Gulf Coast Pure Quartz Sand

On a recent trip to Pensacola Beach, I was amazed at how truly white the sands are on this stretch of the Gulf Coast.  I grew up on the light ruddy brown sand beaches of southern California, refreshed as they are from the crystalline rocks of the Transverse and Peninsula Rages, until recently (geologically speaking) sand delivery was somewhat hampered by flood control efforts.  I now live near the shore of the gray sand beaches of Puget Sound, supplied nonstop by eroding bluffs of glacial outwash sands.  The sands of the Gulf Coast beaches were formed from the wearing down of the Appalachian Mountains, which began their rise some 480 million years ago.  The Gulf of Mexico opened up some 300 million years ago.  The rivers in this neighborhood stopped bringing sand some tens of thousands of years ago.  In sort of a reverse of the Bowen's reaction series, the other mineral grains (e.g. olivines, pyroxenes, amphiboles, mics, and feldspars) weathered and wore down to miniscule particles leaving the highly resistant quartz grains.  This reversal is known as the Goldich dissolution series.  The sand here is almost pure quartz, blindingly white when massed as an endless Gulf Coast beach.

I did see some Deep Horizon oil spill cleanup crews patrolling the beaches in ATVs and just offshore in small skiffs.  I didn't see any evidence of oil spill during my brief beach walks.  I'm sure the oil is out there somewhere lurking.

Globejotting

For all of you, like me, who have fitfully started keeping a travel journal only to give up around the second day of the trip.  Here's the book for all you erstwhile journalists filled with effective techniques to efficiently maintain a journal without missing a thing on your trip.  Cover the highlights, cut the flab, five a day, and many other techniques presented.  Maybe of real importance is how to elude your inner self as a way toward self-discovery.  I consumed this whole book on a recent flight from Seattle to Dallas-Fort Worth on my way to Pensacola for some project work.  It helped to not have a window next to my window seat; really an annoying let down for any geologist to not have the ability to gaze down at the landscape.  Just a heads up, Seat 10A on an American 737-800 has no window.  At least I got in a lot of reading on that flight.  As it turned out, I kept a journal for the whole week except the last day.  As the book points out, it's OK to go back and journal a long past trip.  Please enjoy this book and don't let another journey go undocumented in your journal.  Start now!

Coal Trains Running

As I've mentioned in prior posts, I live about 700 feet form the shore of Puget Sound as the Northwestern Crow flies.  Along this shoreline the tracks of the BNSF Railway snake their way from Ballard to Bellingham, never straying too far from the water along this stretch.  I like trains and I like watching them as I stroll along the beach; Canadian lumber heading south, Everett's trash heading to the big landfill in Klickitat County, and the Amtrak Cascades carrying its passengers between Vancouver and Eugene.  It is a small hazard to cross over the double-tracks to clamber down the rip-rap to the beach.  The passenger trains are fast and quiet compared to the freight trains.

In the planning works is a proposed bulk terminal to go in up at Cherry Point, just north of Bellingham in Whatcom County.  The project is known as the Gateway Pacific Terminal and the developer is SSA Marine Services, one of the largest shipping terminal operators and stevedores in the world.  The main bulk product planned for shipment out of this facility is coal extracted from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.  The destination for this coal is China.  Why does China want our coal when they have an abundant supply?  The main answer to that question is well explained in this paper: China's Coal Import Behavior.  Basically, it's cheaper for China to buy coal from the Powder River Basin than it is to transport it across China's shaky infrastructure from mine to user.

So why do I care?  Well, on a very local level, there will be increased train traffic along "my" beach and through my bucolic home town of Edmonds.  It potentially means 18 more round-trip trains per day (Everett Herald 5-26-11) and these are long trains, up to a mile and a half.  Whether that ever actually comes to pass is really uncertain given the fickle nature of commodity prices, the instability of coal exports, and whether China finds it cheaper at some point to use their own coal.  China really controls the world coal market now.  Coal export instability and an ill-fated coal bulk terminal at the Port of Los Angeles is discussed here:  Sightline Daily -The Instability of Coal Exports II.

The economics and potential job creation of the Cherry Point project are relevant and must be considered.  However, on a world scale, the generation of carbon dioxide from coal burning and the potential health effect of coal dust generated from a bulk terminal operations and train transport must also be considered.  It will be an interesting couple of years or so as this project plays out.  The opposition has created a website with many good articles and resources here:  Coal Train Facts

On another local level in Whatcom County, Dan McShane discusses the politics (reluctantly) and other implications of the Cherry Point project in his excellent and prolific blog Reading the Washington Landscape.  Some of his Cherry Point related posts:

Kelli Linville: Clearly Opposed to Coal 11-4-11
Coal Politics in Bellingham: Yuk 10-21-11
Coal Stories - Including a Link Showing Local Coal Politics at Work 7-27-11
Coal Politics Comes to Washington and Wonky Process and Diplomacy (update) 6-28-11
Coal Terminal Preemptive Strike 2-28-11

I leave you with the Doobie Brothers:

Birding Babylon

There's a saying, "wherever you go, there you are."  More to the point, wherever you go, you'll find nature.  I'm always amazed at the tenacity of nature, a weed growing up through the cracked pavement of an industrial landscape, the bee that pollinates the weed flower, the spider hiding in the weed that captures the bee, the wasp that stings the spider and takes it back to its nest to lay an egg to feed its hatching larva.  There you are.  And so it is, in present-day Iraq, that nature perseveres among the explosions and death.  Amid that chaos, Sergeant Jonathan Trouern-Trend kept online journal of his birding and nature observations.  The highlights of these blog posts are assembled in this small book.  Hope springs eternal like the weed that grows up through the crack.

