Living in Munich

The mountain "Untersberg" near Salzburg.

Going up Untersberg in an Arial Tram

I'm not sure if this is edelweiss

There is a huge drop off behind me of about 1000 m. I wish I brought my base jumping gear..

Looking south over the Austrian Alps

High Alpine meadows with limestone and karst terrain. The sign said that infiltrating water takes about 60 days to exit the mountain in springs below. That sounds like someone's PhD project.

The peak of Untersberg

A church in Salzburg.

Some really nice conglomerate interbedded with sandstone along the back of Salzburg. Conglomerate is when there is a mixture of bolders, pebbles and fine matrial forming a consolidated rock together. Geologists say it is "poorly sorted" (by size). According to the textbook I read (Davis, Sedimentology) conglomerates are formed by turbidites which are submarine landslides. Usually material deposited in rivers, lakes and oceans (continental margins) are grouped by size. This is because the finer the material, the longer it stays suspended according to Stokes Law of gravitational settling.

The old city of Salzburg (founded more than 1000 years ago) and the fortress above. Salzburg was a rich and powerful city, because of its Salt (Salz) and the fact that it was a powerful seat of the holy Roman Empire.

Mirabelli Palace gardens (Scene from Sound of Music).

Sunset over Salzburg.

My home street.

I have been living in Munich for almost two weeks now. I have an apartment that I share with three other guys (yes the kitchen is messy), but I have a big room with two windows overlooking a little street with a street car, cafes, a bakery, pubs and a fruit market. I have a one hour commute to work every day, on street cars, subways and bus, in north Munich at the German Research Center for Environmental Health. I like the peole I work with. Although there is no airconditioning in our building, it is not Tennessee or Bangladesh so I can't really complain too much.

Munich is a really big city (2.5 million people) in the center of Europe and very close to the Alps. Last Saturday, I visited Salzburg and did some mountain climbing (assisted by an arial Tram ;-). Salzburg is a very beautiful city nestled in a valley at the base of the Alps.

Right now my work consists of going to meetings where I learn about the different projects and people connected with this institute for Groundwater Ecology where I am a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. I also have plenty of work to do publishing the chapters of my recent dissertation at the University of Tennessee. I think I'm also remembering and learning German a lot these days which is coming back to me well. My office neighour is is from Banlgadesh, and I like surprising him with expressions and greetings I learned. I think he likes it, because he always laughs a lot when I say something.

My girlfriend Sarah is doing Geology field camp in Turkey (http://sarahsgeologicadventures.blogspot.com/) this summer so you should check out her blog too.

For the Children of Bangladesh

http://inside.unicefusa.org/goto/Peter.Knappett

I did my PhD research on sanitation and drinking water quality in rural Bangladesh from 2008 through 2010. The frustrating thing about doing a very specific research project was that there were clearly many needs around us that were just as urgent as clean drinking water and sanitation. These include education (literacy is only 55% in Bangladesh), instruction in hygiene and family planning, transportation and city planning and flood control. Out of the many organizations operating in Bangladesh, UNICEF is very widespread and effective at tracking progress and targeting specific areas of need and opportunities for positive change.

What was exciting to see is that only a few dollars makes a big difference in Bangladesh. A man in Char Para, the village I work in, got his rickshaw stolen. We were able to get him another with only 40 dollars! Without this he would have lost his livelihood, which wasn't much (1-2 dollars a day), but enough for him to provide for his family.

One of the people that worked for us while in Chara Para (25 Km east of Dhaka) was Kousa, a really smart, athletic 15 year old. He liked working with us and he learned a lot about drinking water from us in the process. Kousa's family is very poor and although Char Para has a school with teachers, Kousa had to drop out of school at age 8 and go work with his father for a local businessman in a textile factory in his village. These factories are very dark, loud and hot and not very safe. I think that's one reason why he liked working with us outside for a change. Kousa has so much potential to accomplish things (he learned English quickly), and yet because he has very little schooling he couldn't read or write very well in Bangali or Enlgish.

UNICEF in Bangladesh is very aware of kids like Kousa and could do more to help them with our help. What is crazy is that Kousa has worked very hard for 7 years full time only making 1 dollar a day. For 400 dollars, he could have learned to read and do math and gone onto college to become an accountant (national occupation in Bangladesh) like some others in the village.

