DeepEarthScience

At the end of a week full of science, I had a touristic trip into the woodlands of Muir. Together with a geologist I met in San Francisco, I traveled to the forest with the large trees seen in the very famous bike chase scene in Star Wars on the second moon of Endor. It was a great trip and I can recommend it to anybody visiting the City of Fog. The Muir Woods are situated in a valley, where the climate is much different than the surrounding mountain lands. So a geologist and a geophysicist could not resist to climb a mountain to the top (I say mountain, but they were large hills, except when I said that the giftshop woman gave me angry eyes). We decided to follow the Hillside trail, followed by the Ben Johnson trail. These trails gave us a good view of the forest and let us examine some really nice rock outcrops of the mountain. And on one of them I found this rock: It is a greenish rock, which according to the geologist, could be serpentinite or an olivine containing r...

It all started with a delay of four hours. Being on our route for over an hour (above Scotland), the intercom of the airplane (a MD11 type of aircraft) sounded: "This is your captain speaking and I have some bad news." There was a technical problem that could not be fixed in San Francisco, so it was decided to fly back to the airport Schiphol, Amsterdam. I was just finishing my first beverage. One of my colleagues told me that he had several experiences like this with MD11 aircrafts. They are old and should be taken out of service. But for now we got a different MD11 that would take us to San Francisco. Four hours later than originally planned, we arrived in the Fog City (it was a clear day). However, at the gate after the pilot had shut down the engines, the ground personnel tried to connect the power cables such that the doors could be open. Only this was not working, so 350 already a bit weary passengers were stuck inside the aircraft. And no power means no air-conditioni...

This morning I got up earlier today to attend the Delfi-n3Xt launch event in our faculty. Delfi-n3Xt is a nano-satellite (the size of a milk carton) which is built by students and staff of our faculty. Launch events are always exciting, because you don't know what will happen. But after two stressful hours we got the confirmation, "Nano-sat number 7 successfully deployed." This was followed by some cheerful cheers. However, was it turned on? This blog started with some post about listening to satellites using the ground station on top of EWI (faculty of electronic engineering, mathematics and computer sciences). This ground station is mostly set up by a student which I assist in teaching him to track satellites. So this gives me the opportunity to get the telemetry data of the Delfi-n3Xt quite fast. It's good to be a teacher :). The next figure will show the satellite's first sounds in space: Click on the figure to get a larger view. In the bottom left...

Last week, I was visiting the beautiful capital of Denmark, Copenhagen. I was selected to participate in the International PhD Elite Course "Tectonics" at the University of Copenhagen (READY program), organized by Prof. Hans Thybo and Prof. Irina Artemieva. During this five day course, the participants (PhD students from all over the world and me :) ) were being taught by two experts in the field of tectonics, the wonders of geosciences. From Geology (I write G eology, because it was defined by the lecturer as one of the two only real sciences); Prof. Çelal Şengör from Turkey with a beautiful British-sounding way of lecturing. From Geophysics (capital G, because I disagree with Prof. Şengör ;)); Prof. Seth Stein from the USA, who also brought his wive, Carol Stein. She gave a very interesting view on the Mid-Continental Rift. These last five days were fantastic, because I learned a lot and met numerous interesting people. I recommend any PhD student participating in such a c...

No, this is not a blog about some random Sci-Fi movie, it really is a blog about the secrets of the deep ocean (sorry guys, no shiny sphere that gives you special powers when you touch it). Already as a kid I was fascinated about large structures in the deep depths of our oceans. I will show you some cool geological features and their origin in the deep depths of the South Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately, Vening Meinesz, the geophysicist I am talking about now for some time, sailed over this huge ocean onboard the K18 submarine (yes, yes, I know, again I am spamming you guys about this very interesting and cool scientist).  After visited several ports along the eastern South American coastlines, the K18 and its occupants started from Mar del Plata the difficult crossing of the South Atlantic Ocean. Vening Meinesz wrote in Volume III of his "Gravity Expeditions at Sea", the following about this crossing: The crossing of the Atlantic from Mar del Plata to Cape Town was a s...

During my weekly fitness session with one of my friends, we started discussing gravity (yes, also my friends are geeks (in the good way)). We discussed the measurements done by Vening Meinesz in the K18. He used I pendulum device, that directly measures the downward gravity attraction in the location of the device, plus all the motions of the device itself. On land, these motion are negligible, but on sea the device swings a lot due the ocean waves. Therefore, Vening Meinesz used a submarine to reduce the motions of the measurement device (waves are dampened underwater). Furthermore, he used three pendulums instead of one, which he ingeniously used to separate the motions of the device and the gravity attraction. Explaining this all to my friend, he remarked that it sounded very complicated and asked me if this could be done more easy. "Yes, this is possible", I replied, "with a GPS receiver". "How is it possible to measure Earth's gravity field with a GPS...

Today I am working at home, because some strong and skillful looking men are renovating my roof vault (in Dutch: "dakkapel"). Luckily I had one thing on my agenda, editing, editing and editing. I have to rewrite my first scientific paper, because I want to send it to my co-authors in the beginning of next month. So today it is about making order in all my chaotic brain waves and scribbles, during the loud noise from above. The title of this blog post is my way of living for the last few weeks (oh and "be concise and focus", but that is another story). I've started a course in English article writing, because as you would have noticed (and some of my good friends commented), my writing is not perfect or even close to perfect. So, every wednesday, I am sitting in a classroom with 12 of my peers, learning about the wonders of the English writing process. One of the most important lessons is: "Writing is editing, rewriting and reviewing". But what...