olelog

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 ...

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

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...

Using LIDAR remote sensing (light detection and ranging) geoscientists made a detailed scan of an earthquake zone in northern Mexico and compared it with a survey taken before the 2010 Sierra El Mayor Earthquake.  They found that the quake did not occur on a major fault, but through a series of ...

Last week, I received a press release (PDF) with the headline "Big Bend National Park Designated As International Dark Sky Park." Big Bend is one of the dark-sky places that Tyler Nordgren visited during his "Stars Above, Earth Below" tour of America's national parks in 2007-2008. It is also o ...

It may sound like a joke, but it’s true. If you don’t believe me, find an atlas or map and look up Scandinavia: A lot of elevated topography, but no name. I made the discovery when working on my new book Bergtatt (“In High Places”), about 3-4 years ago. In Norway, there is a long mountain ra ...

So, I'm finishing up my PhD thesis, which means I'm working most evenings to put in a few extra hours. My cat Zayna sometimes "helps", and I think this pretty much sums up how an evening of thesis writing goes: We start out very strong and focused: "Principles of Isotope Geology" is an importan ...

Callan Bentley and Robin Rohrback-Schiavone have gigapanned two more sand samples: pyrite sand and actinolite sand. Thanks! The first one contains pyrite and silicate grains from Cyprus. The second one is from Ontario, Canada. I have already written about this sample: Actinolite sand from Ontar ...