I'm giving my dissertation defense at the end of April (University of Tennessee at Knoxville) and dedicating the written dissertation to the children of Bangladesh. I'm going to wear my Langi (Bangladeshi man skirt) every day to school (UTK Dept. Earth & Planetary Sciences) from now until the goal of 500 dollars is reached.

Peter Knappett
March 24, 2010

Moving to Munich, Germany

This is possibly the real reason why I'm moving back to Germany... the baking!

The Munich Rathaus (City Hall) with a life size Glockenspiel with little dancers.

One of the many royal palaces in Munich.

Big Church.

The Institute for Groundwater Ecology, my new home.

The German Museum. It is a huge museum containing many inventions from the past 1000 years.

I went on this Nightwatchman tour of the old city center of Munich and heard stories and legends from centuries past. One true story is that they used to bury many people within the city walls, and when the bodies decomposed it caused pollution of the groundwater where people extracted their drinking water! Yuk!

The Scott's Bay Formation on the Bay of Fundy

The conceptual model by De Wet and Hubert (1989) for what Scott's Bay on the Bay of Fundy looked like 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth...

An Amethyst filled fossilized log. Sarah claimed she saw Amethyst while there, and I told her I was skeptical at the time. Not that I know very much about hard core geology, but I just didn't think you would see a mineral that is typically considering an intrusive igneous rock emplaced within a limestone (sedimentary) rock. It turns out you can have both forming side by side at the same time... (picture from De Wet and Hubert, 1989)

That's a geologic map of Nova Scotia, a province of eastern Canada on the Atlantic Ocean. The arrow points the field site on the bay of Fundy dubbed "Scott's Bay". We went there over Christmas vacation with my sister and her family. There we discovered some of the weirdest rocks I've ever seen!

These layers of rock flow like icing through chunks of limestone.

Sarah pointing to the flowing rock layers of deposited silica chert in between chunks of consolidated carbonate mud.

Some of the features out here looked volcanic. Although I wasn't willing to admit it to my brother-in-law at the time, it turns out there was basaltic volcanic rock here (De Wet and Hubert, 1989).

I believe these are stromatolites, piles of fossilized algae, more resistant to weathering the surrounding limestone matrix.

The really high 15 m tides at the bay of fundy allows a unique view of rocks that are being actively weathered by water.

All that red rock coating is chert, a silica-rich rock, deposited by silica-rich hydrothermal springs bubbling up through the carbonate mud of a shallow lake during the Jurassic period. I have never seen so much chert anywhere before. Apparently there are also fossilized logs which fell over and were buried in carbonate mud, and then later filled with Amethyst (a type of quartz which is a silicate rock).

A close up of the stromatolites.

This was the funniest and most humbling part of the day. I was trying to climb down this ice flow that my sister hopped off and landed on ice holding two toddlers.

Birnery De Wet, C. C., Hubert, J. F. 1989. The Scots Bay formation, Nova Scotia, Canada, a Jurassic carbonate lake with Silica-rich hydrothermal springs. Sedimentology Vol. 36, 857-873.

My Trip to Vienna, Austria

Blut wurst (blood sausage), hanchen (chicken), sauerkraut, Schinken (ham), Semmel Knodel (like dumplings) und gurken salat (cucumber salad), great food!

Schloss Schonbrunn, summer palace of the Hapsburg family of 4

Glaciers retreating all over Austria and the world...

Natural History Museum

Art History Museum

Most famous Kaiser of Austria

Old Roman walls and drainage canals from past centuries underneath the city

The Hapsburg's main palace, Hofburg

Inside one of the many catholic churches in Vienna

St. Stephen's Cathedral, one of the most impressive and beautiful in Europe I think. Underneath are catacombs where thousands of dried bones are left over from the black plague

View of Vienna city center from high up in the Wiener Wald

1700 view of Vienna from Belvedere Garden

Pieter Brugel's painting of the Tower of Babel (Dutch)

Palace at Belvedere Garden

Hundertwasser Haus, the architect's name..

My friend Vivien, ex-UW exchangie from France

View from the office of a graduate student at TU Wien

Technical University of Vienna

Austrian National Library

Butterfly house.

Steinway Pianos are made in Vienna.

Karl's Dom

Flight from Vienna to Zurich over the northern edge of the Alps.

What really happens when the cabin depressurizes