POSTMODERN PETROLOGY : ROCKS TOO YOUNG TO VOTE

In geology's long-lost golden age, students were taught that rocks are just ceramics that happen to have been made by  God.  Now, from the young island chain of Hawaii comes news of a  rock type far younger still,  that embodies deep time on a scale shallow enough to establish  a new foundation for the Anthropocene geological column:

An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record

Patricia L. Corcoran, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B7, pcorcor@ uwo.ca; Charles J. Moore, Algalita Marine Research Institute, Long Beach, California, 90803-4601, USA; and Kelly Jazvac, Dept. of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B7

published in the Journal of the Geological Society of America, reports on a new sort of conglomerate formed by the action of lava on plastic debris in shoreline sediments:

THE NORTHERN LIGHTS HAVE SEEN STRANGE SIGHTS

ANNALS OF SELF-REFERENCE : " THE FILM WORKS ITS MAGIC "

The denialati are not the only ones 

to suffer irony malfunctions:

WHO'S SUPPOSED  TO  DISENCHANT THE TV AUDIENCE ABOUT THE DISCONNECT

 BETWEEN  POLEMIC  FILM MAKING  

AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE ?

VISCOUNT MONCKTON'S CRAZY IVAN

THE  LORDS -A- LEAPING  SEASON  IS  UPON  US !
Viscount Mockton,  self-styled "hydrodynamics advisor to Prime Minister Thatcher," and "Chairman of the Blue Riband Commission on the Trans-Atlantic speed record"  has gone ballistic with a WUWT stemwinder entitled  The Economics of the Madhouse, in which he avers  the UK power grid may soon:

" Install 1.2  GW of  new nuclear  capacity  each  year   ( the equivalent of two nuclear submarines ).  But --  insanity upon insanity-- the low-spec civilian-grade reactors they are going to buy from Hitachi cost six times as much as the high-spec, military-grade Rolls Royce reactors in our Trident submarines."

This has left submariners chuckling silently but deeply,  as the largest extant marine propulsion reactors are rated under 200 megawatts thermal, and a very big, very fast sub gets enough steam from a sixty megawatt (.06 GW) pair to leap half out of the water as shown above.

No 600 megawatt propulsion reactors exist, and the .18 GW reactors that power carriers and other capital ships are physically too large to fit within a sub hull, a fact that soon impresses itself on technology S-2's to  Cold War  novelists obliged to  crawl around the engineering spaces in question.

My late coauthor must be smiling at Monckton's modest proposal, for while the thunder of  three quarters of a million shaft horsepower might scare the planckton and pop the ears of sonarmen for 20,000 leagues in all directions, it would provide  turns enough to scare the hell out of the craziest Ivan in the seven seas.

VISIT SUNNY SIBERIA , LAND OF HAIL AND METEORITES

Climate change adventure tourists and Siberiaks run for their lives as golf ball hail bombards the banks of the Ob:

PYRAMIDOLOGY IN THE PITCH PATCH

Have climate activists underestimated the enterprise of  

Calgary's  Tarsandinistas?

There is more to Canadian enthusiasm for  geoengineering than carbon taxation  anxiety or  a desire to embrace global warming to escape the region's  Goddawful winters. 

Besides hosting Earth's largest tar sand deposit, the giant  Athabasca field,  Alberta boasts the world's sourest gas wells, and is awash in the inevitable by-product of high-sulfur oil & gas production: more sulfur.

Even where glaciers have ground the  Canadian Shield flat as a flapjack,  Athabascans do not lack for ski hills. The face of the great white north is pimpled with giant yellow piles of elemental sulfur from  gas and bitumen oil production  

Albertans tired of trying to export into a glutted global brimstone market where among the first to hail  Paul Crutzen's proposal to boost stratospheric albedo with megaton injections of aerosols at high latitudes, for his call to solve the problem of Anthropocene climate change has led to a plenum of schemes for spraying sulfur aloft using everything from artillery and air tankers to balloon-borne fire hoses stretching to the  stratosphere.

By far the cheapest of all these dicey schemes uses what  Alberta has in abundance at an ideal latitude for emulating the cooling effect of volcanoes. Sulfur dioxide clouds are the basis of geoengineering 101, and the corporate Pharaohs of the  Pitch Patch  produce enough sulfur to pile up a  Great Pyramid a year for several dynasties to come.

All carbon taxation activists need to deter geoengineering research is to persuade the Tarsandinista elite that they can instead achieve profitable immortality the old fashioned way!

