Yesterday was almost the perfect day...

That's right, yesterday, Wednesday March 18th, 2009 was just about the perfect day.  First I had my normal structural geology class where we talked about faults and other cool stuff.  Then there was a pizza lunch with one of our professors who is currently in England running Dickinson's University of East Anglia study abroad program.  He is the man.  It's like having another kid in the department.  Then we went outside and set up the famous liquid nitrogen volcano demonstration for Ben's Volcanology class.  It goes like this:

Materials needed:

1. 10 gallon thick plastic trash can (the industrial strength kind) about 4/5 full of water. Picture this as the lithosphere of the earth.  The lithosphere is the crust and the upper mantle.
2. Piece of plywood about 10"x10" with four bricks bolted onto it.  screw a 20" threaded rod into one of the bricks and attach a metal bottle clamp with an eye hook on the end to the rod.  This is your magma chamber retention system and weight
3. Plastic soda bottles of various sizes.  This is your magma chamber.
4. Packing peanuts to impersonate tuff and other fragments being blown out of your volcano.
5. Liquid nitrogen.  This provides the explosive force.

Set your trash can in a large open area, put a soda bottle in the retention system, holding it down with the eye hook.  Fill if half full of Liquid nitrogen.  Cap it and quickly drop it in the can.  Run away.  The liquid nitrogen will sublime to a gas, increasing the pressure in the soda bottle until it overcomes the confining strength of the bottle causing a rapid expansion in volume of the gas.  This is called an explosion.  It is freaking cool.  A reference video is here.

Then after that I headed down to Brett's for an exploratory ride on some new trails.  The day ended with a dinner of Brett's Bangin' Chilli.  Perfect day...