SUPRISE......New Steve Q'n'A, Recorded Nov 6th 2006 Options

[djellison]

Everyone likes suprises right....

At very short notice ( <36hrs ) - Steve and I managed to meet up in Milton Keynes yesterday evening and do another Q'n'A - this time an hour long talking about everything that's gone on in the last 12 months or so since the first Q'n'A last September.

http://www.rlproject.com/audio/ss_qna_071106.mp3
Approx 14 Meg, 1 hour 48 seconds long.

Sorry I didn't have time to do a call for questions - but with the time between knowing it was on and doing it being so short there just wasn't the time to call for them, plough through them and then pick them...I think I got through all the good stuff though. I tried to see any left over stuff mentioned here, things that might have been asked for a Pancam update but better suited to Steve rather than Jim - and I was able to ask my admin team if they could think of any as well ( thanks guys ).

This time it was on the lounge area on a hotel landing....no ducks or wind noise - but occasional passers by heading to and from their hotel rooms - I hope the quality's good enough (I think it is)

If someone wants to put down time markers for transcription and people do the same as last time, I'd be happy to put together another PDF like last time.

Enjoy!

Doug

[CosmicRocker]

... Also, I'd like to help for transcription, but my english is not good enough (you know, I understand "James" when "Michael" is said )

Haha! That's pretty funny, climber. I thought my English was decent enough, but I had a devil of a time translating Doug word for word.

Doug: Here is Part 10. You will probably want to edit at least some of my interpretation of what you actually said. I did not include all of the umms and uhs and repeated words, only enough to capture Steve's unique style. His main monologue in this section was so long that I broke it into a few paragraphs that seemed logical to me.

[Part 10]
…Note to Doug: You may want to check my interpretation of what you said.
…49:24

DE: Have you been able to see in any kind of the outcrops that have been so amazingly visible, anything you can go, ah yes, I can see how that ties in to what we saw in, in Endurance?


SS: Yes.


DE: (a few difficult to decipher words.) So, are we seeing higher, lower, both?


SS: Probably both. I think we’re seeing both higher and lower. Umm, that’s a guess. But uh, we’ll be able to back that guess up, umm, as we get more information. The reason I think we’re seeing higher is because I think there is a plausible scenario which we have actually gone uphill, up section a little bit, as we have moved to the south. Uh, there’s a good chance that’s why the blueberries went away for a while. We always had blueberries strewn about the surface. Of course, those can be moved by the wind. Uh, but there were stretches of time where the rocks had either these just little micro-berries, or no berries whatsoever, and one plausible idea there is that the berries, being concretions, they form as a consequence of there being groundwater. Groundwater will rise to a certain level, and then, you know, not above that, and it may be that we got high enough stratigraphically that we had got into regions that had not received that influx of water. The water just had not risen that high, uh, so we effectively got above that ancient water table and you lose the berries.

One of the interesting things was, this was fascinating to me and not unexpected…But if you noticed, soon as we got into the annulus, which is the ejecta from deep in Victoria Crater, all of a sudden we started seeing great big blueberries again, which we hadn’t seen in a long time. And so, what that says to me is that there are blueberry rich strata down in the crater that are full of big, ripe, juicy blueberries like we used to see back in Endurance. So, I think we have moved up section a little bit, but I think once we get down in the crater, the big blueberries that you see in the annulus suggest that down in the crater somewhere you are going to get back into that blueberry-rich stuff. And the crater is so deep, that I expect it also goes deeper, goes lower in the stratigraphy than we saw at Endurance.

To me though, the thing that’s most intriguing about Victoria is that for the first time, it really allows us to do good lateral stratigraphy. OK? Umm, we’ve never really been in a place where we can look at stratigraphic changes laterally over distances of hundreds of meters. Endurance was not big enough to allow that. There were only a few good exposures at Endurance anyway. Whereas this place, we can study, going from one promontory to the next, to the next, we can see changes in the stratigraphy, if they’re there. And in fact, we are already getting strong hints in some of the images that there are lateral changes in the stratigraphy.

If you think about it, any depositional process, any geological process that you name, has some kind of characteristic size scale, over which it manifests itself. Uh, think of a sand dune, Ok? We think that many of, we think that much of the stratigraphy we are seeing, both in Endurance and here at Victoria, is eolian…is dunes and sand sheets. Dunes have a finite size. You know, they’re not infinite in scale. A dune will be fifty meters, a hundred meters, two hundred meters across. Something like that. They have a finite size scale, and what that means is, if you had a geologic record someplace that consists of preserved sand dunes, you’re going to see these preserved duneforms fattening and thinning, you know, pinching out, over lateral scales on order of a hundred meters, for example, and so what we’re very interested in doing, to help us confirm this idea we’ve had for a long time, that we are in fact seeing lots of eolian crossbedding in these craters, is to look for what geologists call lateral facies variations over length scales that are the characteristic size scales that you would see associated with certain sorts of processes. So, we think we can learn a lot, and this is what really makes Victoria unique, besides just it’s depth…We think we can learn an awful lot by sort of driving from promontory to promontory to promontory, and imaging each one, and seeing how things change.


DE: Each one gives you a slice of the pie …


SS: Vertically!


DE: …and you just kind of tear the pie apart…


SS: Ah, yeah, something like that. At Endurance we were able to go vertically…very nice, very good, systematic stratigraphy over a depth of about seven meters or so. But here we can do both vertically and laterally, and that’s much more powerful than either one individually.
…54:19