 Hello and welcome to Geosciences 10, the geology of the national parks. I'm Richard Alley and with Shridhara Nanda Krishnan, my very good colleague, we will be taking you on a tour of some of the most interesting ideas about how the world works and how it affects you and some of the most interesting and beautiful places on the planet. I think we'll have a lot of fun. I think we'll learn some very interesting things before we get done and I am looking forward to the tour. I'd like to start with a little bit of a look at our national parks, just so you know. National parks are an invention of the United States. The first national park was Yellowstone. You see the glorious lower falls of the Yellowstone River here, the coloration of the rocks giving rise to the name of the place. Of course, Yellowstone is famous for the geysers. There's a giant pot of hot rock down underneath there of melted rock that erupts occasionally and causes big trouble and in between it heats things and makes it wonderfully beautiful. This is a geology class, but don't worry too much. We take a fairly broad view of what constitutes geology. We will look at biodiversity. We will look at climate at living on the planet. Here you actually see the tracks of a mountain lion walking across the deposits of a hot spring in Yellowstone. Mountain lions often put one foot on top of the other and give interesting looking tracks so you can see them there. Here you see the tracks of the bison that are famous in Yellowstone and other places. Bison came very close to not making it. Yellowstone was important in their survival. Yellowstone was a little island in which no one could shoot them, no one could disrupt their habitat. The existence of these owes something to the foresight of the people who said, let us save this piece of the world for the public. These things are valuable. This is a picture of a hot spring mat that is sitting right below Old Faithful Geyser. People are prospecting in these looking for interesting chemicals that will help us. There are biotechnology industries that are founded on things that were discovered in Yellowstone, a bug that has learned to live and do things in really, really hot water has ways of doing things that are useful to us. So we saved this as a beautiful place to go see canyons and geysers, but it's turning out to be a place to save lives and make money as well. The Park Service has a very interesting difficulty. They have to preserve and protect, and they also have to allow us to enjoy things. Sometimes these sort of meet in interesting ways. Here you see a bison jam. If you go to Yellowstone, you will also see bear jams and elk jams and moose jams and coyote jams. It's the way the world works. The bison are beautiful. The Firehole River here behind the bison was described by the mountain men as flowing so fast it gets hot on the bottom. Well, no, there's hot springs under there, but it's a beautiful place. I am a geoscientist, a geologist, a glaciologist. I'm one of the luckier people in the world. I get to go to incredibly beautiful places, and people pay me to do things that matter. I'm a happily married person. I have two wonderful daughters, and you see us here in front of a glacier in Alaska, and the truth is we took with Penn State at one point. And I am trained in rocks first, and then in climate and ice and other sorts of things. I studied at Ohio State, and then I finished my studies at Wisconsin, and then I've moved to Penn State and been at Penn State since 1988. So I've been around a little bit now at this point. I have the usual sort of accouterments of someone who hangs around a place like Penn State for a while. I've got a good bicycle. I play a little soccer reasonably badly. I have, as I said, a wonderful family, nice gardens, an interesting collection of critters. Prancer there is about 22 pounds. He's quite a beast. But I do, I get to go to great places. These next few pictures are going to be from the world's largest national park. This is Northeastern Greenland. I study ice sheets, the history of climate that's contained in ice sheets, and whether the ice sheets will fall in the ocean and flood the coasts. And so we get to go to neat places to do this. And so here you can see Corridor and glacier in East Greenland flowing out from Milmilan towards you. The stripes are rocks that it carries along and dumps into the ocean. And I hope you get the vague idea that this thing might actually be moving. If you were to go out on that glacier and put markers out, you'd fall in a crevasse. So don't do that. But if you did and came back and surveyed them later, you actually would see that they are moving. If you do ever get to go to the world's largest national park, Kondra is beautiful in the fall. It's sort of an amazing place to go to. There are glaciers. There's a huge ice sheet in the middle of Greenland and then little glaciers on the side. Those glaciers are actually shrinking now, as is the big ice sheet. And if you see these little red lines, the big outer loop there is where the glacier was 100 years ago. And now you can see the glacier has backed up. It is slowly melting away. Why? We'll get there before we're done. This is the Tundra in the Fall, a little mushroom and some bear berries there looking at you. The colors do turn. They're very pretty. This is a full mar. It's sort of a little albatross. It can stay at sea. It doesn't need to come in for fresh water because it can drink seawater because it has that fancy gland and its nose to exclude the salt. And it's flying over the ocean and the ocean in cold places gets interesting. The marker there on the white, that's frozen ocean water. That's sea ice and the ocean really can freeze. And between that and the open water where that circle is, as you can see into the ocean through the sea ice, it gets warmer and the sea ice tends to melt. The ocean soaks up more heat and that makes it warmer still. So there's some interesting things we will get to