At the last meeting of my local geological society, they announced that the deadline for our three scholarships, one undergraduate and two graduate, is being extended to December 15 to collect more candidates.

This money is meant for research in or near northern California (I guess that means all of California), but the student could be anywhere in the world, so this isn't a parochial thing. I have a larger point, though: if you're a student at any level, beat the bushes for money from your scientific and professional societies, not just the big agencies.

By the way, my society also makes awards to primary and secondary school geoscience teachers. Check its home page.

Last night I attended a presentation on the rock-physics based theory of earthquake precursors (the p-hole theory), and things are moving along nicely. Funders including the World Bank and institutions like the new SUSEL underground lab in South Dakota are supporting research projects. I confess to a bit of a chill as the speaker, Robert Dahlgren of UC Santa Cruz, got into the fringe subject of "earthquake clouds," but there are some intriguing satellite pictures and perhaps the time is right for some genuine ferment in the field of earthquake prediction. The whole theory is summarized in this article so I won't repeat it here, but seven presentations on the topic will be given at the big AGU meeting next month.

Earthquake Lights
EQ Lights and Mental Effects
Online Lecture by Theorist Friedemann Freund

No, this isn't about a mysterious cosmic visitor that will cause the world to end in 2013. It's about Lake Kivu in Africa, a large rift-valley lake that straddles the Rwanda-Congo border. It is the world's third known erupting lake, after deadly lakes Nyos and Monoun in Cameroon which produced deadly choking clouds of carbon dioxide in the 1980s. Kivu has similar chemistry to these two remote crater lakes, but it has 2 million people living around it.

American researchers are organizing a scientific workshop in Rwanda to get local scientists involved in studying Lake Kivu. (See the press release from Rochester Institute of Technology.) With the right design and buy-in from the two nations sharing the lake, a solution might be found like the safety valves put in the two Cameroon lakes. Those are simply large pipes that allow the CO₂-charged deep water to rise and vent in a self-sustaining fountain. Unfortunately Kivu is thousands of times larger, and the lake gases include methane as well as CO₂. That means Kivu could explode in flames before smothering you, and it also means that methane is an attractive energy source. So much mixed news from an unmixed (meromictic) lake.

Related:
Erupting Lakes
Meromictic Lakes
Erupting Oceans

I found two fun things yesterday. First is Mike Russell's CulturePulp online comic, where the latest entry is a spoof on geological disaster movies featuring "Lava Tornado!" Old fuddy-duddy that I am, I've written about the twisted ideas that moviemakers have about geologic hazards, but this guy has a deft touch and much better knowledge of film clichés. (More on geology and the movies plus some reader ideas)

On the mind-boggling side is the modest Triloblog, which features not trilobite fossils, but artists' sculptures, photos and drawings of trilobites. Andrew Scott is the site's owner and a wide-ranging fellow with no academic training, just the right sort of wonder about his subjects. Trilobites deserve that as well as the scientific attention.