Exchange District, Winnipeg (photo by Juliana Young)

The past couple of weekends we have been installing the storm windows on our tall old house.  As I pull them from the rack in the garage, I find that every few windows there is one that needs a bit of repair: some putty to replace, a hook that needs tightening, or a strengthening plate to be added. This is work that gives me time to think about anything and nothing. Usually it is the latter, I admit, but when I do think, one of the things I find myself contemplating most is the windows themselves.

These windows are presumably almost 90 years old, the same age as the house. Their materials are simple: frames of clear hard fir, a bit of steel hardware, glass, paint, and mastic putty. This traditional sash window/storm window system is based on a combination of renewable resources and plentiful, nearly infinite Earth resources (silica sand, iron) that could be sourced locally in many parts of the world.

Rain through Fredericton windows

If we had a “100-mile diet” for construction materials, then the traditional sash window could feasibly have the majority of its components sourced within that radius. Somewhere like Winnipeg, wood of suitable quality might be a scarce commodity if we were to depend on local trees, but nonetheless most of the window (other than the steel hardware) could come from resources near at hand. Since windows have always been among the more complex parts of a house, what holds for the windows probably holds for much of the rest of the house, too.

In Winnipeg, there is sand directly below our feet if we dig deep enough. Not that far away are places like Beausejour and Black Island, where plentiful high-grade sand was mined historically for glassmaking. I have written before about the Ordovician Winnipeg Formation that underlies so much of this area, and many other units are similarly endowed with sand, such as the St. Peter Formation of the midwestern United States. The St. Peter has such wonderful silica that Henry Ford located a car plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, directly above the sand that was used as a source of window glass!

Wintry view through a storm window

In comparison with most objects we encounter in the modern world, these old windows are notable for the near-absence of petroleum products. Of course energy resources were critical to the manufacture of windows – glassmaking, for instance, takes a tremendous amount of heat – but energy can come from many different sources, and nowadays it does not have to be petroleum.

In refurbishing the windows we have considerably increased their petroleum-sourcing. We are using modern paint, and who knows what is really in that stuff, but I’m sure there are some constituents derived from long-ago marine phytoplankton. And I have been forced to resort to a new sort of glazing putty, as the local hardware store no longer carries mastic putty. The old putty was mostly chalk or lime and linseed oil (from flax); the new stuff smells nowhere near as nice, sadly.

The Natural History Museum, London

In spite of these added complexities, the windows are still elegantly simple devices. They are robust, and so relatively straightforward that even a hack carpenter like me can pull off a passable repair job. The sash window system evolved over several centuries after its first recorded use in the 1670s. It is a wonderful example of traditional human ingenuity, but went out of fashion very rapidly in North America as a result of new technologies that became widespread shortly after the Second World War.  These old windows require maintenance (I have to do at least some window work every single year!), and they do let some heat pass through, but does that mean they are inherently worse than new windows?

Versailles, France (these aren't sash windows, but I liked the photo).

We have a few new windows on our house, and they are beautiful things.  But they tend to be made of metal and plastic, they are precision-manufactured in a factory, and there are noble gases sealed into spaces between the glass.  What happens when something goes wrong with this sort of device?  I suspect that once they are few years old they can be difficult to repair, and that the only solution is to throw them out and start again. I know several friends who have replaced windows twice within 20 years or less, each time at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. How long would it take to recoup the fuel savings of replacing our ancient windows with something newer?  My guess is that it would be into the double digits of years, especially when you consider that our house has more than 20 windows.

The "blue bear" stares through modern glass into the Colorado Convention Center, Denver.

Windows are, of course, just one example of our throwaway economy, where the technologies we have developed depend on ever-plentiful and cheaply transported resources. Is the throwaway economy also a false economy?  What will happen to future generations, if non-local resources for new products become scarce or unavailable?  Will people be engaged in a futile quest to fix items such as hybrid cars or modern windows, objects that cannot be repaired or renewed through the ministrations of the home handyman or the local mechanic?

I think I will keep fixing these old windows for as long as their frames will bear it.

My grandfather's store at Young's Crossing, Marysville, NB, c. 1956.