chat about in a little bit. These are icebergs coming off of Greenland. A glorious fall day. A fog hanging around up above there and the sun breaking through. It's just such a great place. And this is a musk ox. A musk ox is sort of the same size and shape as a bison or a minivan. Either is fairly similar. It probably has a better acceleration and cornering than a minivan does. They're actually more related to mountain goats than they are to bison. But this is the northeast Greenland National Park equivalent of our buffalo or bison here. And a marker of goodwill. We will see some beautiful things. We will have some fun before we get out of here. My colleague, Sherida R. and I have had some wonderful opportunities in the way of putting together this course. And you will see some very interesting things that we did along with Eric Spielvogel from Penn State's the Education Institute and others. We had the opportunity to get a really wonderful group of advanced students and then go out and tour some of the national parks with the students carrying cameras. And so you will get to see pictures they took. You will get to see experiences they had as part of our cause adventure in the great west. Here's Sherida in Arches National Park. And these are some of the things that we got to do with the Arches people. We did indeed walk through Arches. Why are there Arches? We went to Canyon de Che. What happened to the ancestral Puebloans who lived there? We will get to see that before we're done. This is Eric Spielvogel who put a lot of this together. I'm getting a really good picture for you. And so we got a lot of nice things that came out of this. We took our crew to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We hiked down. We had this glorious moonlet night. If you ever get the chance and light, so you're not going to fall over the cliff and fall into the river and the moon is out. What an opportunity to go with Stephanie and Dave and the rest of the crew and wander through the depths of the canyon and the glorious moonlight that we saw there. When you get in the morning and you're at the bottom of this mild deep hole and the flowers are blooming and the hummingbirds are humming by and there's a lot of geology. If you look into this picture and then you'll see them bend, why do they bend? This will come. We'll get to that. Again, we do sneak up on biodiversity whenever we get the chance and so it's not just most of the parks were built for geology but they're increasingly islands of biodiversity in a human controlled world and we really do rely on the parks to keep things alive for us. Some more of our happy campers on the way up out of the canyon. It is indeed somewhat slower coming out of the canyon than it is going in. A little hotter. We zipped by Glen Canyon. We looked at the lake. Behind Samir here you can see this huge white wall and then it turns orange at the top. That white was fairly recently flooded. The lake is really low. Why is the lake low? The climate has changed a little bit and humans are using more of the water. What does this mean for downstream? What does this mean for the things in the canyon? What does it mean for the Colorado? We will get there before we're finished. Here's our crew. We're rafting the Colorado below the dam. That dam changed everything on the river. What did it change? We will get to wander through that a little bit and see what it means. Again, you will see film clips, items, pictures, excitement that our crew generated for you. You'll get to meet them. You'll get to learn from them, from Amish and others here as we wander through. Here Amish is at Canyonlands filming something about the river before it gets to the dam. Here's a crew. Really excited? We were down on the slick rock in Canyonlands in the early morning here waiting for the sunrise to get off and see pretty things. Here's our crew up in Hidden Canyon in Zion. You walk up this cliff of the chain to get around the corners and that chain is wearing grooves in the rock. You will see a little film clip that they made for you when we get that far and some fun things coming there. Here are ancestral Puebloan sites. Wupaki up there with Dave Whitmer and Laney and Irene down in Mesa Verde and then Kim over there filming just outside of Bryce, actually. Stephanie has gone off to work in parks doing some very interesting things now here with Ranger Jan Stock at Bryce. Here we are looking at a geologic feature and fairly soon we will get to these. You look at the picture there above Dave Genesco and you see that one side is orange and the other side is black. The orange are rocks from a lake. The black is rocks from a volcano and that line where they meet is a giant earthquake fault. What's a giant earthquake fault doing there? Well, Dave has explained it to you and you will get to see this before we get finished. A couple more interesting people in glorious places. Very, very glorious places. These are the wild flowers outside of Kenya lands on the drive in. We could show pictures for the whole semester because it's so cool and so fun but we're not allowed to do that. The university actually believes that you're taking a science course and the university is typically much more interested that you know something about science than that you focus on a particular science such as my science because it's such as the stuff that I really care about. We do have to chat a little bit about science. We will actually throw up some facts before we get done and we will do so. I want you to hark back in your memory for a moment to say taking the SAT or the ACT or the PSAT and MSQT or the CAT or the ETC or whatever you took. Harking back, when I was a student low these many years ago they used to give us questions that involved lists and they'd be down to about question 243 and they'd say okay I'm going to give you a list of things. What would come next in the list? I think they sort of have gotten rid of these questions but you may have