Playing with PSICAT

PSICAT is a nice piece of Java software programmed by Josh Reed which is an excellent tool to draw sedimentological profiles. It was used and promoted within the CHRONOS project and Josh brought it to ANDRILL where he used it to document this exciting antarctic drilling program.

The tool is useful for 95% of all cases when you wish to provide nice graphs and illustrations of your profile. However, it is a bit specialized on core descriptions. For example, if you need to document outcrops and you are used to describe it from the bottom to the top you will feel a bit lost, as PSICAT expects core descriptions which start at the top of each segment.
On the other hand it is very flexible, you can for example add e.g. lithological styles and patterns etc..

For us developers it offers a cool XML export, which allows to use the data within other programs. For example, PSICAT data can be used in the ICDP core decription tool 'DIS' as well as within the extremely cool 'CoreWall' which is used for IODP. As far as I know PSICAT is going to be merged with the Corelyzer tool soon.

... What a coincidence, I just started writing this post on PSICAT and saw Johannes post on profile drawing software.

Ping! Please take the Geoblog survey

Some of you may not yet have noticed the new geoblog survey which aims to collect representative data on the geoblogosphere. Sorry for using this rather unusual mass pingback to attract your attention on this.. but the survey will only be online until the first of November 2009.
So please take the survey, it only takes some minutes..




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New candidate smoking gun for K-T boundary

So far, the Chicxulub crater has not convinced me as the source of the global iridium anomaly that marks the K-T boundary. Other extinction events have already been linked with trap volcanism (P-T boundary, T-J boundary [see also this blog entry]) and therefore I had always favoured the Deccan traps as a major contribution to the environmental changes that lead to major extinction at the K-T boundary.

Now I might be able to have the cake and eat it. A structure known as the "Bombay High", which previously has been investigated as a reservoir of hydrocarbons, is now tentatively identified as a meteorite crater. Since the object that made this crater must have had a diameter of 40 km, comparable to the asteroid Ganymed, the crater should actually be classified as an asteroid crater. With a diameter of 500 km it would also be the largest known impact structure and much younger than impacts of comparable size.



The GSA press release says:

"It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place. It is likely that the impact enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India. What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate, and sent them drifting toward Africa.

The geological evidence is dramatic. Shiva's outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500 kilometers in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as the Bombay High, which would be 3 miles tall from the ocean floor (about the height of Mount McKinley). Most of the crater lies submerged on India's continental shelf, but where it does come ashore it is marked by tall cliffs, active faults and hot springs. The impact appears to have sheared or destroyed much of the 30-mile-thick granite layer in the western coast of India.

The team hopes to go India later this year to examine rocks drill from the center of the putative crater for clues that would prove the strange basin was formed by a gigantic impact."

Sankar Chatterjee, The significance of the contemporaneous Shiva impact structure and Deccan volcanism at the KT boundary, 2009 GSA Annual Meeting, Portland, OR. [Abstract]