© Graham Young, 2011

This blog is generally about science and  related ephemera. This morning, in the wake of the Conservative Party’s victory in Canada, my thoughts were about  how people make their voting decisions on the basis of a selective subset of what each party stands for. Which may not sound much like talking about science, but I assure you that it is related.

When people vote for a political party, they generally home in on the part of the platform that   most interests them, whether it is taxation, health care, or a moral issue such as abortion. In so doing, they ignore (or may actually be ignorant of) the party’s stand on other issues. In this sense, choosing a party is much like purchasing cable TV. Cable companies often offer channels in “packages,” where to get what you want  you also must receive a lot of other things.  You know why you are buying the package, but you probably never even look at the parts of it that are at some remove from your areas of interest.

In voting for a Conservative government, it seems that Canadians have selected the package that has the family channels, sports, and economic news channels that they want, but unfortunately they have made this decision for all of us.  Did we all really want that 24-hour channel of nonstop monster trucks and tractor pulls? Why does this package have no arts channels other than country music?

From my perspective, a real concern is that the scientific channels now seem to feature a mix of ”intelligent design” justification, gee whiz pieces on new entertainment devices, and climate change denial advertisements funded by big oil.

Canadians have long been envied by scientists in some other countries because our government provided solid funding for both applied science and pure, inquiry-driven research. When the Conservatives had a minority, they indicated that they were only interested in the former, and that the latter far too often opposed the economic or religious beliefs of some of their bedrock supporters. Now that they have a majority, will this be a body blow to Canadian scientific research?  I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and that our new cable package will still have room for the Discovery Channel and the CBC.

Overview of the fossil vertebrates on the second level

A couple of months ago, I posted photos of the modern vertebrates at the Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, the wonderful museum that opened for the 1900 Paris world’s fair, with a promise that there would be follow-up pieces on the paleontological exhibits. As it is now Christmas, this seemed like an appropriate time to open up the next section of this candy box. Paleontology occupies both the second level and a gallery/mezzanine above, so I thought I would just present the second level at the moment, particularly since the spaces approximately divide the vertebrate and invertebrate fossils.

This replica skull of the Devonian arthrodire (fish) Dunkleosteus may look familiar to some of you. It is identical to casts on display in many other museums, including the Manitoba Museum.

Most galleries of fossil land vertebrates are, let’s face it, dominated by the dinosaur skeletons. For some reason, this Paris museum is different. I’m sure that the dinosaurs are big, since some of them seem to be identical to casts that have looked very impressive in other settings. But they don’t look all that huge here. Their bulk does not impose upon or overwhelm you, and I’m sure that a lot of this comes down to the space in which they are exhibited. The gallery seems like an optical illusion to me: its proportions are such that it does not feel huge, and yet it clearly dwarfs the skeletons contained within.

The giant ground sloth Megatherium is one of the highlights of the Pleistocene exhibits. (photo by Juliana Young)

There is a second reason that the dinosaurs do not seem all that large: the Ice Age mammals are utterly stupendous. Some of the mammoths are huge, but other creatures such as the ground sloth are also monstrous. These exhibits provide a superb illustration of the Pleistocene megafauna that we sadly lost just a few thousand years ago.  Many of the large skeletons in this Pleistocene area are genuine, making this the highlight of the gallery; the carnivores are jaw-droppingly wonderful.

The legendary Irish Elk, Megaloceros giganteus, is represented by this superb specimen. There is a very good reason why the preface "Mega" turns up in the names of Pleistocene mammals! (photo by Juliana Young)

The proboscideans, rightly, have an area of the gallery all to themselves, showing the wonderful diversity of extinct forms

Mammoths always make me sad since we missed seeing live ones by a brief instant, geologically speaking. This mammoth towers over Juliana (who is far from short). Note the wonderful ironwork armature supporting the skeleton; it seems to have a Beaux Arts style that matches some of the railings.

Those of us who are used to smaller galleries have a hard time appreciating the sheer scale of this case. These are large ice age carnivores: a hyaena, cave bears, a lion, and a wolf.

