Christmas

So this is my current favourite christmas song and as an encore to his live show I saw earlier this year, (or was it late last year?) in Oxford, it was brilliant.  It is also incidentally, one of David Tennant's Desert Island Discs!! (so there you go).  The full album version is slightly better than this as it has more orchestral goings on but this has all the sentiment.  Have a great christmas.

Chemistry Set

This week is kind of my first crucial week of my PhD. Not because anything much depends on the results I get out (in a pure data sense) but rather this week's experiments will define what exactly I'm doing for my PhD. All of my pilot studies are coming to fruition and a close at the same time! In one of those quirks of timing I've ended up with a lot of machine time over the course of this week. First up is the MAT251, our group's ageing mass spec which runs some carbon and oxygen isotopes in a fairly standard way, nothing too special about the instrument, but the particular piece of time we're looking at is pretty damn cool.  On Friday I'm back on the laser, this time attached to a different mass spec called the Neptune, trying to do things that mass specs have never done before. And on Monday I have another day on the Shrimp, trying to find out whether I can link two strands of my PhD (the MAT251 part and the Laser-Neptune) into one!

In the middle of this is three days spent playing with a Chemistry set (a real one!) and another mass spec. I'm going to have to be vague here as the work I'm attempting here has only once been tried before in an unpublished piece of work in this department and obviously I'd rather not get scooped if it turns out to work.  Anyway it involves lots of dissolving of my samples in acid, then playing with more chemicals to extract the solute, and all of it has to be done without any contamination, which involves a lot of washing things with yet more chemicals.  Its all a bit fiddly but if it works then it may well be really interesting.

So, by the end of next week, once I've managed to have a look at the results properly, I'll hopefully have worked out which parts of what I want to do work, and which ones don't.  Then I can plan ahead and really get going with the actual work!

College

So this is Burgmann College, one of the halls of residence at the uni. Not being centuries old, the colleges at the uni don't quite have the same feel as back home.  The front of them are fairly St. Catz like in appearance, which not particularly awful, but certainly not that attractive.  The new blocks though, round the back are pretty nice, as you tend to expect from more recent architecture.  The big difference though between some of the colleges here and at home is the fact that all the corridors are open air! Shaded and sheltered but still outside. Its a bit bizzare but of course makes sense in a dry country.

Burgmann is where EG lives, and lies towards the lake end of campus not that far from the department. The blocks he's staying in are self-contained apartments for about five people, with a nice living room/kitchen area, I guess the kind of place that my third-year accommodation was aiming to be! He moved into Burgmann relatively recently and now that its long vac here there aren't too many people around. The colleges tend to lack a sense of community in the way that the Oxford ones did and do, there are only eight main colleges and two grad-only colleges and consequently many people live out for their entire time, or live at home. The Australians are certainly more Scottish than English in their choices of university and moving half-way across the country, partly due to the fact their is no centralised admissions system and so there is an admin fee for every state they apply to uni in.

I guess the community aspect is what made colleges back in Oxford so good and perhaps thats the kind of thing thats missing here.  Whenever I visited a college in Oxford (and it was the same here), I tended to feel a bit of regret at not spending more time on site during my undergrad days, I guess it would have been fun.  But on the other hand I lived in great houses, so perhaps its just a case of the grass appearing greener and maybe I would have felt a longing to live out had I lived more in, as it were. Afterall, I no longer have to deal with pointless college admin!

Floods

More rain! As the strong La Nina conditions really begin to kick in around the world for the first time since 1982/83 and 1973/4, South-Eastern Australia has been suffering some torrential rains, the worst of which have occurred over the past couple of weeks.  December here in Canberra is usually a pretty dry month, with an average monthly rainfall of 52mm.  We got 73mm on the 2nd of December alone. When its cooler its just persistent, when it gets hotter you get thunderstorms, wave after wave, three or four bands a day (or night) which each drop several mm of water. The dams are full for the first time in a decade.  The drought is well and truly over, so much so that the farmers are losing more crops than they normally do due to a lack of water.  Rainfall records have been tumbling, some absolute records have fallen, its been Australia's wettest spring on record.  Last week people were talking about it being as wet as it was during the previous La Ninas, not necessarily unusal, but then we've had this week on top of it and things have got worse!

