October 2005

One of the world’s largest unmined deposits of gold lay beneath a series of glaciers at 15,000 feet in the Andes Mountains. However, a company from Toronto named the Barrick Gold Corporation wants to change that. However, in order to reach the gold deposits they must chisel their way through a large glacier. Naturally, environmentalists are not happy.

Environmental activists in the Chilean capital, Santiago, dumped buckets of crushed ice this year outside the local headquarters of the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold Corp. In June, thousands marched in Santiago and the northern Chilean city of Vallenar, shouting slogans such as “We are not a North American colony” and handing out nuggets of fool’s gold emblazoned with the words oro sucio — “dirty gold.”

The ever-louder protests have drawn Chile’s National Congress into the fray. In August, a parliamentary commission began considering a law that would protect the country’s glaciers from commercial activities, though it has yet to pass any legislation.

Pascua Lama Glaciers

However, with the price of gold rapidly increasing the past few years, the desire to mine these large, untapped deposits will only get stronger. Will Chile bow to the corporate and economic interests? More info from MiningWatch.

After spending the last year pouring over massive piles of research data collected from the Parkfield Experiment, researchers with the USGS have concluded that there was no warning or precursor that would have predicted the M6.0 event that happened on September 28, 2004.

“Parkfield was one of the most promising sites for our research, based on the history of similar earthquakes that struck in 1934 and 1966 with significant foreshocks that were clear precursors of those events,” he said. “But when the quake occurred last year, we were all surprised when there were no foreshocks at all, and no other precursors that could give us a clear and unambiguous signal of the fault’s behavior.

“We were looking. We had the right instruments in the right place at the right time, but there wasn’t a signal.”

Another article on the Parkfield quake can be read at The Australian. More information on the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth is available here.

A study to be presented at this year’s Geological Society of America meeting by Gregory Retallack from the University of Oregon hypothesizes that global warming episodes from large influxes of carbon dioxide and methane could have contributed to “exceptional preservation” episodes.

Well known examples of such preservation of complete soft-bodied fish and other creatures include the Burgess Shale (dating to the Middle Cambrian Period of about 508 million years ago and found near Field, British Columbia) and the Solnhofen Plattenkalk (dating to the Late Jurassic Period of about 150 million years ago and found in Bavaria, Germany). Such exceptional assemblages were thought to have been preserved in environments that were unusually low in oxygen, highly saline, very cold, or extremely dry. What was not suspected until the new compilation was the global distribution of other exceptional fossil deposits of the same ages. Independent estimates of atmospheric pollution crises come from studies of carbon anomalies, microscopic pores of fossil leaves and climatic indicators from fossil soils. Methane outbursts from volcanically intruded coals and submarine gas hydrates are prime suspects for these lethal atmospheric pollution events.

Dr. Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his team of researchers have examined fossilized remains of dinosaurs in China and concluded that there is no evidence to suggest there are feathers of any type present in the remains and that directly linking modern birds to dinosaurs is a serious mistake.

“We all agree that birds and dinosaurs had some reptilian ancestors in common,” said Feduccia, professor of biology in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “But to say dinosaurs were the ancestors of the modern birds we see flying around outside today because we would like them to be is a big mistake.

“The theory that birds are the equivalent of living dinosaurs and that dinosaurs were feathered is so full of holes that the creationists have jumped all over it, using the evolutionary nonsense of ‘dinosaurian science’ as evidence against the theory of evolution,” he said. “To paraphrase one such individual, ‘This isn’t science . . . This is comic relief.’”

The study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Morphology.

Fluid inclusions in rock and ore material are tiny pockets of liquid or gas trapped within rock as it crystallizes. A talk scheduled on Sunday at the Geological Society of America conference in Salt Lake City will discuss the latest research on fluid inclusions and what can be expected from future research as well.

“Not much else was done until Ed Roedder applied inclusions to wide range of geological problems,” Bodnar said. Roedder showed that inclusions could be tapped to determine the pressure and temperature at the time of formation. Roedder’s definitive book, Fluid Inclusions (1984), described what fluid inclusions are and how they can be used. Now 86 and still active, Roedder was Bodnar’s mentor at the U.S. Geological Survey and continues to provide valuable advice and support today.

But fluid inclusions are really most valuable to exploration for metal deposits, such as copper, gold, and lead. Certain types of fluid inclusions are located with certain types of ore.