As in the zoological gallery, there are many other exhibits to see if you can manage to drag your eyes away from the large vertebrates in the middle of the room. The areas below the mezzanine are filled with cases of smaller fossils, interpretation, and dioramas. Most of the exhibits in latter two categories must be described as “period pieces,” which seems only appropriate in a gallery of this relative antiquity. I hope that they never decide that these exhibits need to be modernized, because so much would be lost. A museum can tell us so much about the time period in which it was created!

These fishes are from the famous Eocene Monte Bolca lagerstätte near Verona, Italy.

One of the beautiful Bolca fishes

There are a number of charming dioramas, such as this creative interpretation of how the Cambrian creatures of the Burgess Shale might have looked.

Since the dinosaurs do not overwhelm with their size, one can instead be absorbed by the wonderful variety of forms exhibited by the vertebrate skeletons on display here.

Ordovician brachiopods from Stony Mountain (photo © The Manitoba Museum)

For the past couple of days, I have been scrambling to put together a presentation on fossil hunting in Manitoba’s limestones for a public open house session at the Manitoba Mining and Minerals Convention.  If you are in the Winnipeg area, you might want to check out this session on Saturday morning, which includes several presentations on geological and paleontological topics.

 If you don’t want to chase down the link, here is the abstract of the talk:

A significant proportion of Manitoba is underlain by carbonate bedrock that is often rich in fossils. In the south, limestones and dolostones occur along the margin of the ancient Williston Basin, from Winnipeg north along the lakes to the Grand Rapids Uplands and the Cranberry Portage area. These rocks, dating from the Ordovician to Devonian periods, are about 450 to 370 million years old. In the north, equivalent rocks occur in the Hudson Bay Basin, and are well known from Churchill to the Nelson River. All of the fossils in these rocks represent sea life. During this time, Manitoba was at or near the equator.  Sea level was often very high, so that warm seas covered much of what is now land. Fossils found here include many groups of marine organisms, such as corals, brachiopods (lamp shells), trilobites, receptaculitids (“sunflower corals”), and nautiloid cephalopods. Other fossils, such as fishes and seaweeds, are much rarer and only occur at certain sites. All of the fossil species in these rocks are extinct, although some of them have living relatives. This presentation will include brief explanations of some of the fossil groups, describe where they can be found, and suggest preferred collecting techniques.

Hans was an immensely accomplished scientist. Although he had started off on the hard rock side of geology, he devoted the bulk of his career to understanding the evidence for the early evolution of life. He was an expert on the simple fossils called stromatolites, algal or bacterial mats that grew on ancient seafloors. He also spent time on microfossils, trace fossils, the weird and wondrous fossils of the Ediacaran Period, and the vexing issue of distinguishing early fossils from non-fossil “problematica.

A couple of weeks ago I was stuck in traffic, waiting at one of the many roadworks that plague Winnipeg in the summer. Heat waves rose from the cars and asphalt, and I could feel the intense sun on my arm. I was struck by the thought that the last time I could recall feeling the sun in exactly this way was just over a year ago. I was seated on a bench outside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, in the loom of the CN Tower, engrossed by a long conversation about Precambrian life with the man who possibly knew more about the subject than anyone else on the planet.

I was attending a national earth science meeting, where I discovered that I was one of a tiny handful of paleontologists in attendance. There were few talks that really interested me, and few people I knew; I found myself wandering and trying to become interested in posters about atmospheric science or nuclear waste disposal. But Hans was also there, having arrived by train from Montreal. I got the impression that he felt out of place, and we had a lot of time for lunch and conversation.

I had long been aware of his scientific reputation, his important publications, his medals from the Royal Society of Canada and National Academy of Sciences of the United States. But work is only part of the person, and as on previous occasions I was struck by the qualities of Hans the individual. He was unfailingly polite, almost courtly; he came across as a gentleman who would not have been out of place in a mid 19th century scientific environment, even though he had a reputation for innovative applications of computers and other technology.

Hans was remarkably kind when I exhibited my broad and far-reaching ignorance of things Precambrian. In his gruff way, he generously shared information that would be useful to me as I attempted to come to grips with ideas for an exhibit about Precambrian life forms. He was a large person, and in spite of his apparent gentleness he also gave the impression of being very powerful, even if he was now well into his 70s.