On the day with 73mm, the storm drains were at maximum capacity, the Lyneham wetlands site 50m or so where we live was beginning to flood, Sullivan's Creek (really just another storm drain) was running over its banks slightly in places.  See attached photos.  The duck pond on campus had two exits instead of the usual one.  Canberra got off lightly though compared with other places around it.  Its easy to forget but this city is over 600m up (the highest village in England (and possibly the UK) is just 463m, the pub that gets snowed in all the time is at 520m) and so isn't really floodplain territory. Down to the west, in the floodplains things have got really bad. The town of Wagga Wagga especially.

from www.actewagl.com.au

Its felt drier here the last week, we've even had a couple of nice days, but the ground is sodden, and when the rain arrived again in the middle of this week, it caused widespread disaster across New South Wales, incluing Queanbeyan (which is kind of part of Canberra, but kind of not) whose flood waters peaked at +8m overnight.  The town is pretty much split in two and has been declared a natural disaster zone. Tuggeranong (another distant part of Canberra) allegedly received over 100mm yesterday and has topped 400% of its typical December rainfall already. The Queanbeyan sewage works have been flooded too, which means Lake Burley Griffin is out of action due to contamination, so theres been no sailing for the last week.  The dam at the end of the lake has all its flood gates open.  Other ACT dams are overtopping.

Its going to be an above average cyclone season in the North too.

Rainfall should return to normal levels around April sometime!

Going all sciency it looks like the La Nina conditions are actually weakening slightly, in which case the comparisons to be made are to 74/75.  Here's the November SST anomaly map.  That is a very warm anomaly surrounding Australia and thats why its raining so much!



from www.bom.gov.au

from www.bom.gov.au

Eden

So I've spent the last week down on the coast around the town of Eden, close to the New South Wales/Victoria border (about three to four hours drive from Canberra, five taking the long route).  I was demonstrating on the first-year undergraduate field-course.  It was a lot of fun.  It was sunny all week, and warm, we spent most of it by the coast, frequently on nice beaches, a few swims in the ocean (much much warmer than a month ago!) and there were lots of interesting rocks.  But not too complicated, just difficult enough for me to work it out pretty quickly and the undergrads to puzzle over for a while! Plus there was some not so excellent, followed by excellent, followed by not so excellent followed by excellent cricket going on!

There were three of us postgrads demonstrating (myself, EG and BH - both of whom I get along very well with) along with a plethora of some big names in geology, which was rather cool. One thing that was disappointing was the undergrads reluctance to drink.  Having a beer or two during the evening session's lectures and work is pretty standard for geologists.  These kids need to learn! They were a good bunch really!

We finished the week by driving back up the coast for a beach party to celebrate LB's (another departmental first year grad) birthday.  And a good time was had by all. In the morning it decided to rain, so we fled back to Canberra, where it genuinely hasn't stopped raining since.  Its meant to be summer now.  Sigh!

Loads of photos, enjoy!

Kristalloflex

Having spent a couple of afternoons drilling pieces of stalagmite to send off to Melbourne to be dated, we've also collected some pieces to have a look at the structure of the stals. Basically we're having a look at the crystal structure of the stals, whether they're calcite or aragonite (two of the forms of calcium carbonate).  Both are ok, but a mixture is a nightmare to work with.  Anyway, this is done using X-ray diffraction, basically firing x-rays at a randomly orientated powder of the sample and measuring at what angles the strongest X-rays are diffracted at.  Its quite a simple and easy process and involved using this new machine, the Kristalloflex:

Its located in the geology building on the other side of campus and so was my first trip down to the other half of the department (basically when first founded most of the subjects were divided amongst two departments, a research one and a teaching one, they're reuniting them now, and so whilst now officially the same department, we occupy two sites, up until they finish work on constructing a new building to bring them all up the hill to us).

