midvision

Project Bacchus III, Earth, the Early 21st Century.

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:47:12 GMT

Back in October, some friends and I got together to talk about putting stuff into space. Given no immediately practical way to go to space space, we decided to start with near-space -- between 90 and 150000 feet, where the obvious approach for underfunded enthusiasts is really big balloons. So Project Bacchus began. (The name presumably came about because we were drinking at the time.) Other than some radio and electronics knowledge, knot hobbying, and just being five (said modestly) generally clueful nerds, we had no idea how to do any of this stuff.

Particularly not filling ten-foot balloons with helium. Project Bacchus I turned out to be about learning those lessons. We destroyed two envelopes in different ways, and ended up sitting around sucking helium and saying stupid things in high voices. Because as adults who can afford a large tank of helium, we're allowed to do that sort of thing. There's video of this "launch" somewhere, but we pretend it doesn't exist.

Bacchus II failed much more mysteriously. We filled a balloon to full capacity, seemingly rigged the payload quite well, and it lifted into the air with great abandon. But we never saw it again. Both telemetry systems failed: the Boost (iDEN/Nextel) mobile phone never transmitted once it left the ground, and the last packet from the APRS (2-meter packet ham radio) beacon was around 8000 feet AGL. The weather was decidedly awful (about 45 degF, windy, wet, and super-foggy). We really should not have launched, considering such weather breaks every rule of ballonery, both from the FAA and common sense. So no real lessons learned here; but we did lose a few hundred bucks worth of electronics!

Bacchus III, however, was successful. We've become rather competent at filling balloons by this point -- with the latest revision of the plumbing we can now just leave the tank in the car and can exhaust the entire tank of helium in under ten minutes, without ever breaking the envelope! But since we were all pretty broke and couldn't replace the fancy Arduino flight computer from Bacchus II, we flew a very simple payload: a Canon A470 (with CHDK for intervalometer), a Motorola i335 iDEN phone with the Accutracking app, and a bunch of trash for padding, stuffed into a roughly eight inch diameter styrofoam tortilla warmer from Safeway. We inflated a 300g latex envelope with a full 291 cubic foot tank of helium, tied it all together, and let go.

An hour later, it landed just a dozen or so miles from where we launched, in an unplanted field on the bank of the Stanislaus River. It had been to somewhere between 45000 and 70000 feet MSL, where the balloon popped and the payload fell as fast as it could, with no parachute or anything. The phone properly started checking back in (and even back-filled coordinates from the flight!), and told us where to go. We got out a handheld Garmin hiking GPS and walked right to it. (Since the phone GPS, like most GPS receivers, cut out above 20000 feet, we can only really guess at the flight apogee from the time of ascent and descent, and from the size of objects in the photos. The phone did however produce seemingly accurate horizontal coordinates throughout the fight.)

Despite something weird going on with the camera, and it just generally being a terrible camera to start with, the photos still came out beautifully. We have some more problems to solve (including why it didn't get all the way to 100000 feet, where we calculated it should pop), but then we'll launch again. Hopefully better photos and data from higher altitudes to come!

Video and slideshow here. More photos of this launch and related Bacchus stuff on flickr.

Patagonia, Argentina y Chile.

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:09:14 GMT

In November, a friend and I went to Patagonia, including the far south. Down there, all things are Magellanic in some way. For example:

... the [[Strait of Magellan]] (Estrecho de Magallanes, left), of course. It seemed a bit tame compared to the [[Beagle Channel]] (right)

... [[Magellanic penguins]], which are rather frumpy little birds, totally lacking in the graces of their larger Antarctic relatives. (I fear the Chilean government tourist board will come after me for letting out the big secret, but these photos, just like all photos of penguins, entirely fail to capture how absolutely fucking miserable the weather is. This seemingly balmy romp on the beach was actually in a steady 40 knot wind with rain and occasional sleet, at about maybe 40degF in the sun if you thought warm thoughts.)

... and, my personal favourite, the [[Magellanic Clouds]] (left). These, along with the amazing intensity of the Milky Way at the negative latitudes (right), are worth a trip to the southern hemisphere all by themselves.

San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, East Span.

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 06:42:26 GMT

The Maze, free of mice.

As I mentioned previously, the San Francisco Bay Bridge is closed this weekend, starting at 2000 tonight. My friend Paul suggested we go up for a bay tour around the closing time, to see, among other things, what a Bay Bridge looks like with no traffic on it.

The Bridge, closed.

The main purpose of this closure is to move a new section of roadway into place at the Yerba Buena anchor of the East Span. This roadway will be used immediately (ie, Monday morning), and also by the new East Span when it's finished. Here's an awful crop to show the new deck. It's the shiny new concrete at the upper right. They're going to demolish the existing bits, and then slide that new deck into place. Amazing!

More info in the Caltrans fact sheet on the closure.

San Francisco Bay, California.

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:00:45 GMT

Last Friday, I was invited to tag along for a tour of the progress on the construction of the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge East Span Replacement Project.

For those not familiar with the area: The [[Bay Bridge]] is made up of two bridges, one bridge from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island (YBI), where the roadway passes in two decks through a single bore through the hill on the island, to another bridge that connects to Rincon Hill in San Francisco. The San Francisco side is a lovely pair of suspension bridges, while the Oakland (East Span) is an Erector Set-style cantilever bridge of dubious aesthetic merit. In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, part of the bridge moved significantly, shearing major bolts, and causing one section of the upper roadway deck on the East Span to fail and crash onto the roadway below. The bridge (one of the busiest in the world) was out of commission for a month. It was repaired, with the understanding that to prevent future incidents, the entire bridge span would need to be replaced.

