Since my return from San Diego, I have been too busy to drop back into the blogosphere. However, I am forcing myself to blog right now in order to chronicle some of the recent events for fear that I may forget some seemingly trivial events that eventually turn out to be turning points in our research or in how we think about science. What one never can predict is how current events might dictate future directions. Hindsight is always clear, but you have to leave enough details to actually be able to look back and piece together the trail. These are my bread crumbs to which I may return to in the future, but right now, I have no idea where any of this stuff is going. Five-year plans are over-rated.
I am right now finishing up a manuscript with a visiting scientist Jianping Zheng. This manuscript is focused on a large dataset of mantle xenoliths from the South China Block, and basically, it has opened up my eyes to the extent to which refertilization can modify the composition and density of lithospheric mantle. I think we truly have an exciting story to tell. Specifically, the stability of continents, that is, their fate, is sealed by their compositions and thicknesses at birth. I will tell you more when the time is appropriate. In any case, this is what has been consuming my time because Jianping is about to return to China, and once he returns, I know very well that communication will end because I do not do well with communicating by phone or email. Nothing beats face-to-face communication. As soon as we're done with this, I can return to other projects, like arc migration with Leif Karlstrom and Michael Manga, a new view of the Pb paradox with Shichun Huang, and of course, various student projects and my projects on sulfur. There's just so little time in the day.
In between finishing this manuscript, I have been working in our lab with Sune Nielsen from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Sune is here for the week to investigate the Tl concentrations of MORB glasses. He brought hundreds of samples and has been burning the midnight oil. Hopefully, something interesting will come out of this. Certainly, the motivation for pursuing this is interesting.
All of this comes on the heels of a quick trip to Southern Methodist University, where I gave a talk and met with a few people. In particular, I met up with Bob Gregory, who was the one who did the Oxygen isotope stratigraphy of the Oman ophiolite a while back. I also met up with James Quick, who did some of the early work on the Trinity and Josephine ophiolites in California. I was pleasantly excited to meet David Blackwell, which if you recall, I talked about in the last couple of blogs when i was talking about heat flow! Bob Stern form UT Dallas came to my talk and we had a good, though brief conversation about western Pacific subduction zones. James Quick and I talked about the possibility that the rise in 87Sr/86Sr in seawater at 35 Ma is due to onset of Antarctic glaciation rather than the rise of the Himalayas. I have never been a fan of the Himalayas driving chemical weathering, carbon burial and long-term cooling of climate, but more on that later.
And just a couple days before my SMU trip, I made a quick trip to UT Austin, where I met up with Doug Smith, his wife and Fred McDowell at the Austin Sewage Ponds (Hornsby Bend). We spent a couple hours looking for birds. Doug is the dean of xenolith studies in the United States. Fred made his name in K-Ar dating of volcanics in western USA and Mexico. Both are now birdwatchers, so together, we went hunting for Red-eyed Vireos, Indigo Buntings, Summer Tanagers, Upland Sandpipers, and various waterfowl. All in all, it was a great morning, but we soon headed to the university, where Doug took me down to the rock repository to look at some of his collections. I had come to Doug to see if I could borrow some of his rocks from Arizona for study, specifically some garnet pyroxenites that may represent cumulates in a Proterozoic arc! The samples were remarkably fresh and large, and he sent me back with over 25 samples. I was very happy. Before I left, however, I also met up briefly with Steve Grand and Jaime Barnes. She is doing some very interesting oxygen isotope work on the Franciscan blueschists and eclogites that a former undergrad - Ulyana Horodyskyj - and I worked on a few years back.
I also had the privilege last week of meeting up briefly with Joan Strassmann at Rice University. She used to be faculty at Rice in the Evolutionary Biology department, but is now up at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the one I taught Field Bird Biology with for several years. She was in town briefly but managed to make a special trip to Rice so that we could take a short birdwalk through campus around noon. It was good catching up. We picked up a Swainson's Thrush.
And last weekend, I made a trip out towards the Louisiana border to chase a very rare Yucatan vagrant, a Tropical Mockingbird and a Black-whiskered Vireo. Joining me were my students, post-docts, visiting scientists, the Strassmann sisters (Diana and Beverly) and Jack Murray, one of the program directors of the National Resources Defense Council. We got both birds, but it came with the cost of tons of mosquito bites. All in all, a very nice day.
until next time....................... .
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