Friday Headlines, September 13, 2013
THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES
Today’s round-up:
It’s Friday the 13th. Big whoop.
Jerry saw a rock.
A new fossil glass sponge has been found. Did you know sponges are animals?
Waterspouts over Lake Michigan? Neeto!
Flooding in Boulder. Not so cool.
Superstition. Nuf said.
Jerry Shinn sees rocks while measuring water temperature near Thermopolis, Wyoming.
A mysterious Glass Sponge from the Early Cambrian of south-east China
This is neat, because sponges are really cool animals. Yes, sponges. Those things that you use to wash yourself and/or your dishes. Sure, many that you find at the store these days are synthetic, but the original ones are the skeletons of sea animals.
What’s really cool about sponges is that although they are animals, they can be disaggregated into their separate parts by passing them through a screen or by putting them in a blender, and THEY WON’T DIE! Yup, they come back.
But their not just like mats of algae, they have a complex skeletal structure. They have definite body shapes that mark them as multicellular animals.
What’s also neat about sponges is that their fossil record goes way back. I mean WAAAAAY back. Like before the ‘Cambrian explosion.’ Back in their heyday, sponges made reefs, like corals do now.
The sponges that we use to scrub our bodies have skeletons made of a soft protein called spongein. Other sponges make their skeletons from calcite or quartz and are thus a little – er – scratchier.
The ones that use quartz in their skeletons are called ‘glass sponges,’ since quartz (SiO2) is what glass is made of. And they’re beautiful.
The new fossil species is unique in that it seems to have laid on its side in life, rather than having the vase-like shape more typical of modern glass sponges. How it lived this way and didn’t get buried in the sediment is a question that paleontologists are working on now.
Water Spouts Spotted Over Lake Michigan
Water spouts are interesting phenomena. They are a type of tornado which forms over water, and are typically much weaker than the tornadoes we hear about the move over the land. They usually form from atmospheric circulation patterns during the development of big cumulus clouds, where wind shears and uplifts can cause the rotation.
On September 12, a bunch were witnessed over Lake Michigan near Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Here’s the pic of waterspout near Kenosha/Winthrop Harbor #wiwx #wfrv pic.twitter.com/PxNbab9gbp
— WFRV-TV Weather (@WFRVweather) September 12, 2013
@Skilling My friend Sandy Helmkamp took these in Kenosha/Winthrop Harbor stateline about 20 minutes ago pic.twitter.com/QR8zX8v96n
— Heather Patenaude (@HeatherArnel) September 12, 2013
Double waterspout over Lake Michigan from Carthage College in Kenosha WI. Better over lake than through campus. pic.twitter.com/dYOTo5VH7j
— Kathi Rauscher (@KRauscher1967) September 12, 2013
Colorado Flooding: 3 Dead, Mountain Towns Cut Off
You might think this isn’t really geology, but it is. As geologists, we think about flooding because it can lead to landslides and other big problems. Sometimes floods only happen every hundred years or so. The Front Range of Colorado seems to get hit every couple of years.
Furthermore, floods are preserved in the rock record. Watch the video and look at some of the photos here. Think about the awesome power of the flood waters. What do you think an event like this would look like in the rock record? What would you look for?
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 