Nyuni - batch #3

Attempted to swim out from east end of the island to the eastern barrier/ fringing reef. Didn't get there. Partly through meeting this "cleaner station" (?) on the reef top. Organisms : "brain coral" (fewer zombie jokes, please) ; sea urchins (one of 3 genera seen on this swim ; others have more robust spines in two different colours (which may or may not be important) ; the yellow-black striped fish is, I think, a "Sergeant Major" (distinguished from the Convict Surgeonfish by relatively thicker black bars, and the body being yellow above and silver-white below) ; and the blobby B+W fish looks like it should be a Clown Fish (stars of "Nemo: Found", or some film like that) ... and indeed, visually it looks like a "Saddleback clownfish". But that's a Western Indian Ocean species (not a problem itself ; coelacanths went one way, why couldn't something go the other way?, AND it should have a yellow mouth. Looking on the web ... there seem to be several closely similar species. And considerable intra-specific variation. So I'm not going to worry too much more about it.

Next! Well , after leaving the "cleaning station, I carried on out toward the reef front. But things were getting gradually more interesting as the water very slowly got deeper. After 50mins of travel, I got to this area where - hard to see in static photos - there were in the order of 30 more "LBJ" shoaling around in the seaweed. Obviously, the brownness works for camouflage.
Then ... horror of horrors ... the battery went flat!
Well there's a lesson : if swimming OUT to somewhere, try to do it on your back to avoid being distracted.


And that's me caught up to today!

Nyuni, Tz, Batch #02 : Today, I swims with zee fishes

Title to be spoken in a menacing gangster-esque voice. "Sung Soprano", or something like that.


Went for a bit of a swim yesterday, but there is quite a current around high tide on the headland of the island, so I moved round to the south. Between wind and current there was quite a chop going - 30cm or more, which made snorkelling a less than comfortable occupation.
Fair amount of sea life, but I made no attempt at getting out to the reef margin - I'm really regretting not bringing my fins to Nyuni, but may have a Cunning Plan (TM, Pat.Pending).


Snorkelling in very shallow water, I was being constantly buffeted by the swell. So when I tried videoing things, the steadiness wasn't. No point in even thinking about shrinking them to something postable.
Firstly, these lobate or fan-shaped organisms (a major component of the biota :


I've named the file as if they're seaweed, but the more I think about it, the less I'm convinced. The colour isn't wrong for some algae (red photosynthetic organisms are nothing new), but the paleness of the colour ... doesn't make sense. They're thick enough to be more-or-less opaque, so why not absorb all the light you can in your waveband? Besides, I'm pretty sure that I've seen something similar common in UK waters, but can't find it in online compendia of algae ... therefore, it's probably not an alga. Could they be Bryozoa? But my memory tells me that Bryozoa have stiff meshes as a water filtering device. Rather like a stalk-less crinoid. Which doesn't really fit for these. [SHRUGs ; moves on]

I can't find these yellow-bar-fish in any online references either, but that's probably just the crudity of my search techniques. These wriggly things that go under the name of "alive fossils" don't really attract my attention until they've got fossilized. But this couple of "yellow-bar-fish" seemed to be defending the seabed hole against big ugly me. So once I'd taken a few photos, I moved on. (Without fins, holding station in chest-deep water against around a 1m/s current was a noisy affair.) There's a flashy fish in shot as well - brilliant reflections of "structural colour". I don't recognise either species.


THIS is what happens to people who look (too closely) at the small stuff. (American Scientist, v99#4 p311)

"Wow. A tube worm actually emerging from it's tube! Isn't this the most exciting thing you've ever seen?"

--
Aidan Karley

Fun with Fysiks

A review of this book ("How the Hippies Saved Physics : Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser, 2011) in this bi-month's American Scientist by David Woit starts with a personal (Woit's) anecdote about the problems of getting a physics job in the mid-1980s :

[a sizeable group of physicists] appeared to have managed to pursue scientific research by dropping out of academia and adopting a countercultural lifestyle that included soaking in hot tubs at Big Sur, engaging in Tantric sex, hanging out at North Beach cafes and taking psychedelic drugs. Some of them had gotten rich writing books that mixed physics with various kinds of mysticism. I wasn't very interested in the mysticism part, but I figured that I could handle the rest.

[Edit : link to article]
Needless to say, I was reading this while towelling myself off after a nice 3/4 hour swim in the Indian Ocean, collecting a nice specimen that got me thinking all sorts of interesting palaeontological thoughts on the topic of ecdysis, enjoying a cup of coffee, and thinking about ambling back up to the drilling rig to engage in my paid work for the day.

I think I can handle the tribulations of this job too!

--
Aidan Karley

Batch #01 from Tanzania

I've arrived on the sunny island of Nyuni, but am stuck behind various firewalls, so have to post indirectly to get my pictures to the outside world.
To quote my earlier email :
"Bloody Internet here is as wobbly as whatever. And lots of stuff is blocked too.
Attached is a batch of photos ... Needless to say, these are drastically-shrunken versions of the original photos, as the "-small" suffix in the file names might give away.