Fall: On the Beach

It's fall and the Heerman's gulls again make their contrarian fall migration northward from Baja California to our local beaches and elsewhere along the northern Pacific coastline.  Other gulls are here, too, but my identification skills with the other gull species are not so good, especially with the juvenile phases and subtle seasonal variations.  The American widgeons are here and later in the winter we'll see other ducks, the red-breasted mergansers and the goldeneyes, common and Barrows.

I encountered several beached lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata), the largest known species of jellyfish.  Jellyfish usually die off this time of year as their food supply of plankton dwindles.

Harbor seals are the most abundant marine mammal in Puget Sound.  Harbor seal pups can be found on the beach in the late summer and fall, resting as mother forages.  People may come across a seal pup on the beach and think it is abandoned but it is not.  The pups must not be disturbed.  Seal Sitters is a volunteer group dedicated to the protection of marine mammals in the urban environment along Puget Sound.  I came across a Seal Pup last year but this year I came across one that was unfortunately dead.  Seal pup mortality is relatively high as I understand.

Fall: From the Woods to the Mailbox

We live on the edge of a 120-acre forest of western hemlock, western cedar, and Douglas fir with bigleaf maple and red alder nearing the end of their lifespan.  In another 700 feet as the crow flies is the shore of Puget Sound.  And so we are blessed with a variety of wild plants and animals from rain forest to suburban garden to the shoreline of an inland sea.

Even among the giant trees I'm never at a loss of amazement at the small things.  Walking out to the mailbox I notice a lifeless garter snake on the driveway that was run over by any one of us three neighbors who share this driveway.  I'm not a snake expert but guessing he's a Northwestern Garter Snake (Thamnophis ordinoides), one of several species and subspecies of garter snakes native here.  Its lifeless opaque eyes no longer glisten as transparent windows to his snake spirit.

As I was photographing the snake, along came a beetle, a snail-killer carabid (Scaphinotus angusticollis), attracted no doubt by the scent of the dead snake.  These beetles are pretty common around here and are the good guys that eat snails and slugs.  The beetle's forebody is uniquely shaped to get inside a snail's shell.  Note that the beetle harbors a group of mites seen as the orangish little creatures on the beetle's thorax.

Another common animal is the seldom seen shrew-mole (Neurotrichus gibbsii).  They forage for worms and other terrestrial invertebrates in the shallow soil and leaf letter.  I found this one dead at the edge of the forest.

Fall is also mushroom time, these found growing in our back lawn area, perhaps Mycena sp.

There weren't as may cross spiders this fall as last year, maybe our early November last year freeze reduced their numbers.  It was a cold La Nina last year and this year looks to be a similar La Nina.  We'll see.

McIntosh

Back in the Stone Age when I was in college in the late 1970s, I had an introductory computer class where we did goofy little programming assignments using BASIC and working on terminals connected to the college's big Digital PDP-11.  One of my professor's had just purchased a TRS-80, one of the original desktop computers.  I had no clue then how much computers would become literally a household appliance.  After graduating from college I went to work for a huge aerospace company as a manufacturing engineer.  I wrote production planning on a terminal connected to some mainframe elsewhere in the building.  Our group had a secretary who would type letters for us on an IBM Selectric typewriter.  After four years of flirting with the girls on the soldering line, I was beginning to realize that I wasn't really cutout to work in a giant corporation.  But I was liking too much the engineer salary to make a move.   Fortunately, the company made a decision for me and laid me off.  After a few weeks of job searching, interviewing with dreadful manufacturing facilities and sad looking people, I landed a job with an environmental consulting company.  I walked in for the interview and knew right then and there that that was where I wanted to be.  The people were happy and energetic.  The office was quaintly located in the original Sierra Madre city hall and every desk was equipped with a McIntosh 512.  In short time, I was writing reports and drawing plans, all on that little box.  For the next five years, it was nothing but McIntosh's, graduating from the 512 to the SE and later purchasing a McIntosh LC for home use.  It had a color monitor, which was the coolest thing since the Vega-matic.  Somewhere in the early 1990s the company transitioned over to PCs with Windows and that was it.  Pretty soon it was all Windows all the time.

Rest in peace Steve Jobs.  You made some awesome products and brought Apple back to glory with fantastic new products.  History will view you right up there with Leonardo da Vinci as a genius visionary.