About a year ago, my grandmother was on her death bed and some of my family got together at my uncle’s house in San Diego, CA, where my grandmother had been living since my grandfather passed away. During this somber time, my cousins and I found solace in thumbing through my grandmother’s photo albums that she created over the years of her life. Within them we found letters, postcards, brochures and tickets from her and my grandfather’s travel, and – of course – photos of all of us as small children. It was bittersweet: the photos captured found memories of our youth, but we also reflected on the loss of innocence that occurs with age.
I realized that there was something about holding the albums full of photos and various artifacts lost in today’s digital world. I decided I wanted to follow after my grandmother and start scrapbooking my life’s events, a sort of “analog” version of social media that has become such an integral part of most of our lives.
Taking things back in this way has helped me realize some things, like how I have a certain type of creativity that I don’t always get to explore – by making something just for the sake of making it – or how one terrible photo can jog a memory of a significant event just as well as (if not better than) ten beautiful ones. I find it as a way to do something useful with all of the personal artifacts I’ve been collecting over the years and in turn, reduce my clutter. I’ve also lovingly shared stories and memories with friends and family as they look through my creations.
Anyway, last weekend I was scrapbooking a trip to Europe I took last summer and I thought I’d write about it here.
In Late August 2022, I attended a workshop in Hévíz, Hungary called the Ada Lovelace Workshop on Modeling Mantle and Lithosphere Dynamics. The meeting’s namesake, Ada Lovelace, is commonly credited with being the first computer scientist because she recognized the potential for mechanical analytical machines beyond pure calculation and was to come up with what would later be considered the first computer program.
The Workshop, named in honor of Lovelace in 2020, is held every two years in different locations throughout Europe and last year it was held in the town of Hévíz, Hungary. This location is known for thermal Lake Hévíz – the second largest “thermal lake” in the world and the largest one with temperatures suitable for swimming.
What makes Lake Hévíz a thermal lake? Hungary is situated in an area known as the Pannonian Basin. This basin resulted after smaller continental fragments collided with the European continent. Starting at about 17.5 million years ago and continuing for about 10 million years – during the middle-to-late Miocene – basins formed behind the Carpathian Mountains as the continental crust extended up to 100 km in an East-West direction. The depth of this extension varied with distance from the Carpathian Mountain range.
Researchers posit that southward (and eastward) migration of the extensional zone occurred and the most internally situated portions of the basin were associated with the greatest depths. That is, the inner basin formed from extension of the entire lithosphere (the crust and uppermost mantle)!
Image Source
When the lithosphere extends in this way, it is thinned out and the deeper, hotter mantle “domes” and becomes situated closer to the surface. Even stranger is that lithosphere of the Pannonian Basin is about two times hotter than would be expected from these types of extensional processes alone. The paper cited attributes this extra thermal energy to “unknown processes in the lower lithosphere”. A more recent paper suggests that the higher modern temperatures are due to the fact that sediments that subsequently filled the basin are good insulators of the hot rocks at the base of the basin. In other words, cooling due to exposure at the surface has been significantly slowed. This has resulted in geothermal gradients (increases in temperature with depth) of up to 50°C/km in the uppermost 5 km of the crust. That’s about two times the global average.
What I found most interesting while looking up the geology of the Pannonian Basin was the tectonics that resulted in its formation. The tectonics of this area is related to the overall mountain building period associated with the formation of the Alps: The Alpine Orogeny. The Alpine Orogeny is linked to the Himalayan-Tibetan Orogeny (the mountain building period resulting in the formation of the Himalayan Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau). They are associated because they began around the same time and resulted in the closure of an ancient ocean known as the Tethys Ocean. Further, there are similarities in the respect that there are large-scale extensional features that form in a dominantly convergent setting. The discovery of this for the Himalayan system was groundbreaking, and actually involved my PhD dissertation advisor.
I think that has influenced what I find interesting and important when learning about the geology of new places. I often link what I find to what I’ve become most familiar with during my studies. I’ve written it before here, but I’ll say it again: “the best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks”. Because I think it’s human nature to relate what one has experienced in the past to what one is experiencing for the first time.
The power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
William Plomer
The writer William Plomer described creativity as “the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.” If it is in fact very human to relate past experiences to new ones, everyone is creative and whether it be scrapbooking a trip I took almost a year ago, learning about the geology of a new place and connecting it to something I’ve spent years learning about, looking at spreadsheets full of model-derived data trying to see if any patterns develop, or even writing this blog: I get to be creative every single day.
Creativity is exactly what science is to me. As I learn more about geology, I learn more about the ways in which different physical systems that contribute to shaping our planet depend on each other, in sometimes unexpected ways. As part of my dissertation research, I’m seeking to learn how to determine the specific ways a single parameter, for example, effects how we interpret an entire complex model of the earth. In essence, I’m trying to disentangle a web of interdependent physical parameters and processes and in doing so, understand how they all fit together in the first place. By Plomer’s definition then, my science is nothing other than an act of creativity.
OROGENY ODYSSEY 