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.

Thanks to Phil Leinart for pointing out a lovely new item from Good Nature Publishing Company: a poster displaying the fossils to be found all over Washington state. There's everything from trilobites and cycads to whales, camels, mammoths and ginkgos, plus a few oddities like D.B. Cooper, Bigfoot, and what must be a jackalope.

Related:
Washington Geology
Washington Geologic Map
Fossil wood from Washington
Washington Peaks

As the Copenhagen climate meetings go on for the next few days, it's worth contemplating the risks and benefits of simplicity. When it comes to what I'll just refer to as the climate problem, public awareness relies on simplicity. And the climate policy problem being debated in Copenhagen is so complex that only the simplest version of climate science can be assimilated. That version goes, "carbon carbon carbon carbon"; in other words, "CO₂ is the primary villain of global warming." I'm OK with that message for now because the results from Copenhagen, small or great, will be in the right direction and will not be a colossal waste. We need to stop perturbing the global carbon cycle and move toward a truly sustainable civilization.

But as climate-related policy evolves, we will have to listen more closely and carefully to scientists. Things are not as simple as "carbon." Or "warming." Or even "global." The chorus from science, represented by efforts like the IPCC reports, was a strain on the scientific process (as the stolen email has highlighted) and the community is not all in tune. James Hansen, a well-known name among the chorus, holds that other greenhouse gases need just as much attention as CO₂. Roger Pielke Sr., a serious scientist allergic to the chorus, argues that we can't ignore factors outside the greenhouse gases.

I don't think these ideas are really controversial; they're just not part of the program yet. The program will involve a lot more than a group of delegates in one city for one meeting. The Kyoto–post-Kyoto CO₂-centered campaign will never be the whole answer, just the start of a journey. Flexibility in that journey is as crucial as the chorus of scientists that got the journey started.

Background:
Global Warming in a Nutshell

It's an old cliché among geologists that humans will leave their mark in the rock record of the future as a layer of petrified garbage, and stratigraphers will call our age the Broken Glass Epoch. Paul Crutzen put it more formally in 1990 with the proposal to name a new geologic age called the Anthropocene, starting with the rise of large-scale industry.

Geologist Kyle House lives the cliché seriously, having actually used the "Budweiser Horizon" method to date young flood deposits. "I always take pictures of beer cans in geologic and archeologic contexts," he says. On his blog he shares with us a true Budweiser horizon he encountered last week near Dayton, Nevada.

In my own little-noted hobby of documenting sidewalk markings, I'm slowly gaining enough knowledge to tell the vintage of a sidewalk by the appearance of the concrete, even without seeing a dated mark on it. It is an exact analogy of what geologists do with rocks, using fossils.

More:
How I'd Recognize the Anthropocene
Relative Dating of Rocks
Kyle House's Fresh Geologic Froth
_{Dated artifact — Geology Guide photo}

The BBC will start running its colossal series "How Earth Made Us" next month. But a slight preview is available on photographer Paul Williams' blog Iron Ammonite, where he recounts his experience filming in the Cueva de los Cristales, the Mexican mine chamber where preposterously large gypsum crystals line the walls in a hellish setting of 50°C and 100 percent humidity. Go see his photos right now.

2007 post on Naica with more photos

In 1978 two men came upon a large bone in a riverbank north of Waco, Texas, that local experts identified as the remains of an Ice Age mammoth. The site later yielded the remains of a whole nursing herd, which had perished during a flood some 68,000 years ago. This weekend the Waco Mammoth Site opened to the public, and now you all have another reason to visit this city.

More:
Texas Geology
Texas Geologic Map

The International Commission on Stratigraphy has done a lot of work this year, and the world-standard geologic time scale has changed enough for me to update everything to match the new divisions, dates, and map colors. Start with the high-level eras and eons scale and poke around the last 4 billion years of Earth history.

The new color scheme is interesting, and I rather like it. The old International color standard had some garish aspects, and I never warmed to it—of course, as an American I was imprinted by the U.S. Geological Survey standard at an impressionable age. But this year the Committee for the Geologic Map of the World put together a new color standard that curbs the worst of the International standard and makes the USGS standard look a bit drab. Compare them and see if you agree.
_{New Paleozoic colors — Geology Guide image}