The segment that failed in 1989

The new bridge will be a self-anchoring suspension span carrying two side-by-side roadways (see baybridgeinfo.org for renderings of that). The roadways will hang from a single tower in the center and cables running out to the corners. The underwater foundation for the tower is largely done, but the tower is still nearly at surface level. Here's what it looks like as of last week:

For the connection to Yerba Buena Island, things are complicated. Caltrans must be able to do a clean switchover to the new bridge when the time comes, and have basically no interruption of traffic until then. The new approach will be slightly to the north of the current east span approach, and the last few hundred feet will be shared between new and old. This Labor Day, they're closing the bridge in both directions for the three day weekend so that they can move a new section of roadway into place. They're pouring it beforehand, putting it on wheels, destroying the current deck, and literally rolling in the new one.

I sure hope this event ends up on YouTube.

More photos on flickr; sorry for the poor quality, the lighting at that time of day is a bit suboptimal.

Southern San Joaquin Valley, California.

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:03:00 GMT

Wheeler Ridge, as discussed previously. The anticlinal axis runs diagonally through the frame.

The Elk Hills, another oil-rich anticline to the north of Wheeler Ridge. This was US Naval Petroleum Reserve Number One (here's a more succinct version, if you're already familiar with the Teapot Dome scandal) until President Clinton put it back into private production in the late 1990s. It's hardly recognizable from the air, since it has been completely and utterly reshaped by the oil industry. It is now just a maze of service roads and derricks; it looks amazingly like the side of a pet ant farm.

(These were taken at about 10,000 feet, from N9849L piloted by my friend Paul.)

Mojave Desert, California.

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:39:26 GMT

These are from a Phoenix-San Francisco flight (UAL1437) last weekend. Always interesting to see things from FL360, especially an area I've grown to know so well from the ground. The flight took a direct route from around Buckeye (Arizona) to the Walker Pass area across the Sierra Nevada, passing over Parker, Amboy, Barstow, and California City.

Amboy lava field

Previous post (see also the Lavic Lake post). Also [[Amboy Crater]].

Harper (Dry) Lake and Luz VIII & IX

Previous post. Also [[SEGS]].

Mount Hamilton, San Jose, California.

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 10:15:48 GMT

G'night 2006.

Providence Mountains, Mojave National Preserve, California.

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 23:44:01 GMT

It's that time of the year again. This year I repeated what last year was supposed to be -- going out to Kelso Dunes. It was alright, but the sunrise was better last year.

I love this time of day in clear skies -- the time between astronomical twilight and sunrise proper. You really get a sense that the sun is just another star rising in the east.

It's a bit sad that in a year's time, I've only managed to post to this journal nine times. I'll try to work on that. Lately I mostly just post photos to my flickr stream and my own LJ (midendian).

Sonora Pass, Sierra Nevada, California.

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 20:43:29 GMT

Orionid meteor falling through Cygnus and the Milky Way

When Halley's Comet passes 'near' the Sun every 76 years, it melts a little, and debris trails behind, eventually diffusing into large clouds of dust. Earth passes through this dust twice a year -- once in early May as the eta Aquarids meteor shower and again in late October as the Orionids. Even the smallest particles create impressive streaks as they burn up from the friction of moving through our atmosphere. The comet hasn't disposed any new material in this spot since its last passing in 1986, but there is plenty left.

This year's Orionids happened to fall near a new moon, for a nice dark sky. The peak was on Saturday morning, but there's still a night or two left if you haven't seen them. Orionids appear to radiate from northeastern Orion, near his shoulder, and so will be most plentiful when Orion is at the zenith (ie, straight up), which is around 0300 in California. That said, the most impressive are, like the one above, far away from Orion, since the longest streaks come from objects that hit the atmosphere at the shallowest oblique angles; though there are more of them, the ones near the radiant in Orion hit almost dead-on and burn out quickly.

San Francisco, California.

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 07:42:04 GMT

Much to the displeasure (and occasional horror) of some residents, it's [[Fleet Week]] in San Francisco. Most of the activities are inobtrusive (the usually co-incident North Beach Festival / Columbus Day celebration is far more of an inconvenience), except the [[Blue Angels]] practice and performances. The half-dozen F/A-18's spend about a half-hour each of the of the four days of Fleet Week buzzing the Financial District / North Beach / Marina area, usually very low and very very fast. When they're all flying past you in a single formation, the sound is particularly memorable.

But I enjoy it! This was the first time I've heard supersonic aircraft since Iraq. It's a very distinctive sound.

The first shot almost makes me let go of any regret about the thousand+ dollars I spent on lenses this week, including the Sigma 170-500mm I used for these. I've never used a lens that can go so long -- I found myself forgetting that it was able to zoom in more. It could be a little sharper, a little quicker to focus, and I really wish it had a zoom lock, but for less than a fifth of the price of the comparable Canon lens, it's a winner.

The weather was totally miserable today -- windy, wet, cold, and foggy, which combine into some unnamed weather condition that is even more unpleasant than the sum of its parts (the closest word I can come up with is "January"). It's supposed to be sunny for the weekend, so I'll probably try to brave the Fisherman's Wharf tourists again to try for blue backgrounds and higher contrast. The worst part about the tourists is that when you're carrying around a lens that is over a foot long, you get mistaken for a professional and therefore someone who would just love to take their picture. On the upside, you get to play with the latest in point and shoot cameras from tourists all over the world -- some of them are pretty awesome these days!

California Highway 108 / Sonora Pass, Sierra Nevada, California.

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:50:36 GMT

Last week, I went on a short (day and a half) photo/hiking/driving excursion, and am finally making headway on sorting through all the photos. I don't have much to say about them, but it seems appropriate to post some of them anyway.

CA-108 near Dardanelles, looking east
There was a lot of smoke in the air that night; I could smell it, but I didn't quite realize how extensive it was until I saw the resulting photos -- note the especially soft edges on the mountains in the valley corridor. Where I took this photo, the highway runs along the southern wall of a gorge containing the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River, as well as Donnelle Lake/Reservoir. My original target on this part of the highway was the Donnelle Overlook, so I was very sad to find it closed, seemingly permanently. From that overlook, you could see down into the gorge from the edge of the granite walls, unobstructed by trees.

