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Television:
Local TV makes learning geology fun
Book Reviews:
Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe
in Earth’s History
Movies:
Baffling flash-frozen science Plus, a Web exclusive:
Mixed media message
On any given
night, most television viewers across the United States can find a documentary
that encompasses some aspect of geology. The program of choice could be a Science
Channel show on volcano chasers, a Discovery Channel show about the last Ice
Age in North America or a National Geographic Channel piece on asteroid impacts
on Earth. If viewers want a dose of science in their primetime viewing, these
hour-long programs are about the only choices. Viewers in North Texas and the
San Francisco Bay Area, however, have another option: local geology on local
television stations.
Todd Kent shoots Devin Dennie discussing
local geology for an upcoming episode of GeoAmerica. Image courtesy of
Wayne Newman.
North Texas Explorer and Down to Earth are two half-hour-long
television programs that explore the geology of Texas and California, respectively.
The geologist-producers of both shows began their field-trip-style programs
to entertain and educate the general public — to bring geology into peoples’
homes and show them that geology is fun.
Geology on Texas
TV
“We looked around and wondered, ‘why isn’t there a recurrent
field-trip-style earth science and history show on TV?’” says Devin
Dennie, a geologist from Texas who is currently in a Ph.D. program at the University
of Oklahoma, and producer and star of North Texas Explorer. “We
felt there was a niche for this, teaching the general public how geology affects
our everyday lives,” he says. So a few years ago, when Dennie was in a
geology master’s program, he and his childhood friend, Todd Kent (who was
finishing up a degree in television and video production), got together to create
the show.
Originally aired on the University of North Texas television station, North
Texas Explorer aims to teach people just how significant geology is in day-to-day
living, Dennie says. For example, they recently taped shows at an ice cream
festival and at a Texas Rangers baseball game. While the connections might not
be blatantly obvious, Dennie says, geology is a big factor. “To make ice
cream, you use rock salt,” he says, “and right there you have geology.”
At the Texas Rangers baseball stadium, they explained how the Texas granite
used in the building’s construction formed millions of years ago. The show
has also covered more “serious” topics such as how oil ended up in
Texas. Regardless of the topic, Dennie and Kent seek to keep the show light,
often tying in mountain-biking or rock-climbing options to the area they are
teaching about. “Geology is in everything and is everywhere,” Dennie
says. “Our goal is to hold your attention long enough to teach you something
about it.”
At first, doing the show was a hobby. “But the more we did it, the more
we realized that people were watching it and actually liking it — it was
filling a need in the community.” So he and Kent decided to step it up
a bit after graduation. They teamed up with friend and photographer Wayne Newman
and found a professional media company to help produce the show so they could
reach a larger audience, but they still do most of the work themselves, including
the scriptwriting, on-camera hosting and narration, filming and editing.
North Texas Explorer has been seen on 10 stations across northern Texas
and New Mexico. The producers are now taking on a more national scope in the
form of a new program called GeoAmerica — a travel show that focuses
on “earth science heritage” across the country. They have already
shot several episodes and are hoping to produce more once funding is secured.
“Our goal is to broadcast this nationally and to eventually cover all 50
states,” Dennie says.
California geology celebrities
For geologists
Mel Zucker and Richard Lambert in California, Down to Earth also started
as a hobby. The two are geology professors at Skyline College, a community college
in San Bruno, Calif., in the Bay Area. They wanted better images and educational
material for their geology classes, Zucker says, “so we started making
our own.” They began doing multimedia presentations in class in the 1970s,
Lambert says. “We used to set up six or eight slide projectors and show
all kinds of slides, as if we were on a field trip,” he says. As technology
advanced and became more readily available, the two moved into the video realm.
The professors now use the 30-minute programs in their classes as well as showing
them on two cable-access channels in the Bay Area.
In San Francisco, geologists Richard “Hollywood”
Lambert and Mel “Vine” Zucker review geology in the movies for their
award-winning public access television series Down to Earth. Image courtesy
of Pat Carter, Skyline College.
Through the show, Zucker and Lambert have educated and entertained the public
and their students about topics near and dear to Californians: gold mining,
marine biology, coastal erosion, and of course, plate tectonics and seismology.
They have collaborated with and interviewed a number of geologists at the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, as well as geologists and engineers
from across the country.
Lambert and Zucker say that their students seem to like the movie review episodes
best. In the reviews, the geologists, in a parody of national movie review shows,
sit in director chairs and explain how the moviemakers “got it right or
blew it completely,” Zucker says. They have covered The Core and
Dante’s Peak, among others.
The team has produced more than 45 shows so far, with more in the works, such
as a four-part series commemorating the centennial of the 1906 earthquake in
San Francisco. The 1906 temblor, Lambert says, marked the beginning of modern
seismology. “It’s important for people to understand the history and
the science of it,” he says.
