Tuesday, September 11, 2012

There's Treasure Everywhere


Hello and welcome to Treasure Hunting! My name is Ali Knaak. I am a graduate student working and playing in Golden, Colorado. This blog is a project for my Advanced Science Communication class. The goal is to mix some science with good stories, communication, and discussion to hopefully produce an interesting, engaging blog.

Do you remember as a kid going outside and exploring the backyard? When I was a kid I would explore everything from the nearby creek to dirt piles left from construction. My mom tells me how I would spend hours outside collecting “gems” from the landscaping rocks and bring a big pile inside to keep. (Yep, I had a rock polisher.) I still have some of the rocks I picked up as a child and I still have a yearning to explore. It’s the excitement of a new discovery and finding an answer to a question. I think everyone still has a little kid in them wanting to go discover something. We are hunting for treasure.

Calvin & Hobbes say it best. Source:  http://roy-g-bivblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/calvin-and-hobbes.html
This blog is about treasure hunting – both as an idea and a practice. I think treasure hunting sums up a lot of what we are trying to do in the world. There’s the philosophical idea that everyone is hunting for some treasure but there is also the relentless search for new caches of diamonds, metals, oil, etc. One way that these treasures are found is geophysics. Geophysics uses physical properties of the earth and/or the target to locate and characterize the target and area. An everyday example of geophysics is taking a metal detector out to the beach to find lost rings and watches. Geophysics is connected to many different, relevant areas like gas, fracking, locating unexploded bombs, and finding water such to name a few. My hope is to make these connections more apparent because it will help me understand the goals of my graduate school research in the context of the world and hopefully help you understand how you affect this area of science and how it affects you. I will be exploring these things through this blog. So join me on this journey. Check back in for another post sometime this week.

For day let's just remember: There's Treasure Everywhere!