This photo looks east, towards the peaks around Sonora Pass, from which long ago volcanoes released vast basalt flows. These rocks have been almost entirely removed by the glaciers of ten to fifteen thousand years ago (accelerated by the uplift of the range as a whole), but the occasional peak is still covered. Dardanelles Cone is such a mountain, and its flat brown mesa looks totally out of place in the smooth rounded granites of the western Sierra. You can easily make it out on the aerial photos -- a big brown smudge in a sea of grey, green, and blue.

CA-108 looking east from the area around Blue Canyon
I had specifically timed the trip so that I would be at this point around three or four in the morning. Everything worked out perfectly, including a partial moon rising to backlight the rocks. I didn't see a single other vehicle during the couple hours I was here (taking photos and sleeping a bit), except for one. It started as a thundering noise slowly approaching from the east, then turned to a glowing blob switchbacking down the pass. Eventually it arrived: a long commercial truck, engine-braking the whole way, and every straight edge of the machine dotted by small yellow lights. It was so absurd compared to the rest of the scene, but at least the pace was right. It seemed to take forever to exit the other end of the canyon, grinding away.

Same, zoomed out and to the left.
I really enjoy taking long-exposures. In teaching geology and astronomy, the first point to be made is the difference of scales. The astronomical scale is measured in astronomical units, light-years, parsecs, and billions, tens of billions of years. The geologic scale is measured in millions and billions of years[1]. But the human scale is measured in minutes, months, years, and centimeters, meters, kilometers. The magnitudes are so vastly different that you can't relate to them.

Typical modern photographs are, in a way, not created on the human scale. If we didn't have widgets to open and close the shutter for us, we'd never be able to properly expose modern film, and certainly not digital sensors. The required shutter speeds are significantly less than a second on a sunny day. You can't really feel the difference between 1/50th of a second and 1/500th[2]. (There are side-effects to this: everything seems so instant, especially with digital, you're compelled to shoot a lot of photos. And you can take snapshots, which is an entirely distinct form of photography.)

With low-light long exposures, things are much slower. It brings things down to the human scale. Every frame must be shot with deliberation and care. It takes an exposure of twenty or thirty seconds, minimum, to get any detail in the conditions in which these were taken. Focussing has to be done largely by guesstimation (trial and error if you're using digital and have the time), and composition is best done with your naked eye, not through the viewfinder.

The best part, though, is waiting for the exposure. Counting off thirty, sixty, six hundred seconds. You feel like you're actually collecting something. Putting all the photons in a box and closing the lid, to take them home and admire later.

[1] At least geology has uniformitarianism -- the assumption that physical processes happen the same way now as they did in the past. Astrophysics can't even really offer that because the laws of physics change at the magnitudes involved, in space and in time.
[2] Of course it didn't always used to be this way. Back in the Old Days, when the [[daguerreotype]] process reigned, if you wanted a portrait taken, you had to sit there for anywhere from one to fifteen minutes without moving or blinking too much.

Del Puerto Canyon, Coast Range, California.

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 05:39:17 GMT

I've been out of the area for the last couple weeks, and only happened to hear about this fire on the evening news from Los Angeles the night before. Normally when you're driving up Interstate 5 towards 580 and the bay area, there is a large finger of clouds that spill through the Delta region into the Central Valley, starting to be visible right about at the 5/580 split -- it's not uncommon for it to start raining at that point in the winter. When I saw these clouds, I just figured it was that typical weather (though a bit early). But it quickly became apparent that these clouds were orange, and that my trip would be delayed by my need to find backroads into the hills.

I've been this close (or closer) to probably a half-dozen forest fires (like in Yosemite, driving right next to the flames along the road, or at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, where I had to turn around because the road had melted). The most striking thing is not the smell, not the heat, but the utterly bizarre quality of light. Smoke has a light transmission range rather unlike air and, more subtly, depends on whatever is being burned and the temperature at which it's burning -- it makes experiencing fire in every region quite unique. Ponderosa needles at the Grand Canyon are nothing like range grasses and Oak leaves in the California coastal mountains, not to mention the regional atmospheric differences affecting cloud dispersion, or the inclination of the sun which in turn affects so much else.

I'm a bit sad about this. This fire has entered one of my favorite parts of the Bay Area: the San Antone Valley on the back side of Mount Hamilton. Driving across CA-130, eastbound from Mount Hamilton, everything suddenly seems so remote. A nice barely-maintained road running along a lovely creek, rarely anyone else around -- nothing at all like just ten miles to the west.

Although I'll complain about being told to leave: Much thanks to the CDF and the property owner on who's land I was trespassing for putting up with me.

Rainbow Basin (BLM), Mojave Desert, California.

Sat, 06 May 2006 02:41:43 GMT

What brought me to geology in the first place was my love of mountains. They are spectacular things, from the overall shape of a range down to the minor faults and folds of their orogeny exposed alongside the road. Until a few years ago, I didn't even pay much attention to rocks themselves, just the shapes they've been made into. It turns out lots of people have this particular interest. It's called structural geology, and one of the best places to play is in the desert. Not only do things get preserved longer in the precipitation-free climate, but there's only a few pesky plants obscuring the shapes -- you get a bigger, clearer window on the past.

Rainbow Basin is a small chunk of BLM land about ten miles north of Barstow, California, accessible by a long dirt road, the end of which is a strange one-lane dirt road through the basin, and a pretty good campsite. The rainbow name comes from the colorful weathered strata exposed in the various outcrops -- largely sedimentary, with a few periods of volcanic ash mixed in to hold it all together. It has variously been an inland sea, a lake, a rain forest, and now a desert. In the pluvial times, it had abundant wildlife, dinosaurs of the land and of the sea, some of which are still preserved as the random fossil. At some point between the rain forest and the desert, the surrounding continent underwent major changes, and the sediment beds experienced compression under the colliding pressures from opposite directions. Once horizontal strata now form great sine waves of rock -- alternating anticlines and synclines -- now exposed by erosion.