run into one that's something like this. Here's question 243 what would come next in this list? You got two, you got four well, what could come next there? You add two to get to four, maybe you add two and you get to six that would be a perfectly possible answer. But you know wait a minute maybe you multiply by two to go from two to four and if you multiply by two well you'd get eight. That would be a perfectly fine answer but maybe you'd multiply two by itself to get to four and you'd multiply four by itself and that would give you 16. And so you'd sit here and say wow this is a lousy question this is a piece of ducky, okay get rid of that one. Okay now suppose that they gave you something that was actually a somewhat better question. So you give you two, four, six, eight what comes next? That one looks very easy. You say oh yes you're going to add two and you're going to get ten. Okay when I was much younger I played Little League we were really serious about Little League and you can't believe it we had lawsuits over Little League but coaches yelling at each other anyway I played Little League it was very interesting undertaking and the coaches used to be really big on having us out there doing infield chatter. Now we were not out there chattering uplifting and morally relevant statements we weren't saying batter do your best for your team and country. We were out there saying hey batter your shoes untied. Hey batter you're ugly. Hey batter hey batter hey batter swing two four six eight batter's got a belly ache. Okay so it could have been ten we would never out there go two four six eight ten twelve in the Little League we were out there saying two four six eight batter's got a belly ache. Now this actually might be relevant to something. If you were sitting there saying two four six what comes next eight you get it right and you sit there two four six eight one comes next and you say ten you get it right you say I know what's going on but if you're you're out there playing Little League and you're saying two four six eight ten you've got it wrong. Your ability to see two four six and fill in eight doesn't prove that you know what's going on because if you thought you were taking the S-A-T and you're really playing Little League you got eight right but you got the next one wrong. Two four six eight ten twelve and the batter that might have worked actually the batter looks at you says what's wrong with you and the bench goes right by but that is not the way one does it. This does feedback into science. This is relevant to science and let's look at how this works. What is science? It's humans. It's humans doing human activity. There is no crank that you turn that says that spits out knowledge. Science is done by humans. They are humans who have foibles and failing. They are humans who have mistakes. They cheat and lie and steal. They have mating rituals. They're just like everybody else but science has a very loose set of rules that allows it to do better at some things than other human activities. It's very limited. It does certain things well and it doesn't do other things at all but the things that it does, it actually works on. So what is science? The first thing in science that you do is you find something interesting. You got to care about it. It has to matter people. You go out and look at things and you find something interesting. This is cool. I could learn about this. What you then do is ask, what do we know about this something? There are many people in the world. There have been many people in the world. Your ancestors were smart. Lots of people around the world in lots of places were smart. You will never in your life reinvent everything they did. So first of all you go and find out what they did. You could call this research. You could call this going to the library. You could go and talk to people. There's other ways to do it but if you're interested in something, you're really stupid if you don't find out what other people knew. They may have your answer for you already. So you find out what's known. Then you say okay, they were really bright people. They did really good things but they were human. They might not have put together everything. They might not have had the ideas that I have. I as a new human standing on their shoulders looking out may be able to improve things. So you take what you know and you say how can I move forward? How can I go beyond them? Where can I get a new idea? This is a fun stuff. No one has any idea where new ideas come from. It may come from dreams. It may come from traditional knowledge. It may come from brainstorming. I take hot baths. I get really good ideas while taking hot baths. I don't know why but it works. Okay, so you look for a new idea. You get a new idea and then you can't stop. If you just stop there are some other human activities. You got new idea. You write your novel and you're there. Okay, but in science you actually have to ask is my new idea really a step forward? Have I gotten somewhere that those people before me did not get? And so you actually have to go test your new idea and you have to test your new idea against nature, against the real world. You have to see if your new idea is better than what other people had done. And the way this is done, and this is a very, very strict rule in science, and this is what said science apart from other human activities, you have to find a situation in which you predict something and the old ideas predict something else. If you always agree, then you have just found a new way to restate the old idea. You actually have to find a place where you say tomorrow the sky will be purple and the other one says no it will be blue where you say if I do this that will happen and the other idea says no, if you do this the other thing will happen. You find a way that they differ. That you make different predictions and you have to predict that you're not allowed to just explain it. You have to predict what's going to