Egyptian tourism is tanking as global temperatures and Islamist tempers rise, but the brutal summer heat is setting the stage for a takeover of the  King Tut Tourism franchise by a cooler country.  Canada could reap  Pharaonic profits by renaming the  Athabasca River the Black Nile and erecting a theme park featuring tastefully tawny full-size sulfur replicas of every pyramid and temple from Giza to  Abu Simbel.

Sulfur concrete is a mature technology- just add sand to molten brimstone and pour  like popsicles into obelisk molds.  When sulfur Sphinxes and Memnonic colossi can be banged out for a pittance, why blow a million dollars on a few minutes of space tourism when the same money can turn you into an instant  Ozymandias?

What's not to like about a forty foot  statue of yourself gazing out for eternity over the awestruck heads of Canadian Disney-goers!

If  Northumbrian coal barons, ( and the odd Earl ) can enlist earth art in the service of their polemics , why not the Great White North?

STRANGE BREW AT THE AGU

Willard A. Watts,  Science Prohibitionist  extraordinaire
has brought the gimlet eye of climate skepticism to bear

on the beer supply of geophysics.
He writes from the Fall AGUmeeting:

"The poster sessions seemed to have doubled in size… it might have been due to the free beer provided by AGU:

IMAGINE THE WAILING IF HEARTLAND PROVIDED FREE  ALCOHOL AT THEIR  ICCC CONFERENCES AT SESSIONS"

Yet Watts uttered nary a wail as he ordered free drinks from the free bar at Heartland's first ICCC conference, nor did he and fellow WCTU ( Wassailing Coolista Temperance Union ) members cry in their beer as they bellied up to the free bar at Heartland's last ICCC conference, staged at that bastion of sobriety, 

                 The Mandalay Bay Casino on the Vegas  Strip

 So raise a glass of Yuletide cheer to Watts for AGU snapshots that testify the California drought has raised a powerful  thirst:

THE ICEBERG COMETH

HAVING SAILED THESE WATERS BEFORE, I'M SINCERELY FLATTERED BY WHAT FOLLOWS,  

WHERE can Tony Watts TURN WHEN TIM BALL RUNS OUT OF  Mein Kampf  quotes?  TRY  BOB TISDALE:

IF FANS OF Stalin & THE KAISER CRY GODWIN MIT UNS!, ADMIRAL BOB CAN TURN TO COMMODORE MUELLER'S vergeltungsflotte:

THREE CENTURIES OF HOGWASH

THE ANTHROPOCENE ? IT'S GREEK TO ME

THE ANTHROPOCENE EPOCH

 SITS ATOP  THE THEOGENE,  TITANOCENE AND  CLASSICAL ERAS
POSTMODERN GEOLOGISTS DIGGING DEEP INTO
 THE  SEMIOTIC COLUMN  
HAVE UNEARTHED A BOOK OF CAUTIONARY FABLES ABOUT 
THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE BASED ON LUCIAN'S 

 THAT PROVES THE  CLIMATE  WARS  ANTEDATE  THE  FALL OF TROY:  

THE  FRONTISPIECE OF  DE BELLO CLIMATICO, SHOWING  THE EARLIEST KNOWN  GLOBAL CLIMATE MODEL,  PROJECTING PANTHEOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE  FROM 101 TO 1 BC,
FROM CAM- I RUNS ON  THE ANTIKYTHERA  MACHINE 

 Its invocation of the Climate Gods begins with 

 Interpantheonic Paean to  Climate  Change 

a hymn hailing Zeus, Father of Gods and men ,

  for commissioning Hephaestus to build the 

Antikythera  2-D Analog Cosmos Model

to  help the Pantheon confront the threat of

Hellenic  warming from thunderbolt doubling 

at the end of The Titanocene Era.

It tells  of how foam-footed Aphrodite 

struck far-seeing Icarus, systems  programmer

  of the Gods, with  love for  Phoebe, 

 muse of  solar  radiation  management,

and how when it failed to calculate thunderbolt doubling sensitivity,

Shining-browed Phoebe jilted far-seeing  Icarus, who took flight and threw the brazen Cosmos model

 into the wine-dark Antikytheran sea

to placate earth-shaking Poseidon's wrath

at the mere mortals who sacrilegiously

sang the praises of ambrosia rationing

and Net Zero goals on sacrificing hecatombs

 of swift-burning oxen whose rising smoke

is pleasing to the Gods.

De Bello Climatico  ends on a tragic note, with the
extinction  of  the  entire  Greek  Pantheon, and its replacement by an assortment of post-Etruscan New Age ' monotheistic ' religions, like the dread and bloody ISIS cult,  which explains the work's  Aesopian  moral :

ONE ONE GIANT GOOSE STEP BACKWARDS

Watts has been gobsmacked to the moustache roots by a post that flew under his censors radar last Sunday. 