This area is most famous among geology students for the Barstow Syncline, as in the photo above. Imagine holding a sheet of paper horizontally, one end in each hand, then moving your hands slowly together as it forms a wave. Now imagine only seeing one of the downward periods of the wave, the rest having eroded away or still encased in a mountain -- that part is a syncline. The Barstow Syncline is a very obvious structure, largely because it is so fresh -- very little else has happened this rock. After seeing this, everything in Rainbow Basin looks like a syncline or anticline. Like this:

Note the similar structure on the far right, but the left half -- where the anticline would be -- has totally eroded off. That particular structure is usually referred to as a cuesta in this part of the world: a tilted cliff exposing layers of mixed-strength rocks. In this case, the large white benches of strong volcanic tuff (ash) are prolonging the life of the cliff. (For scale, the small tall plants on the ridge on the right are Joshua trees, about a meter tall.)

But not everything is the same:

This shows a remarkably sinusoidal shape, but note the bedding -- the wave shape is nearly parallel to the bedding plane (see above that in a syncline fold, the wave is perpendicular to the beds). For this example, picture yourself standing at the bottom of a syncline, at the lowest point of the wave, and looking uphill to one side. Several of the beds have eroded in the foreground, and troughs have been cut by erosion. The streams/gullies just happened to make this look like a wave -- it has nothing to do with folding (the light in this photo is rather flat, so it's hard to tell that there are significant canyons in those U-shaped passages). (I could go out on a limb and say that the streams were antecedent, as in they existed prior to and during the folding, such that they continued in their previous path while the uplift occurred -- so slowly that they just cut through the rising rock instead of routing around it as would happen in a more abrupt faulting scenario.) And note once again the white tuff holding things together in the foreground (better view here, where you can match the strata with those exposed in the cuesta above).

It's all a little difficult (like the spacial paper-folding section of those intelligence tests they make you take when you're a kid, which I was always horrible at). Did I miss anything?

300 (Spear|Main), San Francisco, California.

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 04:37:29 GMT

Remember the construction site with the old ship? Well it's progressing. The remaining half of the ship is still buried under Folsom, behind the concrete wall, near the spotlight and scaffolding just right of center. The elevator shaft under construction in the left back corner will eventually be the center of The Infinity Tower II, 35 stories tall. It will be the shorter of this particular pair of residential towers -- all part of a large forest in the works for the continued yuppification of the new "South Beach" neighborhood. (Isn't it great that all these buildings like to say that South of Market and South Beach are "the height of urban living in San Francisco"... totally ignoring that (a) these neighborhoods are becoming nothing but really tall suburbs; (b) you can find plenty of real urban living in, well, the rest of San Francisco?)

The excavation went down about twice as far as I expected. (It's going to be parking, I hope-assume.) The crane they erected of course required a large crane of its own: with all counterbalancing, that crane weighed enough to make the asphalt on Main St subside and a huge crack to form (it's been patched, but I really hope they plan on entirely resurfacing that street once they're done playing). They still want to be ready to start pre-selling in May (meaning not that the building has to be done, but that it does have to generally resemble some place a human would want to live), which means they've had to ignore one of the wettest winters in SF's history, and work day and night. I'm sure the pay is more enjoyable than the work.

It's amazing to think about all the human energy that goes into a project like this (and it's a pretty small project in the grand scheme of real estate development). Finding and acquiring the right lot, raising money, designing the building / "lifestyle", lobbying for permits, lobbying for community support, etc -- not to mention the actual construction effort.

Ivanpah Valley, Nevada/California.

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:14:06 GMT

Ivanpah Valley from old Ivanpah settlement; Stateline/Primm, Nevada at base of mountains on left
Las Vegas' current commercial airport ([[McCarren]]) is projected to be over-capacity in a couple years. In addition to building another terminal at McCarren, they've determined they need a second airport.

About two years ago, Nevada's Clark County purchased the majority of this valley (including the dry lakebed which fills most of the valley) from the BLM[1], for about 20mln USD. They're looking to have the first flights from the tentatively-named [[Ivanpah Valley Airport]] in 2017.

I decided to visit the valley, just to make sure I saw what it was like before it became one of the country's busiest airports. As Chris says, it's only a few miles from the popular Cima Dome area of Mojave National Preserve. The place will never be the same.

Why Ivanpah Valley? Well it's "close", in suburban America terms -- it's only a 40 mile drive from Las Vegas. It's initially going to be for large, mostly international flights "where the passengers will not mind an extra hour of drive time". Long term, they are, of course, planning a monorail. That is Nevada's solution for everything now -- even Stateline/Primm, a town with three casinos, an outlet mall, and nothing else, has a monorail to cross the freeway (though with the airport moving in next door, that monorail might just get extended all the way to Las Vegas).

Instead of essentially stealing part of California (airspace and pollution-wise), they could have gone to some other area around Las Vegas, but it's tough finding space for airports in Nevada. There is tons of restricted airspace, due primarily to alien autopsies, Apollo moon landing simulation, and flying saucer experimentation.

I hate to admit that I will probably find entertainment in watching A380's full of Europeans land in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave, but mostly in that the-world-is-so-fucked-up sort of way. But that's Las Vegas.

[1] The Bureau of Land Management is basically the default owner of all of the United States. If you own land in the US, it was at some point purchased from the BLM, either with actual transfer of money or through assumption (via the widely-accepted squatter's rights prior to the Homestead Act). Most important to this part of the country was the Mining Land Act, which was basically a Homestead Act for metal mining claims. (The BLM is not to be confused with the other Department of Interior divisions like the National Park Service and the US Forest Service. Those are protected lands (to varying degrees), as opposed to BLM land which is mainly just 'administered' -- which just entails making sure it doesn't entirely burn during wildfires and selling it to the highest bidder at the approval of a congressman.)

