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...

One of the samples I was fortunate to acquire in Texas was this extraordinary thing: Rotated 90° to the right: And then rotated another 90° to the right, so now you’re looking at the opposite side relative to the first shot: This was not a sample I found personally, but one that was collected ...

Wow, these rocks are fantastic! The last two days we have been looking at submarine lobes exposed along the Taranaki coast. Lobes are areas downstream of submarine channels where the gradient decreases (i.e. becomes quasi-flat) and turbidity currents deposit sand in an oblate shape emanating fro ...

Liveleak has just posted this video of a very large open cast coal mine failure in Indonesia.  According to the commentary that accompanies the video, it occurred on 4th January 2012 and resulted in one fatality: [liveleak 08c_1329458958] Whilst the camerawork is shaky (understandable given that ...

As I was going to be away for a few days, I put up this post of a whole series of photos of various crocs and left the readers to guess at their identities. Here I shall attempt to reveal all (assuming I get it right): We start off with a fairly obvious one, the American alligator: Alligator m ...

Photographer: Kelly Whitaker Summary Author: Kelly Whitaker; Jim Foster With it’s odd landform shapes, the Badlands of South Dakota sometimes gives one the sense of being on another planet. These badlands, primarily highly eroded, exposed sedimentary strata, can look particularly strange when ...