Throwing good sense and Godwin's Law to the winds, WUWT arts gauleiter Tim Ball delivered this honking addition to the party line:

"When you understand what Adolf Hitler is saying in the quote from “Mein Kampf” above, you realize how easy it was to create the political formula of Agenda 21 and the scientific formula of the IPCC."   

Herr Doktor Ball waded  even deeper into the kultursmog this week with a gonzo attack on George Monbiot.

The weirdness of eliding marxistante Guardian drones with dead National Socialists seems lost on Watts' Dunning-Kruger Bruderbund, but Ball's silly walk has his academic familiars cackling:

Somewhat ?  Ambiguous enough to send Tarsandinistas and The Tea Party rallying to Ball's warning that a Nazi Warmist conspiracy lies behind the Big Lie of radiative forcing:

Phillip      November 27, 2014 at 8:45 pm  

Dr Ball, your article is appreciated. In my view, the comparison with Hitler is entirely apt. 

Godwins law is an internet meme with no weight in logical argument. It is just another way for the politically correct to tell you to “shut up”.

 Shub Niggurath 

“This post is entirely the opinion of Dr. Tim Ball”  

Not really, I agree with him completely and so do lots of other people I know...This has always been political, not scientific. It does not make you a conspiracy theorist if you can see what is really happening here over time. 

Stephen Richards  November 27, 2014 at 7:23 am

Edwards and Betts continue to spout their deniertribe and their massive increase in global temperature and their massive floods to come and their give us the money now and we will save you from disaster... I do not want to hear their pathetic gripeing.

Tony B said :Many of us who are sceptical of the AGW meme (but not of constant climate change) are trying to build bridges, don’t think all climate scientists are dishonest or stupid... The AGW crowd are a very long way from that witness the cry for another £97m from the UK Met O when they know their models are useless.

Secondly, saying the crimascologist are not stupid implies they are deceitful for they must be supporting the more fraudulent members of their profession for this scam to have continued for soooo long.

MANN v. STEYN : DON'T TELL THE JURY

As the scales of justice begin to twitch in  Mann v. Steyn, time remains to admit in evidence the defendent's  National Review columns, including this quote:

"As in the Congolese civil war, where both sides agreed that pygmies made excellent appetizers,  in the Egyptian political standoff...  both pro and anti-Morsi forces agree on little else except that the chicks are fair game...   

This is why President Morsi keeping his first lady in a body bag is more than a fashion statement, but a statement about ... the justice system..."

And tasteful MarkSteyn.Com swag like  a T-shirt emblazoned :

that could leave the jurors wondering :    Is the lady on Mark's left 
                                                                       his  fiance', or his lunch?

POSTMODERN PETROLOGY FOR POETS

THE NEW YORK REVIEW 

OF POSTMODERN GEOLOGY

Deconstructing the un-natural history of the anthropocene epoch since 2006

Will the Anthropocene be the first era since the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction in which all rocks get to be famous for 15 minutes?

This brave new epoch has already seen the TV debut of a prime-time worthy gypsum deposit that puts Industrial Light & Magic's best CGI to shame.

The crystal cave's high Nielsen rating created a gold rush of producers seeking out-of-this-world terrestrial geology to televise, and the few geology libraries to survive the Holocene-Anthropocene Extinction have thronged by science writers seeking news of  postmodern rock discoveries, including

Trinitite
The earliest dated rock of the Postmodern epoch is a green-violet, obsidian-like fused lithic 

The holotype,  a thin stratum of  un-natural glass emplaced in the White Sands of New Mexico. has a tritium age of 6.9 milli-eons, slightly older than deposits of the Terminal Showa formation that outcrop in Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki prefectures, and varous remote locales   in Nevada, Kazakhstan, China's Lop Nor basin . Highly enriched in transuranic elements, trinitite specimens look far older than their years.

Tellerite 

An ephemeral variety of trinitite that resembles popcorn while it lasts,  results from the abrupt explosion of calcium carbonate  into porous burnt lime when hydrogen bombs  explode over coral.

 

It was briefly reported on some now vanished Pacific coral atolls, but all the holotype material  turned to lime water in the first tropical shower following its discovery

Macadamite

While most sedimentary strata  form thick horizontal sheets, hydrocarbon rich macadamite occurs only as thin two dimensional ribbons  containing unfossilized flattened faunal remains

Interwoven veins of macadamite of astonishing extent and complexity have been mapped in Southern California, and form a beltway connecting the Cretaceous formations of Maryland & Massachusetts.