Wheeler Ridge, Kern County, California.

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:07:46 GMT

As you drive south through the ever-boring San Joaquin Valley, the flat valley suddenly becomes very steep above 70 miles before Los Angeles. To the left, through the smog, are the southern Sierra Nevada; to the south and east, the Tehachapi; to the south and west, the San Emigdio; to the far west, the Coastal Ranges. In the foreground between the last two is a series of small hills, awkward and severely broken. This is Wheeler Ridge. The overall structure is that of an anticline[1] -- the top half of the sine wave of folded rocks, a hill with young rocks on the outside and older inside. (Some times the younger rocks at the crest of an anticline erode, leaving a structure with younger rock layers angling towards each other, but older strata exposed at the top.)

Anticlines are well-loved by the petroleum industry. The theory goes that oil is seeping up all over from (the direction of) the center of the earth -- much of it, in fact, ends up evaporating. Oil deposits, then, are discovered where that seepage is trapped, due to hard, impermeable rock layers (as opposed to the somewhat porous layers of whence it came). In flat areas, the layer where the oil is trapped could still allow it to flow horizontally[2] and hence not become entirely trapped. But when other structures exist, the oil becomes trapped in all directions, and a deposit develops. In anticlines, the deposit forms in the arched ceiling of the fold.

The industry refers to the Wheeler Ridge anticlinal deposits as the North Tejon Oil Field -- the field office is on the right of the photo. Shallow oil was first discovered here in the 1920s, and deeper oil in the 1950s. As can be imagined by the sharp edges, there is still movement going on[3]. In addition to the Wheeler Ridge fault spanning the hills, there are also two transform microfaults running across the photo, one forming the Wind Gap and another forming the smaller Water Gap (where the California Aqueduct passes through).

I came across an interesting article this morning: How They Find The Oil, published in a 1966 edition of a magazine from Saudi Aramco (previously Arabian American Oil Company). Most of the article is more detailed, but this opening is entertaining:

At the present moment there are over 25,000 "explorationists" roaming six continents in an unremitting search for oil. They include geologists, geophysicists, paleontologists, mineralogists, stratigraphers, geochemists, hydrologists and many other specialists. Also today there are proved world-wide oil reserves estimated at about 350 billion barrels already located underground. This would be enough to last more than 30 years—at the present rate of consumption. But oil economists, looking into the future, predict that consumption rates will not remain steady. Taking into account population growth, heightened economic activity, rises in the overall standard of living, as well as increased use of petroleum in petrochemicals, new protein food additives and other products, they foresee continuous growth in demand.

The growth numbers were a bit larger than they projected, and their mention of petroleum-based protein additives scares me. But I like the assumption that "more than 30 years" is basically forever, so why not base your entire society on it?

(Sorry for all the photos in this post being crap. I just got a new camera last week and it ended up set badly from when I was messing around with it a few days earlier, and it didn't show up on the LCD preview of course. In conclusion, "ISO 1600" is grainy.)

[1] A glossary straight from the horse's ass.
[2] Simplification!
[3] Lots of "recent" faulting has caused lots and lots of sharp edges; the San Andreas fault system is viewable here simply as the fantastic almost-cliffs that separate the San Joaquin Valley from the Los Angeles area.

Rhein-Main Air Base, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 04:13:05 GMT

Passenger (pax) terminal at Rhein-Main Air Base

[[C-5]] on the loading ramp, runways 7/25 and the commercial terminal in background

[[Rhein-Main Air Base]] was formally established at the close of World War II and had become something of a legacy for the United States and the Air Force in the sixty years following -- a reminder of the War, and of Allied victory, but also a sort of extended American embassy (however ominous that may be). It brought many, many Americans to Germany, and sent a good number of those off to war and related policing initiatives.

Way-back-when, the US/NATO agreed that eventually the base should be handed back over to Germany, to demonstrate that yes, we really do regard you as sovereign now. This was supposed to have happened around 2001, but then the US decided to have wars again, so that agreement was sorta forgotten. They did, however, try to avoid using Frankfurt when they could, and, for example, significantly expanded the US presence at [[Rammstein]] (which before, I think, was kind of a pathetic air base, but I guess didn't fall under the hand-over agreement because it's not a WWII-leftover).

The Air Force ceased operations at Rhein-Main Air Base last October, and last Friday (30 December 2005) they finally handed over the keys to the Frankfurt Airport Authority. (Thanks to rezendi for the heads-up.)

The base shared runways with Flughafen Frankfurt am Main, Germany's largest airport (see this image, with the commercial airport on the top of the runways and the military base on the bottom). They're going to demolish (the sign on the building says "Scheduled for demolition 2006") all the old air base facilities to build a third passenger terminal and new maintenance hangars large enough to house the ridiculous [[A380]].

I didn't know any of this until I arrived there last February, and everyone was talking about the closure. The place was sort of falling apart. Since it'd been doomed for so long, I'm not sure it had much of a maintenance budget. (For example: the pipes in the men's restroom in the pax terminal had pipes leaking inside the wall, and it had seemingly been like this for a while -- they'd brought in a couple of oscillating fans instead of fixing the pipes.) It's all very boxy, very industrial, very much how you'd expect a low-cost facility built in the 1940/50s to look.

The base was an interesting opening and closing to my little adventure into Iraq (and military culture) last year. The attitude on the base was something in-between military and airport -- the staff helpful and friendly, but not so much so that you'd get the idea you were paying them for it.

It was also my first real experience with military aircraft, which quickly developed into a topic of interest for me. I ended up doing the Frankfurt-Anaconda (Iraq) trip strapped to the interior wall of a [[C-17]] (though somewhere over the Balkans I passed out from exhaustion onto the ice-cold steel floor -- if you ever do this, do not ignore the advice to bring a sleeping bag or something very warm). On the way back out of Iraq, I took a [[C-5]], the largest plane in the USAF fleet. That was rather unadventurous-seeming, though, since passengers fly on the top deck, and in regular airline type seats -- unquestionably the best part of the C-5 experience is getting to stand next to the beast on the tarmac before you climb on.

