Recently, several geobloggers brought up an excellent point on science communication: Now that it has been established that researchers need to do more outreach to share their work, HOW? The barriers are plenty – sharing on the internet takes energy, time, some understanding of the different online outlets, putting words together in an explanatory and not officious manner and, most critically in my opinion, the inclination to share what you know to the extent that you can – and you end up with folks walking away saying “blogging shmogging.” Whether in academia or private industry, scientists find it much easier to plow on through their work, teach their immediate co-workers and apprentices verbally, share with the powers that be via slideshows, internal white papers or external, limited-access journal articles and call it a day. Note that “documenting work in a meaningful way” and “sharing findings with a wider audience” are not listed above, as there is no apparent intellectual or monetary reward for doing so. This is why I believe a philosophy of and personal value for “maximum knowledge to and from maximum people” has to be established first. From that place, the methods of communication (online or off) become secondary and much easier to choose from based on the information that needs sharing.

There are practical reasons for information sharing as well: Making more of you and getting as many people knowledgeable in, if not excited about, what you do so that they send or vote money your way. Sharing online doesn’t just mean talking, it means a lot of listening, too. This is a great source of information, ideas and critique for your own work. Take the following interchange between Matt Kuchta, a professor of geology and myself, an industry geophysicist:

A very basic example, but one with a point: In the span of ten or so tweets, I challenged Matt’s rendering of the transition between continental and oceanic lithosphere with a suggestion, Matt challenged me back, we alluded to the lack/scarcity of outcrop, I pointed out that an alternate indicator is new, deeper seismic and Matt kept and changed portions of his interpretation. We could have done this over email, but more people benefit and can join in from holding the exchange on Twitter following which I can record the dialogue here on my blog (or on Storify) for future reference.

How much to share, how and where: Lockwood Dewitt has written a great post about why he started his blog and how he keeps it going: “Blogging takes exactly the amount of time you want it to.” I extend that to sharing takes exactly the amount of time you want it to. If you don’t want to start a blog, get going with a low-energy-for-entry outlet like Twitter and use it to write a few words on your topic and post a link to the details. From there, try very hard to respond to those who ask questions about your post and manage your interactions, which  can be intimidating but only for those who let it be.

Once here, you will hear all kinds of things about the means or media of communication: Print is extinct! Online is the way to go! The blog is dead! Long live the blog tweet tweet! No, hark! The revival of long-form writing online. Blogger or Tumblr? All hail!

Whatever. Blessed with increasing methods of communication, I don’t see a reason to find the Grand Unified Medium. Use them all. The point is to communicate and share as much as possible – through print and online, blog and tweet, FB post and Instagram picture – even if you end up being redundant. There is no such thing as too much information sharing. And here is what I mean by establishing a personal morality of learning and sharing widely, i.e. increasing the awareness of self and others as its own end, before anything else can happen.

(Something I will address later with a compare and contrast is why it’s worth investing in your own blog space if that’s where you want to head. Short answer: Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. don’t belong to you and can be taken away at any time.)

What to share: I am a geoblogger, but this isn’t a geoblog. If you go through these here archives, I write about travel, New Orleans, food, science, politics, being brown, being female and brown, Wisconsin, the Green Bay Packers, family, history, injustice and assorted boondoggles. There is no rule that states that you have to blog on a certain topic inside a specific genre. That’s what blog categories and specific RSS feeds are for. Sure, there are folks who don’t follow me on Twitter because all of my tweets aren’t about geology. They have their reasons, while I have my priorities. You won’t please everyone, but if you’re in it for a popularity contest, you’ve forgotten the whole reason for being here: to learn, share what you know, broaden your outlook and hopefully meet other like-minded people.

Confidentiality and openness: Sharing is also hard to do if a lot of the work you do is competitive and/or proprietary, but there are tenets and techniques of your science or specialty that you can discuss. For instance, I cannot divulge what I work on in the office, but can and will gladly write an explanation of Seismic Inversion For The Non-Geoscientist here or anywhere else. Another ideal that information sharing helps along is Open – open data, open results, open access. Matt Hall also works for the energy industry and I agree with his assessment that it “has a lot of catching up to do. Humanity is faced with difficult, pressing problems in energy production and usage, yet our industry remains as secretive and proprietary as ever.” In a similar vein, I’ve postulated here that “the crux of the problem is that the business ends of academia, companies and software providers are at odds with their more important aspects of teaching, finding oil and creative solutions.” The more we share (what we can), the more the results happen here and are available to a wider audience.

You will notice that, ultimately, all of this leads not just to talking about science online, but doing science in a wider framework. Funny, that’s what the internet was built for in the first place.

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As long as you want to be here and can handle it, it’s not that bad and actually pretty good. If nothing else, I’ve made good friends. Should you want to start your own blog/Twitter feed/online outlet (or just want to discuss this whole business of sharing), please leave a comment below and I will either help you or find someone who can.

Russia! Bolide strike! Meteor impact! What does this all mean and why does the media keep using these terms interchangeably? Here: How to tell the difference between a meteor, meteorite, asteroid and comet. A bolide is a projectile fireball associated with meteor activity. Daring Bolide is the name of my Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction tribute blog (apologies to John Gruber).

It’s February 2013, which means it’s my turn to host the Accretionary Wedge!

The Accretionary Wedge is a geology blog carnival that was started in August 2007. Editions will be monthly (roughly) and hosted on a different geoscience blog each time.

