Petrified Forest in PLoS ONE

Congratulations to Jeff Martz and Bill Parker on their latest publication in PLoS ONE! It's a wonderfully detailed description of the Sonsela Member of the Chinle Formation as exposed in Petrified Forest National Park.

This new paper resolves a number of niggling problems regarding this portion of the Chinle Formation. It has all sorts of implications for how we understand faunal turnover in the Triassic, among other things. And, the work is ridiculously reproducible! Every measured section has detailed GPS coordinates and photographs. . .contacts were walked out to the bitter end. Geology at its finest!

One of the advantages of an online publication like PLoS ONE is that there are no page limits and unlimited color figures. Jeff and Bill took full advantage of this - the PDF of their paper weighs in 26 pages of geological goodness, and that isn't counting the supplement of 29 pages of measured sections and dozens of megabytes of full-color, high resolution photographs. In short, it's a geological monograph.

Part of the Chinle Formation, with random geologist for scale. Modified from Figure 12 in Martz and Parker 2010.

Another neat thing about this paper is that it's one of the first strict geology papers published in PLoS ONE. With the groundswell of paleontology papers as of late, it's nice to see some geology making it into this major open access journal also. The authors deserve major kudos for their willingness to be guinea pigs.

For more about the paper, check out Bill's post at Chinleana. Or, you can read the whole article here. Do you have a comment or a question, or want to rate the paper? You can do all of that at the PLoS ONE website!

Citation
Martz, J.W., and W.G. Parker. 2010. Revised lithostratigraphy of the Sonsela Member (Chinle Formation, Upper Triassic) in the southern part of Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. PLoS ONE 5(2):e9329. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009329

[Full disclosure: I was the academic editor for this paper, and am a section editor for the journal]

Tragedy in Michigan

I wanted to take a brief moment to call your attention to a situation brewing at Michigan State University - the powers-that-be are on the verge of closing down their Geological Sciences program.

Geoscientists impact our lives in more ways than most of us realize. Did you drink a glass of clean water this morning? Geologists and hydrologists help to keep our water supply clean and safe. Did you fill your car with gas this week? A petroleum geologist helped locate the oil deposits and coordinate their extraction. Do you use a cell phone or laptop? The cobalt in the batteries (and nearly all of the other raw materials) was mined from deposits located by geologists. Did your local roads not wash away during the last major rainstorm? A geologist likely had a role in that too. Not to mention all of the paleontologists, planetary geologists, sedimentologists, mining engineers, and the like who have significant training in geology departments around the world.

Surveys find that we are facing a severe shortage of trained geoscientists in the coming decades, as the older generations retire. Our need for geoscientists is not going away, and closing geology departments is not a way to rectify this.

What can you do? Check out these two posts by Chris Noto (guesting at ReBecca's Hunt's Dinochick Blogs) for more information. Don't let the MSU geology department go extinct!