Category: Natural World

Impressions of Monet

Nympheas, by Claude Monet. Image via Wikipedia.

We took the middle and high school to see the Monet Water Lilies exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum today. It was a nice tour; we saw some paintings, and we learned a little something about the impressionists.

One thought that occurred to me during an interesting conversation on the bus back to school, was how the development of abstract thinking skills affects our perception of the more abstract art. After all, it usually requires more effort to appreciate, understand and become affected a piece the more abstract it is. Which would suggest that art appreciation would be useful practice for adolescents who are honing their higher-level cognitive skills.

The tour also left me with one unanswered question, however: are we seeing fog or smog in Monet’s painting of the Charing Cross Bridge in London.

Charing Cross Bridge by Monet. Image via Wikipedia.

London is famous for its fogs, but this painting was done in 1899, well into the industrial revolution, and the yellow tints suggest a pea-souper.

Coal Seam

Escavator digs out the coal.

Although it was high in sulfur, the quarry company mined the thin coal seam that cut across the limestone quarry/landfill.

The water cycle, at the quarry.

The layer of coal is pretty impervious to water, so it blocks vertical infiltration of water, which forces the water to the surface as springs.

At the surface, when the water is exposed to oxygen in the atmosphere, dissolved iron precipitates to produce a red mineral that stains the quarry walls.

The iron gets into the water when pyrite crystals (FeS2) in the coal dissolves. While the iron precipitates, the sulfur remains in the water, making it more acidic. Dealing with the acid can be a huge problem in large coal and metal mines.

The pool of water that collects at the base of the quarry, is probably fairly acidic.

Not all the pyrite is dissolved however, and since this particular coal seam has a lot of pyrite, it is not economical to burn since the burnt sulfur (as sulfur dioxide gas) would have to be captured — otherwise it produces acid rain.

The rich black coal seam sits on top of blocky limestone rock. Above the limestone is a red, weathered soil.

Personal Ceramic Project

I have a neat little tea strainer that sits inside my almost perfect teacup, yet I’m usually at a loss about what to do with it when I take it out of the cup. When the lid is upside down, the strainer can sit nicely into a circular inset that seem perfectly designed for it; however, if I want to use the lid to keep my tea warm — as I am wont to do — I have to move the strainer somewhere else.

One option is to just put the strainer in another cup, but then air can’t circulate around it, and instead of drying, the used tea leaves stay wet and, eventually, turn moldy. A flat saucer would be better, but not perfect.

Of course, I could just empty out the strainer, wash and dry it as soon as I’m done steeping the leaves, but there are a few ancillary considerations with respect to time that make this a sub-optimal solution.

So, since we have a kiln on campus that sees regular use, I thought I’d sit in on the Middle School art class and make my own ceramic tea strainer holder. Since I’ve also been thinking about Philip Stewart’s spiral, and de Chancourtois‘ helictical periodic tables, and been inspired by Bert Geyer’s attempts at making sonnets tangible, it eventually occurred to me that an open helictical form would work fairly well for my purposes.

I’ve cobbled together a design using Inkscape, and layered it onto a cylinder in Sketchup to see what it would look like.

Draft model of a tea strainer holder.

So far the reactions from students has been quite diverse. I have one volunteer who’s wants to help, and I’ve sparked some discussion as to if what I’m doing actually qualifies as art. There is a lot of curiosity though. The middle-schoolers will probably be doing some type of physical representation of the periodic table, so I’m hoping this project gets them to think more broadly about what they might be able to do.

Terraforming Mars

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Jason Shankel has an article on how we could go about changing the surface of Mars into something humans can live on. He does an excellent job of condensing the not insignificant literature on terraforming the red planet.

Starting with an explanation of Mars’ geologic history, Shankel addresses Martyn Foggs’ list of critical challenges:

  1. The surface temperature must be raised
  2. The atmospheric pressure must be increased
  3. The chemical composition of the atmosphere must be changed
  4. The surface must be made wet
  5. The surface flux of UV radiation must be reduced

— Shankel (2011): How We Will Terraform Mars on io9.com.

The Martian Surface as seen by the rover Opportunity. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU

The article is expansive in its detail, provides a wonderful primer on the red planet, and demonstrates an excellent application of planetary system science (as opposed to Earth system science) to what would be an enormous geoengineering project. For example, to warm up the planet, Shankel starts with several approaches:

so how do we warm up the Martian poles? Several approaches have been suggested, from spreading dark material on the poles to lower their albedo, to industrial ice farming to good old fashioned thermonuclear detonations.

— Shankel (2011): How We Will Terraform Mars on io9.com.

He then goes into detail. Lots of detail, in a quite readable form.

A desert in Algeria. Image by islapics via Wikimedia Commons.

Human Evolution: A Family Tree

The Smithsonian has an excellent, interactive, family tree for humanity that goes back 6 million years.

io9 has a neat image of key primate and homonid skulls that show the story of human evolution, and how we know about it.

Image via io9. (The skulls come from the collection of the University of Leiden and were labeled by Roosje de Vries.

Visit to the Quarry/Landfill

We discussed quite a variety of topics just based on the visit to the landfill/quarry.

A single, half-day, visit to the landfill and quarry brought up quite the variety of topics, ranging from the quarry itself, to the reason for the red colors of the cliff walls, to the uses of the gases that come out of the landfill. I still have not gotten to the details about the landfill itself, but I’ve put together a page that links all my posts about the quarry and landfill so far.

There was so much information that we spent the better part of the following week debriefing it in the middle-school science class.

Click the image for more details.

The map below gives a good aerial view of the site.


View Landfill and Quarry (as of 11/26/2011) in a larger map