First image :
2011-07-21 11-28 Tanzania, flight over Rufiji delta, This is Kiechuru inlet, rivermouth bars forming with breakers DSCF1496-small

2nd ..2011-07-21 11-39 Tanzania, Songo songo Island DSCF1507-small.

3rd ..2011-07-21 11-43 Tanzania, Songo songo Island, baobab tree beside runway DSCF1510-small.

4th ..2011-07-21 12-29 Tanzania, Boat journey to Nyuni DSCF1523-small.

5th ..2011-07-21 12-55 Tanzania, boat journey to Nyuni DSCF1554-small.

6th ..2011-07-21 13-16 Tanzania, Nyuni reef DSCF1565-small.

7th ..2011-07-21 14-48 Tanzania, Nyuni home sweet home DSCF1566-small.

8th ..2011-07-23 13-04 Tanzania, Nyuni, white bird DSCF1570-small.

9th ..2011-07-23 13-05 Tanzania, Nyuni, boats on south shore DSCF1571-small.

I've made a horrible mess of crossing the links and the photo names, but I'll know better in future posts. I'm sure one can figure out what it's meant to do, but it is now lunch time and my belly is growling.

Mars Rover Driver gets into SF story

Who : Scott Maxwell and the fairly small Brotherhood of Mars Rover Drivers

What : They've been name- (or job-) checked in a recent SF short story.

Where : Karl Schroeder, of Canada, in the story "Laika's Ghost" ; published in at least the "Engineering Infinity" anthology, but possibly elsewhere.

When : Published 2010, but some of the stories are copyrighted 2011 ; go figure. ISBN 978 1 907519 51 2

Why : Well, the anthology as a whole is pretty good (so far ; not finished reading it yet). But I started using this "Twitter" thing recently and I heard of the Mars rover driver who "twits". So I started "following" him (sounds like I became his stalker!) and then he (or his character) turns up in a book I'd ordered for completely other reasons.

If the world is small, then Mars must be even closer.

Differential Survival Across the K-T Boundary: A New Theory on Why the Dinosaurs Perished but Reptiles, Birds, Mammals and Amphibians Did Not

Differential Survival Across the K-T Boundary: A New Theory on Why the Dinosaurs Perished but Reptiles, Birds, Mammals and Amphibians Did Not

He's an amateur studier. Seems serious.

He's come up with what he thinks is a novel idea to explain why the dinosaurs "got it" while birds and mammals didn't.
I actually printed this off to have a peruse on a flight a few months back, and I've got some scribbled notes somewhere ... somewhere safely tidied away. Have to try to find it again.

Geological Heraldry

Oksana and I went to the Burns Night party last night (27th Jan) because it's our wedding anniversary, and Burns Night itself is a good enough excuse.

A nice night out. Oksana hadn't met "Scottish Country Dancing" before, which was fun. It is, of course, obligatory that 2/3 of any dance floor have absolutely no idea what they're doing, no sense of rhythm, and don't care either.

Meanwhile I sketched up some geological heraldry on the traditional napkin while thinking about what to get engraved onto my kilt's belt buckle.

Unfortunately, the photo of the napkin isn't up to much, and I've no illusions about my drawing skills. The armorial description I came up with was :

Crossed hammer and chisel (alternative: crowbar), quartered with compass, hand-lens, sample scoop and specimen bag. Motto in scroll surmounted is In Lithos Veritas.

No, I can't remember many of the rules for describing heraldry. Well, it was 30-something years ago that I had to learn it in History class. One of the more interesting things I learned from that teacher, whose name I've forgotten.

Boring coring.

George wants to see some core coming out of the ground. Well, no names, no pack-drill, but here's a few pix from a recent coring job. (When I've finished unpacking them and cutting off the identifying marks.)
Coring is a pretty uncommon activity these days - the only time it's really necessary is to get undamaged samples of a reservoir for porosity/ permeability measurement, and even then the results are somewhat suspect because the core is typically flushed through with liquid filtrate from the drilling mud, and that can damage the porosity of the rock sample.
An interesting job I was on a few years ago was where the client wanted to compare the vertical and horizontal permeability of the reservoir. Here, even if there were porosity damage, it shouldn't differentially affect the vertical versus horizontal properties. Has that file finished extracting yet? Nope.

Half an hour later ... well actually the photos I took on that coring job were much more boring than I'd remembered. Only one worth bothering with really, and none of the actual coring operation (unless you want photos documenting that the core barrels had sub-standard orientation markings - didn't think so).
The photo is of the cut end of a section of core, which I photographed in the driving rain of a wet and mosquito-ridden evening. The blade used to cut the core has cut more-or less straight and planar, so the wiggling of the fine beds of dark material indicates that there is irregular bedding here. In the NE of the image you can see that one of the beds is thinning quite substantially over a small distance. (You can also see most of a centimeter scale bar). The saw nick in the NW of the image is where we broke off a chip for microscopic examination.
Then we wire-clipped a cap onto the end of the fibre-glass barrel, nailed it onto a box with it's neighbours, and packed it onto the back of a truck to go to the core analysis lab, never to be seen again (at least, not by me).