I'm off on field-trip for the next week to Eden in New South Wales, I'm demonstrating on the first-year residential field-trip.  It should be good fun, hopefully!  I'll be away for a week so there probably won't be any blog-posts until next Sunday, but you never know.  Speak to you soon.

Dog on the Tuckerbox ??!!

So on the road to Tumut, five miles south of Gundagai sits this famous statue of a dog on a tuckerbox (lunchbox or equivalent). Its a monument to the pioneers of Australia, those who first travelled into the bush, though quite why a dog on a tuckerbox is a bit of a mystery.  Like all good folk-lore, the story varies from person to person whilst the actual origins are all a bit vague on the issue. The original poem by Bowyang Yorke gives little away about why the dog is sitting on the tuckerbox so I'll recount the various stories I've heard. Back in the day the pioneers were crossing a muddy creek south of Gundagai when the wagons got bogged downed, and in an attempt to get them out, the yoke on the wagon broke and poked out the leader's eye (who the leader is I don't know, maybe it was Bullocky Bill, the dog's owner).  Anywho, the dog ends up sitting on the tuckerbox, some versions imply that he did worse things to it, some versions say that guarding tuckerboxes was the duty of the dog, and that the dog stayed loyally guarding his master's lunch, even though he was killed, until his own death.  Its all a bit strange really, but charming none the less.

Its also fruit growing country, so we picked up some big bags of really fresh apples for not too much.  Delicious!

Stal Cutting

The stonemasons in Tumut

I've spent the last two days in the little countryside town of Tumut, located an hour and a half a way to the west of Canberra.  It actually takes almost three hours to get there as you have to go north around the mountains to get there! Located in Tumut is a good stonemasons, and its here that we get our stalagmites cut, for fear that if we weren't getting professionals to do it, we'd muck it up! And they are very good, with some impressive machinery. As is the pace of Science we were there to get the stalagmites collected during the 2009 field-season cut, first into manageable sections, then to get a 2cm or so thick slab cut from the middle of the stal (such that the growth axis also lies in the plane of the slab, even if it moves about - it definitely helps to have a brain that works in three dimensions here) from which we do our analyses.



A box of stals, w cut three very heavy boxes worth

Our stals were cut by Jamie, who was very good at controlling the blade (1m diameter or so, they have one which must be three metres or so).  The machine is quite big, and makes the stals look small in the photograph, they're not! Bloody heavy too, its deceptively dense pure calcite.

Big cutting machine!

It takes a reasonable while to cut a stal, but we were kept busy, marking up the stals to be cut, drying cut sections, labelling them, and wrapping them in bubble-wrap so that they can survive the journey home.  Plus of course some impromptu analysis, some of the stals look very exciting, a couple are of superb quality, a few of merely good quality, and a nice aragonite one which should be interesting.  Though as ever, there were a few duds!



The first cut on Havana, one of our most promising stals, a nerve-wracking time. The stals all have names to go with their codes, to make them easier to remember and identify, this one is Havana, because it is cigar-shaped.  Or rather more cigar shaped that stals usually are!

Tumut itself is a very pretty town, located in a valley near the snowy mountains, it helps the countryside is so green at the moment but it seems like a very nice place to live, provided the jobs exist of course. And its finally, for the first time here since I arrived, actually somewhat hot, rather than warm, two degrees of which due to altitude all things being equal, but none the less really nice. Though the Chinese meal we had during the evening was suspiciously shiny.

LA marks up one of the side-offcuts

Next step is to polish and photograph the stals, XRD the bits that might be aragonite, thin-section other interesting bits, and take samples to send off to be dated.  Then maybe, just maybe, we can start analysing them!  Its a long process this, a very long process!

Removing a slab from a stal section

Trouble In Indonesia

Being in a research group who's current main priority is paleoclimate and the interactions of climate and natural disasters on carbonate systems in Indonesia, its reasonably understanding that we've been rather excited about whats been happening in Indonesia over the last couple of weeks.