He seemed, remarkably, no older that he had been when I first met him 20 years earlier. As we sat, he recounted his ongoing project on Ediacaran fossils from Newfoundland, and talked about the pleasure he took in carrying out fieldwork. When I returned to Winnipeg, I was able to take along some illumination of the Precambrian life that had previously been darkness to me.

____________________

I try to avoid sending unnecessary correspondence to important senior scientists, but a few weeks ago we had some exhibit development issues that required Hans’ expert opinion. Our museum artist Betsy Thorsteinson is developing a reconstruction model of the complex Proterozoic stromatolite Ephyaltes garganicus, from the Sibley Formation of northwest Ontario, and she had reached a point where she had many questions that I was not capable of answering. I compiled a list and sent it off to Hans. In very short order, I received a response in which he very kindly and clearly explained the complicated structure, and delineated how it was likely to have looked during life.

Betsy incorporated his ideas into her revised model, but of course being Betsy she had additional questions in her quest for the most perfect possible reconstruction. I sent Hans her further questions on the morning of May 20th, but shortly after lunch that day I received a message that he had died very suddenly the day before. It is not the first time I have sent correspondence to someone who turned out to be dead, but I still found this utterly shocking. How could someone so vital and knowledgeable, who had contributed so much, and who still had so much to contribute, have been stopped so suddenly?

Paleontology is a thinner and poorer discipline than it was two months ago.

Anyway, I now have an official curatorial blog at The Manitoba Museum. There’s not too much posted yet, but I am looking forward to it. I hope that some of you will take the time to occasionally visit both of me.

Colourful Paleozoic strata at Valaste waterfall, the highest waterfall in Estonia

Stratigraphy is the study of the arrangement and succession of strata. All sedimentary successions follow a few basic rules, our understanding of which has been gradually refined over the past four hundred years. According to  the principle of original horizontality, sedimentary layers were originally horizontal, while the  law of superposition states that “sedimentary layers are deposited in a time sequence, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top.” Similarly, the great majority of blogs are composed of horizontal posts, each of which is accreted above the previous one. This current post is like sediment being deposited on the Earth’s surface; if you drill down you will see that the layer below is dated February, underneath that are posts extending back into late 2009, and if you go to the very beginning of this blog you may find yourself somewhere in the Younger Dryas.

Ordovician carbonates in northern Kentucky

Strata are typically laid down in sedimentary basins, low areas in the Earth’s crust (such as Hudson Bay) where sediment is able to accumulate. For sediment to accumulate, it has to be generated, and some geologists like to talk about the “sediment factory.” Large amounts of sediment are typically produced under specific conditions, such as when corals and other organisms are growing great volumes of carbonate skeleton, or when actively-rising mountains are shedding vast quantities of freshly-eroded sand and silt.

When the sediment factory is switched off (as it is, for example, during some sea level changes), then sediments stop accreting in the basin. This hiatus may last years, decades, or millennia. The net effect is that the sedimentary record is not continuous: the record of time provided by sedimentary rocks is of fits and starts, feast or famine. In any one region the rocks may give a wonderful documentation for one period of geological time, but then for the next period there is no evidence whatsoever (we get a much more complete story when we compare several regions). Much modern stratigraphy is focused on recognizing and analyzing the hiatuses, because these can tell us so much about the geological history of basins and continents.

A simple-minded interpretation of the law of superposition might suggest that Steve Kershaw (Brunel University) is older than the Silurian carbonates he has burrowed beneath on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia. Some people will go to extreme lengths to find stromatoporoids!

Blogs are also produced in discrete intervals. No human being is capable of mechanically producing a volume of readable text every day, and a blog is thus a stratigraphic record of the individual’s life. Each post could be considered as a single depositional event. These blogging events are of interest, of course (at least to a few readers), but future blogostratigraphers may well be as interested in the relationship between event and hiatus. How was the blogger able to produce a continuous stream of quality pieces during this interval?  What was responsible for this smattering of drivel? Was this gap related to a a traumatic event in the individual’s life, or did he just wander off and immerse himself in Facebook applications? I imagine a cadre of academic blogostratigraphers, each applying sequence stratigraphic methods to studying the bloglives of the obscure but interesting.

