East Asian Monsoon (by sarah)
Last Monday I had another really cool lecture with Andy Carter this time it was looking at the interconnections between things like the East Asian Monsoon, local warm pools of water in the sea, continental uplift in this case the Himalayas.
This for me was a fun mind teasing, problem solving lecture in which I guessed why there where extention faults at pretty much right angles to compressional features. I actually cheated with this and thought about where the sigma 1,2 and 3 where - this was structural stuff from back in the day and those Cosgrove lectures came flooding back - this was bizar as I swear I hadn't understood them at the time and suddenely I am using them to work out problems. I still avoided actually doing maths though.
I then ended up puzzling over the best way to do simulations and the like and again once more I feel this desire to make better simulations better models but they say that it takes months of processesing time. I thinking there must be a better way but want to know more about what makes models models and simulations simulations and what is good and what is bad. I want to use triangles for some reason and have them as colums which I don't see in all the stuff so far.
I'm thinking the gaming and graphics industry would know stuff that would be useful to this - this is just a strange urg I have :/
We disguessed ways of actually constraining stuff with dates from the field and this was fun too and it was pulling together many things from previous lectures and my undergraduate. This was cool becuase we looked at how upper crust interaction ie mountain building events are affected by the underlaying interaction of the crust and upper mantle - he actually mentioned the word asthenosphere which I haven't heard since like A'level geology I swear!
Then there is the interactions with oceanic currents and where the land is and weather curculation with the mountains in the way and that this cuases rain to actually fall and things and tempurature which can be affected by errosion rates (due to the chemical reactions involved affecting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) and the albedo affect which is like how much sunlight gets reflected back into space form say bare soil verses vegitation so if more rain get plants growing but then there is also rain clouds and how they act both as a green house gass warming the planet and how they are affecting the albedo affect etc.... I love this sort of stuff I really do.
Though Andy (I think) finds the structural, traditional, geology bit more interesting I found the whole concept of the actual interaction interesting - he said this was studying earth systems and I think I have found a name for some of the Jake of All Trades stuff within geology.
It was buetiful especially when you start looking at how say the evolution of certain things say lignin in plants can affect the climate and things like that - everything is interconnected and understanding how and why is something I can really get my teeth into - I am building up shortly on how I think geology as a subject will be tuaght in future but it still needs work!
Mon 20th Oct 2008 3:57 pm 
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