At first it wasn't the volcano that gripped the group but rather the tsunami. The Mentawai Islands where the earthquake struck hardest are part of the group's coral field-area.  Which is reasonably distressing when you come into contact with the locals there reasonably regularly. In pure science terms, its a great opportunity and the likely located of the group's 2012 field-trip. There'll be a new PhD student arriving early next year to the group, also from the UK(!) whose job it'll be to see if the corals in the area record a record of these tsunami generating earthquakes.  Its an exciting project, and I'll guess we'll know the answer in four years time!

As time has gone on though, the Mt. Merapi eruption has got more and more severe, and the exclusion zone has widened and widened and we're seeing widespread covering of the local vegetation in ash.  Whilst not in my field-area, how this ash, and the vegetation destruction leaves a chemical signature in the groundwaters and consequently speleothems in such an area is very much what I'm working on.  Exciting, if dangerous times!

And whilst these disasters are always tragic, they do make the science more exciting and hopefully our work will go a small way to helping in the future.

More weather

At the risk of writing too much about the weather here, it has been awesome today.  Instead of the series of tame drizzly lows that have characterised the last month (its been so wet here recently, the wettest spring for decades probably) its warmed up a bit, now above twenty and the rainy lows have turned into epic thunderstorms. We've had three today, the first at five-thirty in the morning, waking pretty much everyone up.  The other two were this evening and involved some pretty serious cloud-bursts.  I was caught in the final cloudburst of the day cycling home, it was epic, and I was only about two minutes from home.

But I've only got myself to blame. Between the final two storms there was this fantastic light, a dark matt grey sky, with bright clouds where the sun shone between them.  The whole city was in that strange post-thunderstorm orangey glow that looks so awesome, like someone had turned up the brightness of all the colours.  It was really cool, so I stopped to take some photos (although being a camera phone they don't quite do the scene justice) and ended up getting caught by the fast approaching storm, damn!

The race that stops the nation

Its Melbourne Cup day, the country's greatest horserace, held on the first Tuesday of November every year. Its quite a symbolic and historic event for the entire country and its such a big event that traditionally its been a public holiday. Unfortunatly not this year as in ACT they decided to change it to a random Monday a few weeks ago which meant we got bank holidays in consecutive weeks, which is pretty stupid.  Its still a bank holiday in Victoria though.  Anyway, a lot of people no doubt took the day off work today to watch, and gamble and drink, and go to various Melbourne Cup social events, dressed up, and with fancy hats and the like.

In the department everyone stopped work for half an hour and watch in the seminar room, there was a sweepstake and the like, and a few of the girls in the department were wearing hats! Its a two mile long-race, flat and handicapped. Basically its a bit like the Grand National, but half the length, with fewer horses and no jumps, so really its not actually as good, but it holds a far greater place in the Australian psyche than the Grand National, over 100,000 attend and almost the entire country watches so its possibly the greater prize.  To be fair I thought it was a bit anticlimactic (if there's one thing I've learned its that the Australians love a good hype when it comes to sport and heritage (which are somewhat the same thing in this country)), maybe I need to get more into it next year.

I can sail!

As opposed to flailing wildly in a boat, which is what I've been doing for the last few weeks.  I took up a sailing course at the beginning of the month. About three hours, twice a week on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings.  Its being run by the ANU sailing club down at their boathouse on Lake Burley Griffin, a nice twenty minute cycle ride round the lake from the department (apart from the big road bridge and aggressive magpie). The course has been really good fun.  It was very windy the first couple of weeks, the first time we went out we were capsizing all the time.  This was followed by a really calm session which was just tough, but the last few have had really good winds, and when the sun has been shining has been really nice.

The capsizing has been actually quite good for us as a group, because we're no longer afraid of it, and rather good at dealing with it. Anyway, today's session was really fun, we've started having mini-races, and today I've finally feel as though I've got the hang of it.  I may not be very good, but I now know what I'm doing, as opposed to being fairly clueless the first few weeks. I'm still suprised at just how quickly you can sail upwind!