OK, now my idea factory has dried up. Time to think about something else.

© Graham Young, 2010

Next time, maybe I will tell you about my other new blog …

If you visit this site periodically and are beginning to wonder about the absence of new posts, don’t worry. I am not ill, and rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I’m just busy.

I have been working on several new pieces for this page, but life keeps getting in the way. We are assembling the exhibits that will accompany the Ancient Seas video, and that has involved a lot of toil and pain. Not to mention blood.

Anyway, I will be back soon, and you will again wish that I didn’t post so much. Meanwhile, wander around, take a look at anything here that you haven’t read yet, or check out some of the links. I particularly recommend my friend and colleague Sean Robson’s new page, Lore Deposits.

See you.

We have continued to work on exhibits and are now within spitting distance of finishing the second part: the marine Cretaceous and the end Cretaceous extinction. Which is a very good thing, because we are scheduled to remove the hoardings and open this to the visitors next weekend.

At the moment the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Cenozoic is graphically represented by this hoarding (yes, that's a ground sloth in the foreground). But wait ... (photo © The Manitoba Museum, 2009)

The cases have been built, the panels designed and sent for output, specimens prepared, models created, mounts constructed, lights installed, and video edited. For the past few days we have been occupied with fitting specimens and models into their cases. This is mostly very pleasant, since we know the end is close and are beginning to see what it will all look like. Nevertheless, it is also slow, painstaking, and occasionally exasperating.

Next week I hope to show you the first of the finished results, and in the interim I may talk a bit more about how we acquired some of the pieces. But now I’d better get back to work on it, so you will have to content yourselves with the view through the hoarding …

(photo © The Manitoba Museum, 2009)

How many people have looked at my page today?  How did they chance upon it?  Which parts did they find interesting? How are visits influenced by the frequency, subject, or quality of my posts? Since I launched this site, it has had just over 4,000 visits. Maybe this isn’t a big number, but I am pleased that I am not writing purely for my own amusement, as I had feared at the start of this process. 

This seems like a good time to examine what people are actually looking at. The following is a compilation of the “all-time” top 20 search topics that led people here as of August 28th (I have grouped similar searches):

It is intriguing that fully half of these topics (such as bird gravel and ship scrapping) are at best marginal to the subject of this page. I get hits for “Siberia” and “40000 feet” only because I posted a single photo of Siberia from the air. Obviously, it is worthwhile to include a diversity of material if you want to attract visits; I just hope that a few of those who came looking for information on octagonal sheds (for example) took a bit of time to read some of the other material on offer here.

The paleontological search topics are a mixed bag, but I am surprised by the level of interest in eurypterids, which appears to be far greater than that for any other Ordovician group. Are there more people who collect eurypterids than cephalopods, for instance?

Considering visits to specific posts, the most popular by far is The Churchill Quartzite.  Fair enough.  I like that one myself. But I am at least as proud of some pieces that have attracted only 10% of that attention.

How much should I be thinking about what attracts people to one piece, rather than to another? This is the point at which attention to statistics can become dangerous. As long as they are just a matter of interest or fun, like baseball statistics or lottery numbers, then that is fine, since they cannot be modified by passive observation. (If I am in a position to modify baseball statistics or lottery numbers, I am not telling you about it here, and you will be hard-pressed to locate me in my new tax haven somewhere in the Caribbean.)

But as the generator of content on this page, there may be a danger that I will begin to modify that content. I might begin to write what I think will attract visitors, rather than writing whatever I find interesting on a given day. I do like to see an increase in the number of hits, and most months they have increased, but when will they reach saturation?  If I “sell out,” might visits continue to go up, or would this just annoy those people who come back regularly to follow what I might have to say?

The truth is that I have no plans to sell out, at least in any conscious way. I have a long-term agenda for this page, and anyway, I am too contrary (or pig-headed?) to be strongly swayed by whether I am attracting a large audience. There is, however, a plan to add more items that might make the site useful. In particular, I am currently working on separate pages about Tyndall Stone fossils, and more technical pages about my research.  But these have turned out to be big projects, so don’t expect to see either of them next week!

Statistics are no substitute for judgement, but they can provide untold hours of idle amusement.