Looks like I'll be seeing a lot of talks about earthquakes today, mostly about the latest in early-warning systems. But I'll also drop in on a session on earthquake statistics, for the Nonlinear Geophysics group. Those people intimidate me, being the farthest thing from geologists and the nearest to mathematicians. But the brain could use a little stretch, right? In the afternoon I'll see what we've been learning recently about Mercury, and at the day's end is the Gutenberg Lecture, given by John Vidale and covering tremor, the strange deep shuddering that I've referred to off and on here over the last five years.

Background:
Quake alerts before the shaking starts
Introduction to earthquakes
Geology of the planet Mercury

OK, this is the first day of the big American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. I'll be here all day, all week. Today I'll spend part of the morning at one session on earthquake prediction, another on the evolution of the Earth's mantle, a third on the status of oxygen in the early Earth, and some time to wander among the thousands of poster presentations. In the afternoon is a session on seismology dedicated to the work of the late Paul Silver (he died in August and is listed as coauthor on many of the talks, which I find touching). Last is the Whipple Lecture, which will be an hour-long survey of Mars science. On Twitter, look for the hashtag #AGU09—just enter that in the search box—and you'll see me and a bunch of other people posting quick updates during the day and evening.

Earth science is a big field, and I don't always catch every significant event in it. So I'm late with the news that Jack Eddy died earlier this year. His was a very unusual career that involved crossing scientific boundaries and gaining popular fame. The first stir he caused was in 1970, when as a conservative solar scientist at an old-school institute his paper on the astronomical significance of an Indian prayer wheel on a Wyoming mountaintop made the cover of Science. And he repeated the feat in 1976 with his signature paper, "The Maunder Minimum."

I remember the eye-opening feeling of reading that paper, in which Eddy marshalled a range of evidence to show that the Sun's sunspot cycle had basically shut down in 1645 for the span of a human life. With that paper, he joined an eminent line of scientists including Galileo, Halley, Hutton, Darwin and Wegener who added new dynamic truths to our comforting notions of the universe.

Eddy moved on to stir up people and get them working with colleagues in distant fields on what we know today as climate-change science. While I was putting the second date on his entry in my biographies list, I reread the long interview he did with Spencer Weart in 1999. If you've seen that, I hope you'll read it again, and if not I envy you your pleasure in reading it for the first time.

Related:
Geologists' Biographies
Galileo
Edmond Halley, Father of Geophysics
James Hutton's Original "Theory of the Earth"
Charles Darwin's Evolutionary Theory
Alfred Wegener's Dynamic Earth
Interview with Jack Eddy
A Preliminary List of One-Name Earth Scientists

The Copenhagen climate talks featured a strong protest by the lowest nations of the world—mostly island countries that stand to suffer degradation, even extinction, by rising seas in the coming century. One of them, the nation of Tuvalu, offered a stricter version of the Kyoto Protocol called the Copenhagen Protocol (hat tip to Andrew Leonard).

The very land of Tuvalu appears to be less than a thousand years old. Like nearly all of the world's coral atolls, it owes its present elevation to an episode of high sea level centered around 5000 years ago, when the seas were some 2 meters higher than today. That allowed the atolls to grow high enough to emerge as islands when the sea went down to its historic level. Tuvalu is thought to date only to around the year 1100, but people quickly found and settled it, as they did to atolls all across the Pacific. The details are in a fascinating article by Bill Dickinson in the March 2009 GSA Today.

I always hate it when global-warming opponents and deniers tell me that climate change is nothing to worry about given the huge changes evident in the geologic record. I hate it because the Olympian perspective of deep time is no comfort to people and nations facing wrenching change now. So I hate myself for recommending this article, as if I thought it excused us from considering what to do for the Tuvaluans. It doesn't excuse anyone, but it is really cool science.