happen. Then you set up the situation you see what happens. You can call this making hypotheses and doing experiments. There's lots of terms that you probably learned in fifth grade. It is listed terms of the scientific method. But this is really the scientific method. Get interested, learn, get a new idea, test it, but you have to test it by making predictions. And then you have to see what happens. If your idea repeatedly fails one time, yeah, nature might be fooling you, you know there's lots of things can go wrong in an experiment. Your new idea just keeps it fails it fails it fails throw it away you were wrong. Even if you loved it, even if you desperately thought it was a beautiful idea if it fails you gotta throw it away you're wrong. It succeeds. Okay? If it succeeds are you right? And this is the point where we go back a little league in two four six eight. If your idea succeeds you make the prediction correctly over and over and over again. It is possible that it is true. You have truth with the capital T you've nailed it it's there there's choir singing and everybody's giving you, you might have it right. Alright? You might have been close. Isaac Newton came up with rules of physics. Isaac Newton is really really accurate for a lot of things. Scientist started to say well Newton is truth we're done all we have to do is estimate things better Newton's got it nailed. We still teach Newton in physics because it's still very useful. But Newton if you go to really big things you go to really small things you go to really fast things Newton is wrong and you need Einstein and you need quantum and so on now really big is sort of a system or a galaxy and really small is an atom and really fast is 90% of the speed of light so Newton's really good for the world we live in today when people build buildings they don't actually worry too much about quantum they use Newton's laws but Newton is not right he's not true in any way shape or form he was just close he's useful. The other option of course is that you got it right but you were just lucky and this is where you're sitting there two four six what comes next eight and you say two four six eight what comes next ten and you're playing Little League you got eight right because you were lucky not because you knew what was going on and so there's three options if you make your predictions right you may be true you may be close you may be lucky no one ever actually tells you you are now playing Little League nor do they tell you you're now taking the SAT in the real world and so you never will know so science is not really about truth with a capital T in fact if there's one thing that we do know that comes very close to truth with a capital T it's that eventually as a professor the students always show us up the students learn something we don't know the students find some mistake that we have made and so the experience of every professor in history is to watch students go blazing by at full speed which in turn says that the professors did not know everything and was not truth with any capital T and so science is not really truth with a capital T what science is is building our ideas will be revised it's getting better it's getting closer to being really good to having it really like and keeping on doing this get a new idea test it if it's better than the old one keep it get a new idea test it if it's better than the old one keep it accumulate the knowledge accumulate the wisdom of the brightest people in the world over generation after generation always testing it against nature to make sure that it works and pull this together ok now we will occasionally trip over some questions that are very interesting to people there are people who say look the world is no older than written history I have a sacred book and the story in this goes back 6000 years and that's it and I know this this is revealed truth ok and the scientist said well no it doesn't look that way I have counted more tree rings than that no trees without annual layer so we will come to interesting questions like this we will come to questions of evolution and other sorts of things and when we do we should chat about them a little more these are things that matter to people there are things that matter in politics they stir up a lot of fervor and fever on many sides and it's not just both sides there's all sorts of interesting ideas floating around out there when we get there just remember what science is it's subject to revision it is not truth with a capital T what it is though and I think that everybody sort of knows this if we pretend that science is true we are successful I did not die in second grade of a really virulent fever because somebody had antibiotics that were generated by science I walked in this building and I did not worry that it is huge open space with these heavy things over my head that it was going to come crashing down on me and kill me I am speaking to you through the wonders of a cup of sand a cup of oil a little bit of red rock and an amazing amount of intelligence and science that turn them into computers and fiber optics and other sorts of things so that we can actually chat this way if you were to get lots of different groups of people around get the volleyball team and the knitting circle and the bridge club and whatever else get a whole bunch of different groups of people and give each group a cup of the right red rocks a cup of sand a cup of oil and say turn this into a computer communication system science and engineering have done this and I am reasonably confident that the volleyball team and the knitting circle will not succeed in doing so science works and it works really really really well it works it works it works there just isn't much doubt about this if you complate to engineers ok once you have the idea you got to turn it into reality you got to make it work and then you need business people to sell it and what have you but science really really does work it's one of the