olelog

This is the week when major league baseball starts up again. Right now, a small army of groundskeepers is at work readying the fields of play. And that means their ...Read Full Post

It was a real pleasure today to lead an outing of my city's stair-and-pathway walkers that visited four former quarries (using a bunch of paths and stairways, of course). The four sites had been transformed into, respectively, a shopping center, a city park, a municipal tennis center and a huge ...

In a development that has been years in coming, scientific drillers on Sunday succeeded in reaching a dark body of ice water called Lake Vostok, hidden beneath almost 4 kilometers of the central Antarctic ice cap. It was a thrilling technical achievement that involved the use of kerosene and fre ...

The magazine Geology Today is turning its content into an event, "Minerals and Fossils Explained 2012," during March. The magazine's articles will be bundled for public access, and a panel ...Read Full Post

A lot of geologists have a strong allergy to "the Gaia hypothesis," which is popularly known as the "Earth is alive theory." Geologists in general are allergic to all sorts ...Read Full Post

Isen omkring Nordpolen forsvinder hurtigere, end selv de mest skeptiske...

Det svenske Vattenfall overtog tre danske kulfyrede kraftværker –...

I Sverige har en mineralsamler fundet de første svenske diamanter...

Dig og klimaet Informationscenter for Miljø og Sundhed har i dag (1....

Jordskred, som det der onsdag aften rev 400 meter af motorvej E6 og 300 meter...

Over the past two weeks there has been interesting earthquake activity in El Hierro volcano in Canary Islands. What is so interesting about this earthquakes is the fact they are getting more shallow every day or so. Currently the most shallow activity that has been taking place is around 6km dep ...

A pair of Tyrannosaurus restored in the act at Spain’s Jurassic Museum of Asturias. Photo by Mario Modesto, from Wikipedia. Over the past few days I have written about the dinosaurian Kama Sutra, the idea that sauropods had sexy necks, and how to sex a Tyrannosaurus rex (Answer: very carefully). ...

A tropical cyclone has hit the island of Madagascar, with winds of up to 195 km/h. The damage may be as bad as in 1994, when a cyclone killed 200 people and displaced 40,000. Madagascar, the world's fourth largest island, is prone to cyclones and tropical storms, especially in the rainy seas ...

Dikes are sheetlike igneous intrusions. We usually see them in two dimensions but sometimes they form prominent threedimensional landforms. Here is a photo of a dike I saw while spending a vacation in Tenerife. I didn’t have an opportunity to stop there and inspect it more closely. Even the phot ...

By Bruce Betts I gave the first lecture of my Introduction to Astronomy and Planetary Science course last Wednesday. The video is below. I did a tour of the solar system, always a fun start to things. The course is Physics 195 at California State University Dominguez Hills. It goes out live ...