia. North America is formed at the end of the movie, where Scrat pulls the plug of Scratlantis (Yes, again Atlantis, it just must exist), forming North America.). A really funny scene and it gave me inspiration for this post. This weekend I was struggling to think about a blog subject. Thanks to Scrat, I found my acorn: Continental Drift. In my research I work with topography, gravity and seismic observations. I am trying to combine all these observations in a new way, such that I get better insight of the old continental structure unde...

My last post was criticized about the doomsday prophecies I made about the Fennoscandian area (I think dear Annie missed the non-seriousness in my text, but heck, he/she got a point). The mentioned process of land uplift takes a lot of time and the dramatic geological change will not affect our way of life in a long time. So I decided to write about a geological change that does affect the way of life already today and dramatically in the future. The research I write about is from a couple of my colleagues working a lot with people from Thailand. They are part of a research project called  GEO2TECDI-2 , which uses GNSS, InSAR and tide gauges to see the movement of the surface of Thailand with respect to the sea level.  When you look at the topography of Thailand, you will notice that the country is very flat. The difference in height between coastal areas and 500 km inland is only a few meters. This means that if sea l...

Sorry, but I could not decide on the title of this blog post. So I tried a literature technique I learned from reading my first "real" dutch literature novel, "Tjeempie! of Liesje in luiletterland", by Remco Campert, which is a typical dutch novel, full of sex and without story (I hope I do not offend anybody now, but I was a teenage boy, just finding out about the two (sex and good stories) and I did not pay a lot of attention to the last). Remco Campert also had two titles so he put them both on the cover of the book. Just like him, I am now among the great dutch literature writers (literature is the art of writing, not the scientific kind, which is also great, but that is not what I want to talk about (In the next bit I will, just to make things complicated, hmmm lets continue)), writing in English, hmmm... Enough about the title bit (I just needed an introduction), I want to talk about this phenomenon we observe in Scandinavia, or even more accurately...

As a child, you think the Earth is solid. Heck, many adults still think the Earth you walk on is solid, motionless and has infinite strength(...and is flat, well some think this). But it is not. The Earth can behave like a liquid, it moves a lot (in all directions) and it can break. This only takes a lot of time and we humble humans don't have the time to stick around long enough. We know this only decades now (Ok, the not being flat part, maybe a bit longer). There are many scientists that are trying to figure out the dynamics, mechanics and materials of the Earth. And I am one of them. Well, I am learning to become one of them. My job at the TU is to find a structural density and viscosity model of the crust and upper mantle below Scandinavia using mainly satellite based gravity data and observations of post-glacial rebound. A lot of deep Earth words, but I will try to discuss them in this blog of mine. The idea for this blog was for me to put my ideas on paper, some of thos...