olelog

During my 15 years building up this site, the geologic time scale has undergone a surprising amount of revision. But lately—well, for the last year anyway—it's been stable. So I've primped and polished my various versions of the time scale and present them here for your reference and ...

Geologists have a bit of awkwardness in their language in talking about the deep past: distinguishing dates from durations. None of us has a problem with the weirdness of historical time—we can easily say that an event in 200 BCE happened 2211 years ago, and that an object made back then i ...

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 ...

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...

Photographer: Stefan Pleister; Stefan's Web site Summary Authors: Stefan Pleister; Jim Foster The photo above showing a handsome rainbow arching over lush green fields near Korbach, Germany was taken at a meeting of amateur astronomers. An afternoon thundershower had just moved through the ar ...

One of the famous Missoula Floods sites is the giant ripples southeast of Wenatchee. The ripples are on top of a huge flood worked gravel bar on the west side of the Columbia River across from Crescent Bar. I got a nice enhanced view of the ripples this week as they were partially covered with s ...

Yes, that “Recent” in the title was a clue that these are not actually fossils, but the little beauties fit the spirit of our series. This is sand from an unknown island beach in southern Japan. The spotted star-shaped grains are the foraminiferan Baculogypsina sphaerulata (Parker & Jones, 1 ...

And here I was afraid it wasn’t nice to torment readers with pictures of unidentified flowers that subsequently drive them mad as they chase through botanical clues… Well, you say you don’t mind. I’ll take you at your word. I disavow any responsibility for subsequent therapy bills. These shouldn ...

An interesting conversation arose in the comments to Matt’s last post — interesting to me, at least, but then since I wrote much of it, I am biased.  I think it merits promotion to its own post, though.  Paul Graham, among many others, has written about how one of the most important reasons to w ...