The accident-prone person that I am, I chose the topic of Geo Injuries. Look at the four pictures above, and these are not counting my wounds from non-geology-related incidents. Who better to host?

Clockwise from top left and in chronological order:

1) 1979: While playing on a Bay Of Kuwait beach at low tide, my right ankle hit exposed limestone and that left a big gouge. This rather low-information geologic map of Kuwait shows that its urban areas (on the east side of the country along the water) are underlain by cemented coastal deposits. As I recall, the limestone I cut my leg on is oolitic and the literature indicates that it belongs to “Pleistocene and Holocene coastal ridges that [are] composed of calcareous sandstone and oolitic limestone, which formed during the flood flow from south to north.”

Pleistocene and Holocene?! Great, so the first rock I cut my teeth on, so to speak, couldn’t even be Miocene or older. Talk about adding insult to injury. (If you’re new to this blog, you may or may not get used to the puns and mixed metaphors after a while.)

Here is a 1960s-era photograph of my mother standing on the aforementioned Dibdibba Formation of the Kuwait Group. See how light and ethereal and Not Falling On The Rocks And Ripping Her Skin Open she is even in a sari and no-grip sandals? The woman is like that to this day. As you will see, I definitely do not take after her in this department.

A couple of interesting historic notes before we move on: a) In the mid-1980s, Kuwait began to pour billions of dinars into waterfront beautification, which essentially meant pulverizing a substantial portion of these coastal deposits into sand or importing sand from other locales to pour over the bedrock (think Waikiki Beach). In 1990, Saddam Hussein’s forces trashed all of these beaches to dig trenches and plant mines and other explosives as a defense against amphibious attacks by their enemies. Starting in 1991, Kuwait “rebuilt” all the beaches to the point where they now have a paint ball park on the grounds of the famous Kuwait Towers, a Hard Rock Cafe and – wait for it – an Applebee’s along the beachfront. Check out Kuwait City and Salmiyah along the water on Google Maps and see what tax-free oil trillions can do for you. b) Sinkholes. Sinkholes that swallowed expensive shore-front homes. Limestone + groundwater decline due to rapid urbanization = bad things. See what tax-free oil trillions cannot do for you.

2) Fast forward to 1993 when I took up geology in earnest: A knee wound that looks nothing like it felt at the time, this is the result of rappelling down the side of a cliff made of Mississippian Ste. Genevieve Limestone at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, and not sticking my feet out to meet the cliff when my friend Brian told me to. In shorts. With no kneepads and helmet on. Body armor is overrated.

3) 1997: Ever hear of that really slow rock? It moved a mylonite. (Badum-dish!) Ever hear of a geologist who lost her balance and slammed her left arm into a rather striking outcrop of mylonitized quartzite and marble in Arizona’s Buckskin-Rawhide metamorphic core complex? Well, you did now!

And it bled like a son-of-a-cuss. Poor Steve Marshak; he had to deal with so many injuries on that spring break field trip, including the re-opening of my lacerated cornea right after the hike up the Grand Canyon. (I’m a medical mess, I know.) On the bright side, the weather was perfect and I got some beautiful pictures and hand samples out of the deal. Photographs forthcoming.

4) 2000: This injury is so spectacular not just because of how dumb I was being while receiving it, but also as it is an example of polyphase deformation! I even took a picture of it from another angle and color-coded it from oldest (blue) to newest (red) so you can follow along at home. Callan Bentley would be so proud.

Deformation event 1: Road rash from bike accident in 1993. (The pedestrian who stopped while crossing the bike path to take a smoke break got it a lot worse.)

Lineation 1: Structural geology masters field work in the Sierra Gigantes above Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico in 2000 – On the discovery of a gorgeous vertical Pliocene dike intruding a Miocene-aged volcaniclastic sandstone, I decided I had to climb it to get to a plateau above the ravine in which my field assistant (Scott G., a fellow undergraduate of Callan, in fact) and I were taking measurements. A jointed section of dike gave way and I slid down the dike with a piece of the broken volcanic material embedded in my leg, and with little shards of volcanic material raining down on me.

Duct tape over gauze is awesome, if not the most hygienic. I could have shredded my face or chest coming down the dike and we were many hours away from even small-town Mexican medical attention, so I was pretty lucky to get away with the above. But, what I really feel bad about to this day is that I wrecked an outcrop for no good reason. Don’t be dumb like me.

Lineation 2: Fell off bicycle in 2002. Edge of railroad track peeled my skin off in a nice layer. (I’ve asked Rachael Acks to go on a bike ride with me. She may not want to now.)

Deformation event 2: Gouged by furniture while helping a friend move in 2007.

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Show me your injuries! Leave a comment or link to your post below. You don’t have to be a geologist to play; simply having been injured by a rock or while doing something geological is sufficient. I will put the entries together and post them here as well as at the AW site at the beginning of March. The winner (one with the most spectacular wound or story) gets their choice of two bandage tins from this website mailed to them.

Who wants to be a winner? Fine print: Don’t go around hurting yourself to do this. Also, if your battle scar is NSFW, please say so or don’t share.

“Measure the strike and dip on this baby!”

Rocks and Mardi Gras is something I’ve often considered renaming the blog. That or Rocks On The Rocks.

You know, so I can make dumb Carnival time jokes like the one above.