GWB was visiting Germany the same week I was, making Rhein-Main the first (and only) place I've seen [[Air Force One]]. I think the Germans would have preferred he hadn't visited.

Granite Pass, Mojave National Preserve, California.

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 00:27:17 GMT

High clouds over van Winkle Mountain

Granite Mountains
I decided to continue the tradition I started last year of making a point to be somewhere nice for sunrise on December 25th, a holiday which I don't celebrate in any other particular way.

The original plan was to walk up Kelso Dunes, which are notoriously beautiful at sunrise and sunset, but I hadn't gotten enough sleep, and even more importantly, I'd forgotten to get gas before I left civilization and getting to the dunes would have significantly risked running out at some extremely inconvenient point (ie, any point). What I'd neglected to remember was that pretty much everywhere around here is beautiful at sunrise.

Others on: flickr, or my gallery (including older snapshots).

Hunter's Point Generating Station, San Francisco, California.

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 07:55:31 GMT

PG&E's Hunter's Point generating station seems to have been reviled by the residents of San Francisco since its construction. It's a visual and environmental blight in a neighborhood that already seems unfairly blighted. At least since 1998, the opinion has been unanimous that the plant needs to go -- it's the phase-out schedule that no one can quite agree on.

The plant no longer operates on a regular basis -- it is a 'peaker' plant which is only operated when the grid needs it. In all of California's power problems over the last few years, it's been easy to get the message from the politicians that our power problems are entirely about generation. It really is easy to believe that, and it really is true that if you compare the load versus the generation, there is a shortfall. But lack of generation rarely causes the infamous "rolling blackouts". The problem is regional transmission capacity. The 'pipes' sometimes aren't big enough, or even more frustrating, they're in the wrong places.

Distributing anything into San Francisco is tricky -- it is a city that (like most cities) tends to consume vastly more than it produces, and that is fundamentally hard to get to (it's at the tip of a mountainous peninsula[1]). The Hunter's Point plant and its sister Potrero generating station are the only source of power the city has within its borders; the rest comes up the peninsula through a small number of large transmission lines. Unfortunately those lines do not (yet) offer the capacity to fill transmission gaps to meet CalISO's standards, so they (CalISO[2]) require the HP and Potrero plants to be available, despite the agreement that they be shut down.

Half the HP plant's generators are permanently decommissioned -- this occurred a few months before I took these pictures a year ago. The shutdown of the other half is waiting on the completion of nine new transmission lines to increase capacity into the city. That is, instead of generating electricity when the capacity into the city is too low to meet demand, they will just not run out of capacity (we hope). In the ISO algebra, this works out.

The Potrero plant a couple miles away is staying, though. During the debate over the Hunter's Point plant's future, the Potrero plant (which is not owned by PG&E) underwent emissions upgrades (giant catalytic converters!, etc) to avoid the HP plant's fate. Up until then, they'd been able to stay in environmental compliance only through liberal use of the law that allows dirty plants to literally buy the right to pollute from other, much cleaner plants that otherwise "underpollute"[3].

More: the 115kV line to connect the terminations at the HP substation to the Potrero substation, the 230kV Jefferson-Martin line to increase the capacity available to entire peninsula, an old, but still useful article, including a rough substation map of the peninsula.

[1] A point made all the more painful by the rest of the peninsula being run by different counties, one of which is the infamously isolationist County of San Mateo, who basically single-handedly ruined any hope the Bay Area had for good, unified regional transit by refusing to participate in BART and any other regional project. Santa Clara County to the south has always wanted to participate, for example, but because a direct rail link with San Francisco would need to pass through San Mateo, the cost to connect them (via a indirect route) has so far been prohibitive (though it has been in the "planning" stage for twenty years now). (San Mateo did however make the concession a few years ago to allow BART to pass through their county in order to connect San Francisco with its exclave San Francisco International Airport, which sits in the marsh off the County of San Mateo.)
[2] The California Independent System Operator. The "system" is the state's power grid (transmission network), the "independent" refers to their role as a third-party overseer who neither buys nor sells power, and the "operator" refers to their ability to be bureaucratic jerks whenever they feel like it.
[3] This has always been one of my favourite laws of all time. So absurd!

Apache Trail (AZ-88), Superstition Mountains, Arizona.

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 04:02:41 GMT

The superstition around the Superstition Mountains is never-ending. The most famous myth is the long, silly story of the Lost Dutchman's Mine. Another (related, and even sillier) myth is that of the Peralta Stones.

Yet another myth is that the Superstition Mountains (Weaver's Needle in particular) are volcanic necks: when some volcanoes go dormant, the last bits of magma that would have been expelled remain in the network of tunnels that brought them there (the magmatic system), thus hardening and remaining in place. These would then be more robust than the rest of the volcano and would be the last part to erode. These things do happen. There are volcanic necks elsewhere in the region -- most famously, Shiprock in the Navajo Nation. But this, just like the Dutchman's gold, is too ridiculous of a story. Such orogeny would prescribe that the column be entirely consistent in composition, but you can pretty clearly see several different layers in these mountains. They are, in fact, just erosional leftovers; pieces of rock that through some chaotic chance, didn't get eroded[1]. This is far more common and likely than the volcanic neck theory.

But they are volcanic. Between 17 and 21 million years ago, there was a 30 mile wide caldera here, which greatly afflicted central Arizona, including the area that is now Phoenix. It spewed rhyolite and ash everywhere, many meters thick in places. Like here, for example, in this big whitish strata overlooking Canyon Lake[2] to the northeast of the once-caldera:

Obviously there's been faulting going on -- which there's been a lot of ever since the San Andreas decided to start this whole Basin and Range extensional business a couple dozen million years ago.