We've not been learning in little plastic toppers, but proper Lasers (and a Taser) which are fairly decent fibreglass craft, Lasers are even raced in the Olympics and are seen as very pure sailing as there's not much to the boat, its all reasonably simple. Anywho, I've been having fun, met a few people, and am now considering their intermediate course that'll start in a few weeks.

Look what they've done to Jens

Just look at him, the poor little dog!  I was round at JB and ES's last night for dinner, and to watch a recording of the Arsenal-ManCity match (they have FoxSports).  Jens has been shaved to get rid of all his excess fur.  He looks so tiny and strange.  He was very affectionate though!

Jens' before photo

Embarking on life the other side of the fence, will the grass be greener?

My IMac has arrived, and it is huuuuuuge. 27 Inch screen!, with all the bits and bobs located behind it.  Just look at it compared to my old laptop.  I spent a long while deliberating between mac and PC, and have decided to see what a Mac is really like.  So I'll be spending the next four years without a delete button or a stop button in the name of sleek efficiency, the Ctrl key not doing what the Crtl key should, an international rather than UK keyboard, and the nagging issue that its not really possible to turn anything off, not properly anyway.  On the other hand I've got a laptop style trackpad to go with it, and the things you can do with the gestures is amazingly cool, and about as useful as having a toolbar at the bottom of the screen.  Oh well!

Addendum (26/10/10): Though Mac does have a delete key, its actually the backspace key, the delete function does not exist for text.  Similarly, there is a stop button in Itunes, and a pause button on the keyboard, the two buttons serve the same purpose, which is a pause/stop hybrid which does neither of the two functions adequately, jack of all trades-esque.

Fluff is in the air

Various parts of the campus are covered in fluff today, with more fluff floating serenely through the air. And the producers of said fluff: trees.  Or at least some of them. Anyway, it looks a bit like snow, but is actually pollen (I think).  It is said that when the fluff comes then its the beginning of exam season, which it is.  Glad I'm not an undergraduate!!

It definitely feels like Spring now, its getting pretty warm, the trees and looking green, there are ducklings and goslings about complete with proud parents.  And since we've had so much rain so far this year, ending the 10-year drought, the reservoirs are filling, back to near 90% and there's even the potential for water restrictions to be lifted.  As a result Canberra and the surrounding bush is looking pretty green right now.  There's even the smell of cut grass. All the municipal grass seems to have been cut in the last couple of days, and given quite how much municipal grass there is in Canberra, thats quite an achievement! All in all its rather pleasant here at the moment.

Rain

So on Friday we had another of those really wet days that seems to occur occasionally in Canberra.  It absolutely bucketed down pretty much all day, the storm drains went wild. I stayed inside working waiting for a break in the rain that didn't come until after three pm.  The Australian weather service runs a very good radar imaging mapping thingy so it was quite good to watch the bands of rain come across this corner of the country.  In some places in New South Wales it was the wettest day for thirty odd years, and the wettest October day for a hundred.  Lots of reports of flooding, and some high winds, which of course means falling branches and trees.  As I've said before, Australia has some seriously weak trees. But apparently the rain never made the coast, got stopped by the coastal ranges, so there you go, fine in Sydney, as usual!

I've included a few pics of the storm drains today, a leaf got stuck on my phone's camera lens so the images aren't great.  These pics are after the storm when I attempted to go home, and the water level in the drains was already doen by six inches or so from its peak when I cycled in, in a gap between bands of rain.  The drains are almost back to normal now, but they seem to take a few days to get right down.  Hopefully I'll include another post in a couple of days of some after pics (or should that be before?).

Anyway, Canberra is going to be very green this spring, its already getting that way.  The impression I'm getting is that its not going to be this way every year.  Its the beginning of a La Nina year (though in my climatologist opinion I'd say the Indian Ocean Dipole is having more of an effect right now) and so may remain fairly wet. Don't go booking any holidays in Queensland in the new year, thats for sure.

