Geology January 2012 Archive

My last post, and the commenters to it, mentioned various sounds distinctive to geology. After a while the subject turned to sights, beginning with the legendary green flash, a rare ... Read More

In Italy, seismologists who allegedly misled citizens into staying put and dying in the 6 April 2009 L'Aquila earthquake are being put on trial for manslaughter (see past posts here, ... Read More

The lifeblood of science is publication of papers in journals. Many journals are nonprofits supported by scientific societies, while others are commercial ventures. One recent change in this field is ... Read More

The mountains of California have been bare of snow until just yesterday, allowing people to drive all over Yosemite seeing places that are inaccessible in the winter. My sister, an ... Read More

In some respects, science is so far advanced that something the experts consider trivial is astonishing to the public. For a long time, many decades, we've routinely monitored the Earth's ... Read More

Meteorites are always news, especially when they turn out to be Martian rocks. Even more newsworthy is when the meteorites have been observed falling from space. On July 18 of ... Read More

Just as beef and cattle both refer to the same thing but for different purposes, we have minerals that take on different names when they're extra-pretty gemstones. Gemstone users and ... Read More

A powerful group of state legislators in Washington has introduced a bill to liberalize the rules for rock collecting on state lands—including state parks—to match those on federal Bureau of ... Read More

Every day, the search engine Google posts a new graphic version, or "doodle," of its company logo. For January 11, it's a colorful stratigraphic version of "Google" to mark the ... Read More

When you're in geology school, at whatever level, it can be hard to see your future in the real world. The higher you go academically, the more people around you ... Read More

I have David Bressan to thank for learning that Alfred Wegener first spoke publicly about his radical theory of "continental displacement" on this day in 1912, in a talk presented ... Read More

Many years ago I started compiling photos of minerals, mostly my own specimens, and after a while it made sense to me to keep track of them in a big ... Read More

Remember the rule of headlines: If it ends in a question mark, the answer nine times in ten is "No." So when a breathless, fleshless piece in the Daily Mail ... Read More