Zucker and Lambert are “providing a tremendous service to the community
and really ought to be applauded,” says Mary Lou Zoback, a seismologist
at USGS in Menlo Park who has been interviewed for the 1906 series. Working
with the two has been great, she says, as they ask excellent questions and then
“skillfully extract the parts of what we discussed” to produce a very
professional show. This type of program is “absolutely something that should
be done elsewhere,” Zoback says.
“With all the new technology and editing possibilities on your desktop
computer, anyone anywhere could do this and I think it would be great,”
Lambert says. Making the videos, however, is quite time-consuming. Lambert and
Zucker teach full-time and produce the show on nights, weekends and semester
breaks. It takes them anywhere from one to seven months to produce one episode.
“It’s a labor of love and expense,” Lambert says, “but it’s
very satisfying.”
Megan Sever
Links:
North
Texas Explorer
GeoAmerica
 |
Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and
the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth’s History |
“Gorgon” is short for “gorgonopsian,” a lion-sized reptilian
predator of the Late Permian, known primarily from fossils found in the Karoo
basin of South Africa. The book Gorgon is an autobiographical account
of Peter Ward’s quest, beginning in the early 1990s, for an answer to what
caused the supposed mass extinction of land vertebrates at the Permian Triassic
boundary (P/T).
So, how did Ward, whose primary research during the 1980s was on Late Cretaceous
ammonites, become involved in the study of the nonmarine P/T extinction? Quite
simply, it was because he needed a large scientific problem to solve. For, as
Ward tells us, once he and others established that an asteroid impact caused
a sudden end-Cretaceous mass extinction, he went looking for a new and equally
challenging scientific problem.
Much of the book recounts how Ward met this challenge, with diary-like accounts
of his fieldwork in the Karoo basin, mostly in collaboration with Roger Smith
and his co-workers at the South African Museum. These accounts stress the hardships
and rewards of fieldwork in the Karoo, and reveal many of the ups and downs
of the people, their work and the scientific process. I think these accounts
are the best part of this book, although fieldwork in the Karoo does not sound
much different than working in dry and remote badlands regions, such as those
that are common in New Mexico or Wyoming.
The rest of this book weaves into the field accounts a progression of discovery
and reasoning that should lead us to the cause of the P/T extinction that Ward
advocates. However, this part of the book is not well-developed; he reveals
little explicit information about evidence of the P/T extinction. The scientific
process here is difficult to follow — a difficulty exacerbated by internal
inconsistency and questionable scientific reasoning.
For most of the book, Ward characterizes the P/T extinction as “a sudden
and catastrophic event” or “a message of rapid catastrophe,”
only to later state that “many lines of evidence were converging on something
more prolonged than a single quick strike.” Ward’s last word, however,
is that the P/T mass extinction leads us to a new view of extinction as “fast,
and in pulses. Not a single short burst of death ... but instead a series of
episodes of extinction, for perhaps a hundred thousand years.” How, however,
the reader of the previous couple hundred pages, filled with various, inconsistent
descriptions, can grasp or in any way evaluate the data behind his conclusion
eludes me.
Even more problematic is Ward’s attempt to tie the P/T extinction to a
Triassic world of low atmospheric oxygen. Ward claims that Triassic red beds
(iron-rich sedimentary rocks) are evidence of (and indeed a cause of) the low
oxygen, as the “rusting” sediments sucked the oxygen out of the air.
However, isn’t the abundance of Triassic red beds (they are not omnipresent,
as Ward believes) evidence of relatively high levels of atmospheric oxygen?
Ward concludes that the “global rusting” caused two enormous catastrophes:
the Permian-Triassic extinction followed 50 million years later by the Triassic-Jurassic
extinction. Note, however, that Ward later dismisses the end-Triassic extinction
as unlike the P/T extinction because it was “never a threat to end animal
life on the planet.” Then, Ward goes a step further with this argument.
He uses the supposed low atmospheric oxygen levels of the Triassic to explain
the rise of the dinosaurs and their descendants, which followed the demise of
the mammal-like reptiles that dominated Permian landscapes. “I am proposing
that the dinosaurs and their descendants, the true birds, came about as a result
of low oxygen,” he writes, noting that he is the first to propose such
a mechanism. However, the large lungs of birds (and perhaps of dinosaurs) are
oxygen-hungry structures designed to supercharge the avian circulatory system
by rapidly oxygenating the blood. They are exactly the opposite of what would
evolve in a low-oxygen world. Animals that evolve in low-oxygen environments
do not evolve structures designed to use large quantities of oxygen.
Gorgon is readily recognized as a book of popular science meant to be
read primarily by the layperson. I believe such books should present well-reasoned
and well-documented science to their readers. This book does not. Gorgon
tells us much about what Peter Ward did during the 1990s, but its contribution
to a scientific understanding of the end-Permian extinction is a disappointment.
In the epic
disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, hurricanes, tornados and hail
pummel different parts of the planet. The entire Northern Hemisphere ends up
covered with snow and ice. Although the special effects make it look like the
real thing, many of the scientific flaws in this enjoyable movie are all too
easy to recognize. If you want some suspense when you watch the DVD, to be released
this month, read no further — we are about to embark on a little investigation
into the science (or lack therereof) behind the film.
