Crystal House

A fellow named Roger Hiorns has created a giant sculpture he calls "seizure".
He covered the interior of a house with giant blue crystals.
But god, all the glue-gunning sounds so exhausting.
So, instead, he sealed the house, and poured in from the top ~90,000 liters of copper sulfate. A few weeks later, he drained the house. (I'm presuming it wasn't as dramatic as, say, opening the door and letting a flood of blue flow out.)

Personally, all sarcasm aside, I think it's a pretty cool project. It reminds me a lot of photos from the Poles, with the ice crystals clinging to everything. It also is a cool example of how substances bond into crystalline shapes, and lord knows how I love bonding.

More details here and here.

(via apartment therapy

Cueva de los Cristales

Um, wow? This is a shot from a cave discovered in 2000 in Mexico by some miners. Definitely on my list of Top Ten Caves to Visit.
For a better description, head to Geology News.

To survive.

From OlyBlog.net.

Costco is a bad idea though. The large glass doors would be too difficult to blockade.

Cupola.

I don't have time to complete blogging about my badass rock vacation this summer, but I can share this photo:

This is Hopkin's Chocolate Cave at Lava Bed National Monument. I think it's a cupola: "CUPOLA: A recess in the ceiling of a lava tube. Possible origins of a cupola are: a cavity created by collapse, inflation of the roof by gas or lava pressure, or the roofed-over site of a former tube overflow. See also: rise chamber. Cf: alcove. Aka: breakdown dome, ceiling dome, covered skylight, dome, filled skylight, former skylight, old skylight, overflow dome, roofed-over skylight, standpipe chamber." ("Nomenclature of Lava Tube Features"; Larson; "6th International Symposium on Vulcanospeleology")
My parents swung by today, and brought me a dresser and bookshelves! It's fantastic to have an actual living space, and to easily access my books. And I don't feel too guilty, because most of the furniture was just hanging around their house.
So, the week's off to a good start. I'm going to go do my chemistry homework, and, as long as I don't get sucked into Dancing with the Stars, it'll continue to be a good week.

Oregon Caves: A Brief Introduction

Oregon Caves is eroded out of a giant chunk of marble, metamorphosed from limestone that was scraped off the Pacific plate. The black lines are graphite. Only 5% of the world's caves are marble, because it's much more difficult to erode than limestone. This hardness is also why the cave is tiny compared to, say, Carlsbad.

Water drips down through organic material on the surface, picking up carbon dioxide. This carbonic acid drips through the marble, dissolving the rock and collecting the minerals. In the hollow of the cave, the carbon dioxide dissipates, precipitating the minerals, and formations slowly grow.

One type of formation is called rimstone, or gours. These "dams" grow in areas with slow water movement and low gradients.

Back in the 1900s, people destroyed a large section of rimstone in the cave. This rimstone should stretch across the passage.

This is an empty crystal pool elsewhere in the cave. However, it is evident that the destroyed rimstone was covered with crystal.

It is certainly made out of crystal. You can see the tree-like crystal structure.

As a contrast, this is the crystal structure of flowstone.

But observing the crystal structure of these formation should be impossible, because they shouldn't be broken. This piece even has a thick layer of epoxy glued on. It makes me very glum.

But, despite the damage, there are still many cool formations in the cave.

There are also neat cave bugs, like these endemic harvestmen (which are not spiders!) In the winter, they gather inside the cave to stay warm, and occasionally do pushups (no, I'm not kidding you.) They can also self-amputate their legs, and then grow them back. All of which makes them into my favorite insect, ever.

And, on the surface, you can see fawns.