Saddamite   

More mafic than Maccadamite, this high-temperature no-pressure  lithic facies results from extreme local  heating of holocene tar sands in  regions prone to  pyromania, including Iraq and Kuwait.

Saddamite consists of  sand grains in a matrix of carbon black and pyrolized asphaltenes, a petrogenesis  that defies  natural explanation.  While high nickel and vanadium porphyrin levels suggest an  origin in marine cretaceous petroleum, the infernal thermal fluxes needed to generate pure carbon in such amounts only result from the deliberate ignition of oil fields 

Cryabase
The new discipline of meteopetrology focuses on cryabase, the only terrestrial rock consisting enirely of condensed air.  

Its minerals include native oxygen and nitrogen,  ice  I & IVcrystals , priestlyite (the carbon analog of silica) ,and  minute crystallites of argon, , neon, krypton and Freon.

The  sporadic type locality at Cape Canaveral  transiently features aircicles and flowstone like crusts on  liquid hydrogen tanks, where cryabase  avalanches can cause self-inflicted meteor damage to Space Shuttles.

While rare outside the Kuiper Belt, cryabase may become depressingly common in the inner solar system if Senator Inhofe's views on global warming  are correct.

Caution should be exercised in collecting cryabase samples, as geologists' picks tend to embrittle severely at frozen air temperatures, and the temptation to lick field samples for a better view of microstructure can lead to severe frostbite of the tongue.

Saganite
A phenomenally cold and dark family of aerosol minerals arbitrarily small amounts  of which can reportedly lower global temperatures below freezing for 40 days and 40 nights. The  type report published in Science in 1983 seems largely based on the related species, apocryphite, found in many factoid deposits, but lacking the consciousness raising properties of the material originally published . 

Saganite exemplifies the  unstable  minerals grouped as the "factoidite"  melange  arising from hermeneutic metamorphism during high-pressure  deformation professionel  

Little is known of its physical properties as despite its extensive literature , it only occurs in nuclear winters.  Saganite may be  semiotically related to the War of the Worlds symplectite, first reported from Grovers Mills New Jersey by Orson Welles in 1938.

The Tora Bora Metapeltites
Some anthopocene cave deposits in the Hindu Kush and Waziristan syntaxis show signs of shock and awe  deformation. Their extensive contamination with shards  of lead and depleted uranium frustrated   postmodern petrologists seeking to connect them to:

The Ground Zero Gneiss

Known only from deposits in lower Manhattan, this product of political catastophism is a mylonized migmatite containing portlandite,  asbestos fibers, enormous laths and corrugated sheets of metallic iron and  mica-like sheets of carbonized cellulose with angular markings more legible than graphic granites, many pertaining to world trade.

Mann v. Steyn : Approaching The Bench From The Penalty Box

AFTER THREATENING TO  -BRAIN THE JUDGE- SUBMIT AMICUS  BRIEFS
PALO OCCIDI  AND  NOLLE PERCUSSI   

 THE  ST. TRINIAN'S  THIRD  FORM  TORTS  &  HOCKEY  CLUB

HAS JOINED THE MARK STEYN DEFENSE TEAM

HOW MANY ECONOMISTS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A CLIMATE POLICY?

ONE,
 IF IT'S MILTON FRIEDMAN 
If you're looking for intelligent life in mid-America,
try the University of Chicago

before you turn to the Heartland Institute

ANNALS OF BELATED DISCOVERY : THE EAST POLE

The Age of Discovery endures:

A map of palaeomagnetic field drift published by Italian and American researchers  in   Geophysical Journal International ,  based  on  a continuous sequence  of   lacustrine  sediments  outcropping in  the Apennines  reveals that in the 787th millennium BC, Earth boasted an East Magnetic Pole near  Latitude 0  Logitude 0 in the Bight of Benin.

It follows that for as long as it took for the magnetsphere's focal point to drift across the Equator, tropical nights were brightened by the light of the Aurora Orientalis shining over the Prime Meridian:

 On the far side of the world in the same brief epoch, Homo erectus could marvel at the Aurora Occidentalis illuminating the Pacific around the West Magnetic Pole in the waters north of Tuvalu.

 Now that Sagnotti et al.'s 

Extremely rapid directional change during Matuyama-Brunhes geomagnetic polarity reversal

has rewritten the history of polar discovery at right angles to Perry & Amundsen, the RGS and National Geograpic can offer a prize for the first expedition to gather direct evidence of East and West Polar palaeomagnetism from the seabed around 0^o, 0^o  and  0^o, 180^o.

Once the great drill ship, wind surfer & submarine race from pole to pole is over, a new era of quadrupole modeling can begin!