great things of humanity it's one of the things that allows us to get new ideas allows us to share information it allows us to communicate now I would like briefly to just tiptoe around some other ideas that you would probably get in different classes to a greater extent we're coming to you as a communication medium we're coming to you over the internet we're chatting about way things are the internet has changed a lot of things we can sit at home and we can google each other and we can find out what's going on and that's pretty fun it is sort of changed information if you go out and look on the web at the certain things that we will talk about in class evolution, climate change, age of the earth what have you you will find an incredible spectrum of views out there some of which are based on this vast pyramid of knowledge that's been put together by humans in the scientific method over thousands of years and some of which are based on somebody sitting down in front of a computer at a blog and typing what they think and you pull them up on the search engine and they all pull up as being equal they just show up there's no sorter in there and so why should you believe my communication that's a scientific communication and not the blogs that you will find that say oh he's an evil liar he's trying to corrupt your poor minds and so I presume the great majority of you actually have a pretty good understanding of this but it's worth just a word or two to chat about that there are so many different sources of information you could go to an internet you can go to magazines you can go to books you can go to the scientific literature and you know where I'm going the scientific literature is the one I want you to sort of lodge in your brain for a little bit there is a great difference in some of these communications between a blog which may have nothing behind it but the informed or uninformed opinions of a scientific result that we're going to try to present here in class which has sitting behind it this pyramid of knowledge of testing against nature by thousands and thousands and thousands of people in all the countries of the world over all of recorded history that's very carefully put together to see if it works you go look and say okay in the internet side in the blogs there's some great stuff out there but there's a lot of garbage out there too there is just ducky knee deep or higher and as you go from sort of the internet through these other things what you find is you get to typically better quality information not always not everywhere but typically better quality internet the internet is so cheap it's so easy you don't have to be in it for the long haul there's a huge amount of it that is not carefully examined to see whether it's even vaguely true or not whereas if you get on the other end out there in the scientific literature we jump through incredible hoops to try to make sure that it is basically correct if I wanted to tell you that my new idea works I have to first of all get the new idea then I have to test it then I have to do all this stuff and see if it works and then I have to write it up I have to say that's what I did and you have to be able to know exactly what I did you have to be able to duplicate what I did put it out there tell the truth what I did what other people did and then I send it in and I say please please publish this through the world and they say well no not yet we're going to get a couple world experts and they're going to look at this really carefully and they're going to make sure that you're not lying or cheating or stealing that you have acknowledged the knowledge that you pulled in from other people that you've told us what you did that your results look good that you have run careful tests that your statistics are not cheating and they're going to run a whole bunch of different things and they'll get these world experts to look over it and only after the world experts have said yeah that makes sense and I allowed to put it out there and this still doesn't make it true don't for a minute think that it does but it means that a whole lot of the ducky is missing and if it matters the scientific literature is the place you go to look it may not be friendly it hasn't been distilled in this course we will try to distill the scientific literature into something that's useful but no world experts are actually vetting the last word I just said to make sure it was the right word it is slow it is careful it's not the fastest way to get there there are things that can't you get that out faster this is such a cool idea I really want to know we have to we have to be careful we have to follow the rules when people read the scientific literature they should know that it is standing on this this pyramid of knowledge that comes up from from the depths of antiquity and the care of all these people across the planet and so that's just a little bit of where we're going what we're doing we will get much more down to specifics we will talk about rocks and we'll talk about rivers and we'll talk about glaciers and all sorts of fun things but in the end keep in mind what it is it is humans doing really important things to keep humans happy help us in terrific fed and cured and clothed and housed and healthy and wealthy enough that we can actually worry about big questions of what we're doing here and what we should be doing here but it doesn't really tell us those but it does give us the wherewithal to address those and we are going to address those some subset of them how do we humans stay happy, healthy and terrific on the planet how do we keep from being killed by giant waves and volcanoes and earthquakes and what have you how do we find valuable things how do we track down keeping things alive by going to some of the really beautiful places on the planet with some really good people who worked hard to show it to you and having a lot of fun I personally look forward to the trap and I hope you do too, thank you