061419d

Good news for a Friday. Scientific paper that I sent off to a major journal about a month ago has been accepted. We will have to make a bunch of revisions, but the first hurdle has been cleared.

The paper is about a strange little fossil mound (like a reef, but without a rigid framework) constructed by a new species of organism, along with some familiar critters.

111318b

I have finished with my latest revision of our interminably in-preparation manuscript about a fossil mound in north Alabama. We really are getting closer to being done, at which point we will be ready to send it out for review  and have it return, perhaps much later, covered with red ink (digitally speaking). Now it's time to get back to my other big project, revising a  30 year old book, and greatly expanding it!

071218b

fossil reefs
in North Alabama
who put them there
to fool us into thinking
the sea occupied that place
long long ago
which has primacy
evidence of our senses
or someone waving an old book
if you even have to ask
you are headed the wrong way

040417b

A Paleontologist Stares out the Window


Describing a mass of tiny tubes
left behind by critters 300 million years ago
they grew in a barrier inlet
that had no name
with sea lilies and more fantastic things
but who were they
and why do we find them
nowhere else?

012517

Why do we care about these reefs
dead 350 million years
scarcely impressive when alive
now just blobs in rock
dissolving in the acid rain
will the Great Barrier Reef die twice too?
We are killing it softly
in 350 million years
will anyone mourn its etching
corpse?
Scholarly publications will be more concerned
with that peculiar, short-lived race
that poisoned the planet so thoroughly
it took millennia of millennia
to recover

There are times in earth history
almost devoid of reefs
their bland and ugly cousins
small and unassuming
their time comes once again
with the corals dying
algae and bacteria
bastions of reefs 350 million years ago
750 million years ago
and for a billion years before that
once again will rule the seas
parrotfish will call them Lord
we won't call them anything
you can't do that when you're dead

What I should be doing instead of writing this

Well, there is always my regular work. Plus, in a few weeks I will be speaking to the Birmingham paleontological society about fossil reefs. Not long after that I will be speaking to a group of seniors, taking a class about science for nonscientists, about trace fossils. That talk is more or less ready, but I last did the reef 113 years ago and it needs updating.

042116c

Now that I have mailed every copy of 102 (except one new subscription: thanks!) I am back to work on 103. And I am reading submissions for 104.

At least, that is what I will be doing tonight. For now, I am reading articles about microscopic critters that helped build reefs. Some pretty amazing little fellers were doing this 330 million years ago.

My latest geological publication

Kopaska-Merkel, David C., and Haywick, Douglas W., 2014, Small carbonate buildups in the Bangor Limestone (Chesterian) in and near Alabama, in, Puckett, T. Markham, and Rindsberg, Andrew K., eds., Stratigraphy and depositional systems in the Mississippian strata of the Appalachian Plateau, northwest Alabama, A guidebook for the 51st annual field trip, Alabama Geological Society, Tuscaloosa, p. 111-138.

Abstract

Carbonate mounds in the Mississippian of Alabama are small, unobtrusive, and sparsely distributed. Of eight known mounds, six are in the Bangor Limestone (Chesterian), one is in the Pennington Formation (late Chesterian), and one is in the Tuscumbia Limestone (Meramecian), in the subsurface. Nine other small mounds are known from the Bangor in southeastern Tennessee. A small Bangor mound in Blount County, first described as a rugose coral colony by Andronaco (1986), is here reinterpreted as a composite of coral colonies and muddy domains held up by a consortium of microbes, sponges, and fenestrate bryozoans. This is the first such mound reported from the Bangor.

no gnus are good gnus

They get such a bad rap! It isn't true, anyway. Dreams and Nightmares 99 is at the printer. I sold two poems yesterday, one in only about an hour. The surprise lilies are not opening very quickly this year. That might be because the summer has been so dry, because the temperatures seem close to their optimum. Speaking of which, it was only 11° C this morning, though as a low temperature for the day that is not bad at all. I hope all of you who are poets have been writing horror verse for Halloween haiku II. These annual anthologies from Popcorn Press are a lot of fun. Even if you don't feel like writing poetry for the book, you can visit their kickstarter and contribute a little bit that way. Last night I started reading Kim Harrison's last Hollows book. I long for the days when I could have stayed up all night reading. I'm pretty sure I will finish the book tonight and so far it is just as good as its predecessors. Which is to say, you should buy it. I recently wrote a humorous children's poem that my writing group unanimously said should be in a book. I guess I need to get busy and write a few dozen more of them! For now, though, I am working on an article about fossil reefs for a field trip guidebook. I won't get to enjoy the fieldtrip, but I can contribute to it. Also, this article will be one that a colleague and I didn't find time to write years ago and now we can get it done.

geological sf

http://www.dailycabal.com/2009/12/speaker/