Slightly afraid of birds

So the Australian magpie is a bigger meaner viscious version of the UK one (which I am enamoured to via childhood related nostalgia).  I mentioned when I first arrived that it was swooping season.  During spring the male magpies become very territiorial and have a tendancy to swoop on the helmets of cyclists which they see as a threat. Some people tie cable-ties to the top of their helmets in the belief that the magpies only attack the top-most part of the cyclist.  Though a lot of people doubt that actually works.  There are even stories that some of the more vicious magpies have been known to stick their beaks inside people's ears when attacking.  Not all male magpies do this and its been interesting to find out just where the vicious ones are, there is one on the eastern side of campus I know of, for example.

(Photo from lonebiker.dk)

I was cycling back from a sailing course on Lake Burley Griffin on Sunday and got swooped twice in one trip.  The first was scraping round on the top of my helmet before I even noticed, the second was much more noisy and just flapped around a bit.  The trick is to just keep on cycling and get out of their territory as quickly as possible, though this was trickier when I was at traffic lights for the second swoop!  I would say it was good I was wearing my helmet but there's the possibility its actually the helmets themselves which the magpies find threatening.

Anyway, since this double swoop on Sunday, I've kind of become ever so slightly scared of birds, flinching when I see a shadow of one flying low nearby and the like!!

The Gender Gap

It was the RSES student conference on Thursday and a chance to find out exactly what everyone else is up to, and hopefully finally work out who everyone is. In order to fit in most of the department's grad population and a few of the honours (aka 4th years) students, talks were limited to just eight minutes, which is nothing.  I trimmed my Pliocene ENSO talk down to what I thought would be suitable, and still only really got through half of it!  As you might expect there were some really good talks and some really dull ones.  The dullness being from the Petrologists in the first session, but it picked up through the Tectonicists (!), Physicists and Environmentals.

There was also a BBQ after, on the departmental BBQ (which I find fantastic!) and then beers on into the evening for those who stayed. Overall it was a good day, but most of the people I kind of already knew, those who hide away, still hide away! Oh well!

What was very interesting to note was that of the 37 talks over the course of the day, 19 were guys, 18 from girls, which is damn good for a science subject.  At grad level in RSES at least, there appears to be no real gender gap.  The corresponding stat though, was that there were only three talks for which the supervisors were female.  Above the post-doc level, the gender gap, especially in this department, is huge. Is this something that needs active change? or will the gender gap grow itself out? or both, of course!

Jens

I couldn't leave the kind hospitality of JB & ES without a post concerning Jens, their very adorable dog.  His name is Jens, named after the cyclist Jens Voigt, but his name is frequently affectionatly lengthened to Jento (as in Ianto) or Jentle.  He's a crazy dog, but very friendly, always pleased to see you, and generally out to lick any piece of bare flesh he can lay his tongue on.  He enjoys making you open the back door so he can go outside and then want to come in (with a hilariously adorable two legged frantic scrape against the glass pane), only after he can no longer see you waiting with the door open for him. He hates being left alone, is petrified of being in the car, even when we are taking him for a walk.  And when he's on his lead he has a very frantic excited attitude, pulling you along, running from person to person to check we're all there and then bounding off as far as his lead can carry him (about 2m) before attempting to run along on his hind legs, his fore-legs waving in the air being held back by the collar on his neck.We've had some good times over the past three weeks, especially playing tug of war with his favourite toy.  He doesn't let me win very often! I'm going to miss him!

Also, its been a fantastic three weeks with JB and ES, they've really helped me settle in to Australia and Canberra.  They've applied no pressure in finding my own place, letting me find somewhere that I actually think is a nice place to live.  I also feel as though I've been introduced to Canberra from the local perspective rather than the student one, which is always a great alternative viewpoint from which to learn a new city.  I wonder how many international students ever end up with as much local knowledge as I already have, having spent three weeks in the real world!  I am very grateful to them.

JB and ES also had a cat called Bentley, but frankly its Jens who'll always have a special place in my heart!