[1] The rocks look "cut up" and fractured because of calcreting, which I'll post about later.
[2] Part of the water reclamation system that supports the Phoenix metropolis.

Little Painted Desert, Navajo Nation / Arizona.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 04:03:26 GMT

nibot posted a few days ago about his starlight walk up Mount Sinai, which, among other things, made me think of one of my favourite photographs. It's hanging at Sabuddy, an Israeli restaurant in Tempe, Arizona; it's a very simple image of the barren badlands, somewhere, I assume, in Israel. Thinking about badlands and Arizona of course got me thinking about the Painted Desert.

This is not the Painted Desert. That's technically north of here. This is the Little Painted Desert; it's not a National Park, and is barely a park. It's about ten miles off I-40 near Holbrook, on the border of the Navajo Nation. It is little, I suppose, but it is also totally devoid of humans, and can be appreciated in silence.

Several parts of the Colorado Plateau are covered in badlands terrain like this. Their origin is in easily-eroded deposits (clay, claystone, mudstone, etc) that were then, post-fluvially/post-lucastrinely (river/lake), exposed to a very dry climate with infrequent but extremely heavy rainfall (such as pretty much all of the southwestern US). Flash flooding causes deep erosion, forming gullies and ravines. (The Arabic term wadi probably best describes this sort of water flow.)

The lack of vegetation comes from the high clay content of the soil. Clay can absorb a lot of water, and expand while doing so, but as it dries, it sort of evaporates more than consolidates -- it has trouble returning to its old size when the water goes away. Cracking and the general instability when drying cause it to erode quickly through the omnipresent force of wind (if you've ever been on the open plains of the Plateau, you can probably recall how it almost feels like it could erode your skin if it wanted to). The time right after a big rain is the most important time for a seed attempting to grow in the desert; even low-moisture desert plants require a lot of water during germination, and it's very important that they germinate and reach a decent size before they're forced to go into low-moisture mode. Since in the badlands areas, the ground is busy literally blowing away during this key time, it's pretty impossible for anything to grow. If the soil is very high in clay, it can be impossible for anything to grow for purely chemical reasons: water binds readily to clay particles, preventing the water from being used by plants. (This property of clay also causes it to form a sort of protected barrier, which makes it useful as a liner in landscaping and landfills.)

In a few places, flat-topped buttes have formed (such as in the background of the second picture). This is due to a harder rock layer withstanding erosion better than the surroundings. Generally, and particularly in this region, these are ash deposits from the nearby volcanoes, or perhaps even basalt flows themselves.

Although defined by severe erosion, badlands also harbour some of the best fossils. The water stays in the paths of the gullies, leaving the sections in between totally dry and preserved. The badlands in South Dakota are particularly famous for this, and the (real) Painted Desert in Arizona less so. (Though it has lots of fossilized ("petrified") trees, which are something else altogether.)

Communications Hill, San Jose, California.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 05:35:34 GMT

I've been house/cat-sitting for a friend in San Jose the last week. It's on the south side of what's called Communications Hill just south of downtown San Jose. It has great views of the smog[1].

This is the road up here. It's not at all as much fun as you'd think. Other than the adverse camber just at the exit of the first turn, going uphill is okay, but has no rhythm at all. Downhill, it's downright dangerous. Apparently there's already been a couple accidents from people overcommitting their suspensions. The hairpin, in addition to adverse camber on the entrance and apex, is basically three seperate turns, the second of which increases radius from the first, and the third of which decreases radius very very quickly. They then put that cement island / greenbelt at the exit, in case you didn't find anything to collide with yet.

It's a temporary road, I'm told. Instead of the hairpin, it's supposed to be a T intersection, with a leg that extends to the left, over the hill.

The whole hill is scheduled for development. There's a large fixed wireless tower on the top (hence the name of the hill); it's not very full, so I'm guessing that will disappear as development continues. In the meantime, in order to prevent the hill from eroding away (and sliding onto the existing development) (I assume), they've built this somewhat random system of micro-canals, all across the hillsides, which look like street gutters without the accompanying sidewalks. The hills are all small bushes and grasses, populated with field mice and small foxes, all of which will be disappeared when the houses come.

[1] And also of planes landing at SJC, which would be a lot more interesting if anything flew into there except the steady stream of Southwest 737-300's and Southwest 737-700's (yay blended winglets!). Sunday afternoons mix up the routine with the odd private Gulfstream and Learjet/Global Express/Random-Bombardier-Product.

Hajar Mountains, Emirate of Fujairah.

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 18:34:43 GMT

Just beyond the Big Pass on the way to Fujairah from Dubai. The barrens in the foreground is probably a sabka; in the background there is a truck driving across it, breaking the top layer and creating that plume. Unclear if what it is breaking is sabka or just desert pavement.

Random dirt road near Bitnah. Quarry-like activities on the left.

jace commented on a previous post to mention that hajar means "thousand" in Hindi, which got me looking. That's apparently not what it means in Arabic.

When used as a name, it refers to [[هاجر]] (Hagar/Hajar), daughter of Sarah and Abraham, and mother of Ishmael (also with Abraham), and considered to be the mother of the Arab race. Abraham and Ishmael are believed to have built the [[Kaaba]] at [[Masjid al Haram]] at Mecca, which contains the [[Hajar el Aswad]], the Black Stone, which is believed by some to be a meteorite (which possibly was important to Arabs long before Islam, when worshiping things that fall from the sky was trendy -- which I'm guessing was an easier religion in the wide-open, crystal-clear skies of Arabia than elsewhere, since the number of things you can see falling from the sky increases as visibility increases).

The part you have to wonder is how much either of those meanings (the mother of Arabs, or literally just rocks) went into the mountains being named as such. Most likely just rocks, but I could envision a case where those mountains would be seen as life-giving (more wildlife/food, and fresh water). The two meanings of hajar leads to some amusing puns while googling, too.