A highly exaggerated storm surge floods
New York City in The Day After Tomorrow, a movie that while entertaining,
bends several laws of physics in its dramatization of sudden climate change.
Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
The blockbuster’s opening sequence shows a team of scientists, led by paleoclimatologist
Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), living through an Antarctic ice shelf collapse (in
a digitally recreated sequence reminiscent of the disintegrating Larsen B Ice
Shelf in 2002). After offscreen analysis of cores from the shattered shelf shows
evidence of an abrupt climate change 10,000 years ago, Jack tries to persuade
policy-makers that something incredible is about to happen.
The movie briefly addresses the trigger for the imminent climate shift, showing
Jack standing before a graphic of Wally Broecker’s ocean conveyor belt
at a United Nations gathering. The release of fresh water at high latitudes
from melting glaciers, he says, will lead to a “critical desalinization
point,” slowing down Atlantic circulation, which affects the Gulf Stream
— and the weather.
|
What did you think of the movie The Day
After Tomorrow? |
To prove his point, snow falls on Delhi, massive storms strike Hawaii, football-sized
hail kills pedestrians in Tokyo and unbelievable tornados destroy Los Angeles.
Jack runs models of a brewing “megastorm” over the Arctic, showing
three conjoined storms — hurricane-looking cloud masses with incredibly
cold eyes — traveling south, dumping snow and flash-freezing the planet
(and people) as it goes.
While the scientists work, the movie follows the somewhat formulaic path of
a summer disaster flick, doling out stock characters and tiny glimpses of human
drama. One plotline follows Jack’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhall) and his schoolmates,
trapped in New York City directly in the path of one of the freezing storm eyes.
They witness the inundation of New York, which then freezes solid as the megastorm
passes. Jack and his co-workers, well-versed in traveling in Antarctic conditions,
set out to find Sam as the climate continues to change ... you’ll have
to watch the movie to find out what happens next.
“It’s not often that you get a movie starring an ice-climbing paleoclimatologist,”
Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona told a packed house of paleoclimatologists,
at the first annual CLIVAR meeting on abrupt climate change in May in Baltimore,
Md. “There is some good science behind this movie, like all good science
fiction.”
But a truly good sci-fi film, says Gerry Stokes, director of the Joint Global
Change Research Institute of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the
University of Maryland, College Park, is as close to reality as possible, with
suspension of only one or two rules of conduct, “like the ability to travel
faster than the speed of light.” This movie “had to have a lot of
things go wrong.”
For example, Stokes points out that cores from the Antarctic ice shelves would
be too young to contain a climate record of 10,000 years, something normally
extracted from Greenland or Vostok ice cores. Also, seasonal Atlantic freezing
and thawing would extend the glacial shift over 10 years, not 10 days. And even
though the weather teleconnections across the globe are plausible, Stokes says,
the movie’s ensuing flash-freezing megastorm is not.
These events, Stokes says, break some very big rules: the first and second laws
of thermodynamics. The megastorm’s eyes are supposed to be large super-cooled
air masses, at negative 150 degrees Fahrenheit, which Stokes says is about 100
degrees colder than the coldest point in Earth’s atmosphere. Moving air
that cold that quickly requires the release of energy — in other words,
heat. “To quick-freeze something that way,” Stokes says, “doesn’t
happen.”
The movie breaks other physical rules as well, says Klaus Jacob, a senior researcher
at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, in Palisades, N.Y., by exaggerating the
flooding of New York by at least an order of magnitude. Using the Statue of
Liberty as a gauge, Klaus says the movie shows about a 200-foot storm surge.
“A 30-foot surge,” he says, “would be what one could expect under
the worst of circumstances.”
Regardless of the movie’s trespasses, it does highlight some current geoscience
issues. “Independent of the movie, there has been modeling of increased
inputs of fresh water” to the Atlantic, says Tony Busalacchi, director
of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland,
College Park. These “water-hosing experiments” show an ensuing Gulf
Stream deceleration, and heat stops transferring from lower to higher latitudes,
changing the way atmospheric moisture moves. “We need more work on this,”
he says, to model abrupt climate change and ocean salinity.
More work is also needed in communicating science, says Stokes, who was struck
by the movie’s portrayal of scientists interacting with policy-makers.
It was a “classic confrontation,” he notes, with “bullheadedness
on both sides,” leading characters to discount both valid science and policy
concerns.
“The movie is certainly sensationalistic,” Busalacchi says, “but
it does provide value in getting people to think about the climate.” And
despite all its faults, scientific and otherwise, the movie was highly entertaining.
The larger-than-life imagery of a quickly glaciating planet made it a relief
to look outside and find a warm, relatively ice-free planet.
Naomi Lubick
Link:
"Earthquakes, climate change and
reel disasters," Geotimes, September 2004
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