It took me a little while, but I found one of my earliest research guides that I made for Earth Science in 2002:
I have a particular fondness for this guide because I snuck an Easter Egg of sorts into the guide: a simple link asking, “why would I need a glossary of geology?” That link led to this page which read:
“As years went by, such verbal deposits would thicken. Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve when they meant between two streams, and a perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do. A cactolith, according to the American Geological Institute’s Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was “a quasi-horizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.” The same class of people who called one rock serpentine called another jacupirangite. Clinoptilolite, eclogite, migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pumpellyite. Meyerhofferite. The same class of people who called one rock paracelsian called another despujolsite. Metakirchheimerite, phlogopite, katzenbuckelite, mboziite, noselite, neighborite, samsonite, pigeonite, muskoxite, pabstite, aenigmatite. Joesmithite. With the X-ray diffractometer and the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, which came into general use in geology laboratories in the late nineteen-fifties, and then with the electron probe (around 1970), geologists obtained ever closer examinations of the components of rock. What they had long seen through magnifying lenses as specimens held in the hand — or in thin slices under microscopes — did not always register identically in the eyes of these machines. Andesite, for example, had been given its name for being the predominant rock of the high mountains of South America. According to the machines, there is surprisingly little andesite in the Andes. The Sierra Nevada is renowned throughout the world for its relatively young and absolutely beautiful granite. There is precious little granite in the Sierra. Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, El Capitan — for the most part the “granite” of the Sierra is granodiorite. It has always been difficult enough to hold in the mind that a magma which hardens in the earth as granite will — if it should flow out upon the earth — harden as rhyolite, that what hardens within the earth as diorite will harden upon the earth as andesite, that what hardens within the earth as gabbro will harden upon the earth as basalt, the difference from pair to pair being a matter of chemical composition and the differences within each pair being a matter of texture and of crystalline form, with the darker rock at the gabbro end and the lighter rock the granite. All of that — not to mention such wee appendixes as the fact that diabase is a special texture of gabbro — was difficult enough for the layman to remember before the diffractometers and the spectrometers and the electron probes came along to present their multiplex cavils. What had previously been described as the granite of the world turned out to be a large family of rock that included granodiorite, monzonite, syenite, adamellite, trondhjemite, alaskite, and a modest amount of true granite. A great deal of rhyolite, under scrutiny, became dacite, rhyodacite, quartz latite. Andesite was found to contain enough silica, potassium, sodium, and aluminum to be the fraternal twin of granodiorite. These points are pretty fine. The home terms still apply. The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop granite. They say granodiorite when they are in church and granite the rest of the week”. John McPhee from Annals of the Former World.The first chapter of this book is online. |
My son has been following the NASA Artemis II closely. All week, he has been keeping the NASA Live Stream on as ambient noise in the background. He told me that it helps him imagine himself working on essential differential equations at Ground Control, rather than at the library, studying for his final exams.
I am now also doing this.
I’m currently waiting to find out what today’s wake up song will be.
I have not been following the mission closely this so it was my son who told me that a couple of days ago, part of the astronauts’ mission was to verbally describe the dark side of the moon.
Why do we need astronauts to view the Moon when we have robotic observers? Human eyes and brains are highly sensitive to subtle changes in color, texture, and other surface characteristics. Having astronaut eyes observe the lunar surface directly, in combination with the context of all the advances that scientists have made about the Moon over the last several decades, may uncover new discoveries and a more nuanced appreciation for the features on the surface of the Moon.
I haven’t watched this footage of this moment yet, but I have it cued up for when I’m not at the reference desk…
The astronauts were able to observe and name the geological features of the moon because they were actively studied and were trained to do so
First, the crew participated in a crash course in lunar geology called “Lunar Fundamentals.” This weeklong, classroom-based training offered them the basics to understand lunar geology and the processes that shape the moon’s surface — primarily impact cratering and volcanism.
However, as somebody who has been teaching for more than 20 years, I know the best place to learn about geology is in the field. That’s why NASA also took the Artemis astronauts to a series of field sites in the United States, Iceland and Canada.
Early in their training, in September 2023, three of the crew members — Hansen, Christina Koch and back-up crew Jenni Gibbons — undertook geology training at the Kamestastin Lake impact structure in northern Labrador. Then the entire crew travelled to Iceland in August 2024.
“How the Artemis II crew trained to observe and photograph the moon: A NASA science team geologist explains” by Gordon Osinki in The Conversation, April 7, 2026
In an Instagram story, now vanished, Harvard Art Historian and Scholar of celestial humanities, Jennifer Roberts, pulled an excerpt of the Nasa Moon observation and paired it the written observations of Galileo Galilei, made some four hundred years ago (maybe from this text?).
An expert knows and uses different language than a non-expert. An expert is able to make much more detailed and nuanced observations than a non-expert.
An expert is able to draw on a much larger vocabulary when using a large language models.
If the use of Large Language Models does become a norm in our lives for the years to come, does this mean that more of our educational programs will be dedicated to the study and practice of learning to name what we see?
And will these systems see what we see?