That's it for Fujairah, I think. A few other photos here.

Emirate of Fujairah, UAE.

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 05:19:26 GMT

The Arabian Peninsula doesn't exactly have the geologic grandeur of the Alps, the Sierra Nevada, the Andes, the Grand Canyon, or the Himayala. But it does have its specialities. The most obvious is petrology, but a more interesting one is ophiolitology. The ophiolite sequence is the common (optimal) arrangement of rocks that are thought to have once been ocean floor. Oman/UAE's Semail Ophiolite is one of the largest ophiolites in the world.

I remember when I first saw part of the Semail Ophiolite. I was in Dubai in my rental car, stopped at a light two blocks from the giant roundabout onto Sheikh Zayed Road near the World Trade Center. I looked over at the gas station on the corner and saw their decorative rocks. Huge hunks of isotropic gabbro. Obviously they didn't come from Dubai. Later, I would drive out to the mountains -- Sharjah, Fujairah, etc -- and see quarries everywhere, most of which could easily produce those rocks.

They are, in fact, a common decoration, such as above to delineate the beach. That's the Indian Ocean, by the way. I'd never seen that before either, but it's an ocean. They all look pretty much the same from the surface. Here's a closeup of some of that gabbro though.

This is a petrol station on the Fujairah coast. (I, for one, welcome our man-eating gas-station-attending giant clam overlords.) It's part of the yacht club. I would guess they also own the beach nextdoor and "operate it for the public interest". This is an ENOC station. Emirates National Oil Company is one of the agencies in charge of distributing petroleum products in the UAE. It's hard to call it an agency or a company; it amounts more to "a bunch of assets owned by some rich guy who also owns a bunch of other land and owns a bunch of people in the group of people who make rules by which we all try to live by to avoid getting arrested by another group of people". (It's the same as everywhere else, but Western countries tend to put more specific names on things and make lots of legal and cultural barriers that must be worked around.) The buzzword, if you want to learn more, is emiratisation, which ostensibly just means "managed solely by UAE nationals". If you were raised a capitalist, this will all make your head hurt.

This is an advert (in the Hajar Mountains on the most impressive pass on that highway) for ADNOC[1], the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. (Abu Dhabi is the largest emirate by land area, and hosts the UAE capital, also named Abu Dhabi.) ADNOC runs all the petrol stations in Sharjah, and has a decent share of the market elsewhere. I stopped at one at a small outpost of a town in the middle of nowhere, and was annoyed to find that they won't let you pump your own gas, creating that always-awkward situation of wondering whether you're supposed to tip them or not. Reminded me of stopping at a similarly nowhere town in Oregon and having a similarly awkward situation. (Of course, my conversational English is a bit better than my conversational Arabic, so the Sharjah incident was a magnitude more awkward.)

Also some mountain porn in the background. I will post more of such things in a few days if no one minds the lack of words. ("No one ever reads the articles" anyway.)

[1] I would link directly to adnoc.com/, but they seem to have misconfigured their Apache's mod_rewrite, so it generates limitless redirects. Good work, guys.

Hajar Mountains, Emirate of Fujairah.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 04:25:32 GMT

The deserts of the Old World have a different feeling about them, a feeling that initially weirded me out.

When you walk around, say, the Mojave, or the Sonora, there's a certain frontier quality about them, a feeling of isolation and aloneness. Part of it is the Western folklore of cowboys and gold and such, but it's also just about right: other than the scattered Indian settlements (mostly abandoned), and the (even more abandoned) random mining settlements, large parts of these deserts are alone, in space and in history. The New World humans didn't find any particular reason to hang around there in large numbers (other than crossing them for trade), and their populations did not grow (until the 1950s) to the point where the land was valuable enough to put a price on it.

The Arabian Peninsula, however, has been continuously -- and relatively densely -- occupied by humans for thousands of years[1] -- they reached both of those points. Innumerable wars have been fought here -- almost all before humans traded black gold. (They fought for the same old shit, too: land rights, water rights, ocean and seaport access, and good old fashioned morality.) There is no doubt that this land belonged to humans, from the beginning of time -- and their marks are everywhere. (Manifest Destiny used to be called survival.)

This is a roadcut near the settlement of Masafi, also in the Emirate of Fujairah. It is probably the highest elevation settlement in the UAE, sitting in the mountains up against the Omani border[2]. You can easily reassemble a history here. First there was a foot trail, but that was too steep, so there was a minor excavation for the first caravan roads, then the first automobiles, etc. It's artificial erosion. It took me a second to realize that the thin strata, spaced roughly every fifteen feet were not intrusive sills, but old roads, dripping down into the next freshest roadcut. Eventually, on the current roadcut you can see (again, not dikes) evidence of the modern technique (explosives) and between the walls, a lovely undivided two-lane highway with pristine black asphault (a UAE trademark).

The first picture is from a dirt road, several miles away from the highway near Bitnah. I was looking for the emptiness, some sign that it hadn't all been trampled, but all I found were small, poor communities, with smiling barefoot children playing in the road (and laughing at the lost whitey in the rental car), and several large, gleaming-white compounds, just like you see in the movies made before the West forgot the charm and validity of Arabian mythology. This compound was also near some sort of excavation; I couldn't tell if it was a quarry, or someone preparing a building foundation, or someone just having fun with a backhoe. Maybe that's what it is: it all feels like a giant pending construction site.

It was all disappointing, in a way. But human history is fun too. I guess.

[1] Other than the Rub al Khali, of course.
[2] The Masafi economy is entirely unilateral, and entirely modern: they produce drinking water. There are very few stable wadi in the Emirates, and the Masafi Water Factory traps a spring at its source. Most of the Arabian Peninsula's water comes from desalination and tastes a little weird, so you can sell for a premium if your water comes out of the ground.