In 1987, the Caltech biomagnetist and paleomagnetist Joe Kirschvink gave undergraduate Dawn Sumner a rock sample [from South Australia] to study for her senior thesis. The apparent glacial origin of this rock lead directly to the theory that periodically the Earth has been thoroughly glaciated from the poles to the Equator: the so-called Snowball Earth events. A website dedicated to this theory includes detailed teaching slides, a FAQ, and many other resources on this interesting period in Earth's history.
posted on Apr 21, 2008 - View this thread

Suspending Life. "If almost every species on Earth was killed some 250 million years ago, how did our ancient ancestors survive and evolve into us?"
posted on Apr 18, 2008 - View this thread

The Burning Crater of Darvaza. [Via.]
posted on Mar 26, 2008 - View this thread

Answers Research Journal is a new "professional peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework." Current Volume. Call for Papers.
posted on Feb 2, 2008 - View this thread

The Mystery of the Sliding Rocks of Racetrack Playa. One of the most interesting mysteries of Death Valley National Park is the sliding rocks at Racetrack Playa (a playa is a dry lake bed). These rocks can be found on the floor of the playa with long trails behind them. Somehow these rocks slide across the playa, cutting a furrow in the sediment as they move. Some of these rocks weigh several hundred pounds. That makes the question: "How do they move?" a very challenging one. [Via]. For more in-depth information, including maps and additional pictures, see Paula Messina's website about the Sliding Rocks.
posted on Dec 2, 2007 - View this thread

British diplomat William Hamilton (whose 2nd wife Emma is perhaps best known for having a scandalous public affair with Horatio Nelson) loved volcanoes. His 1776 book Campi Flegrei: Observations on the volcanoes of the two Sicilies* used stunning hand-coloured illustrations by Peter Fabris to demonstrate to the scientific world that volcanic processes can be beautifully creative as well as horribly destructive. [via this post at the nonist, which, in case you hadn't noticed, has been really great lately]
posted on Nov 4, 2007 - View this thread

The GTC (Great Telescope Canaries) sees first light today. Apart from the sheer size (10.4 m) of its mirror and from the science it will deliver, the GTC is remarkable by its location at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory 2426 m high at the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente in the island of La Palma. La Palma is also, for a number of reasons, also interesting for geologists. In that regard, it made headlines a couple of years back due to a paper about the risk of a collapse of the island which could cause a devastating tsunami. Oh, and it's also a really nice place for a holiday.
posted on Jul 13, 2007 - View this thread

Prototaxites, what is it? Is it wood? Is it algae? Why, it's a humungous fungus. Scientists were long baffled by the mystery organism, which was recently verified to be a 350 million year old fungus that stood more than twenty feet tall. It doesn't look like much in the hands of Geologist Kevin Boyce, but the far sexier artist's rendering gives you a better idea of what an odd geological bird Prototaxites was.
posted on Apr 26, 2007 - View this thread

There are holes in the earth's crust! It turns out that the ozone layer was just keeping up with the Jones's; in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, there is a patch of several thousand square kilometers where the mantle is exposed. 'The team of scientists from Cardiff University stress there is no need for the public to panic about the giant hole even though they describe it as "a gaping open wound in the Earth's skin".' The scientific team departs today to investigate the hole. They will be detailing their progress on a blog. And you can ask them questions about their project, which they may answer online.
posted on Mar 5, 2007 - View this thread

The Natural Arch and Bridge Society has many, many interesting pictures and lots of info.
posted on Dec 17, 2006 - View this thread

"You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you?

30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live.
posted on Jul 13, 2006 - View this thread

San Andreas primed to "explode." Growing up in SoCal, we constantly practiced earthquake drills in anticipation of the "Big One." Now, new evidence suggests that the Big One will be even worse than we all feared. At the moment, everything looks calm though. People say we're crazy for living in either San Francisco or Los Angeles, of course we think living in New Orleans is crazy too. But cities are rebuilt. And no matter where you go, you really can't escape natural disasters. Besides, some of the biggest earthquakes in the United States were in Missouri! In any case, Forbes compiled a list of the safest and least safest places to live in the U.S. in regards to natural disasters. Apparently... we should all move to Hawaii!
posted on Jun 23, 2006 - View this thread

The site design is somewhat unfortunate, but The Virtual Cave features lots of photos and information on, well, caves and cave formations. We've all heard of stalagmites and stalactites, but I'd never heard of cave draperies or cave pearls before. Then you've got your helictites, your aragonite, and your splash stalactites (found in lava tubes). And they've got a Show Caves Directory of caves in the United States that are open to the public, with addresses and contact information by state.
posted on Jan 14, 2006 - View this thread

What Aren't We Seeing? Panoramic (high-res) Photographs of Profound Geological Erosion. When we're in Monument Valley, it's tempting to say that we're looking at monuments - large hunks of stone scattered across the landscapes like statues to honor past heroes, or tombstones to honor the dead. A closer look tells us there's more to it than that. As we scan from one "monument" to the next, we can see in each monument a sloping base of roughly uniform vertical thickness and then straightsided rock of very uniform thickness. The rock is the same in all of them, suggesting that they were all part of two (or many more) uniform layers of stone that extended across the entire region. And how about here, where the Front Range and the Great Plains meet. Do you see a fault? An experienced geological observer would see a high ridge to the left with at most a few scattered ragged exposures of rock, whereas a prominent ridge of sedimentary rock juts up in the middle but is nowhere to be seen to the left. The road that we see going away from us on the left side of the image seems to separate two rather different areas. That observation provides us with a hypothesis: maybe there's a fault between two different kinds of rock. (more discussion here, and don't miss the Virtual Field Trip to a Major Unconformity).
posted on Sep 10, 2005 - View this thread

The History & Politics of Geology. College prof has his coursenotes online. Interesting reading includes Alcoa's aluminum monopoly, OPEC & Big Oil, and the Tudor Military-Industrial Complex.
posted on Aug 13, 2005 - View this thread

Athanasius Kircher was the 17th century's Jesuit version of the übergeek. His scholarly attentions were drawn to egyptology, astronomy, magnetism, languages, optics, music, geology, mathematics and many many other pursuits. The "dude of wonders" invented novel machines such as the mathematical organ and magnetic clock, established one of the first museums, published about 40 academic works (with beautiful accompanying illustrations) and was globally revered as one of his time's greatest intellectuals. He is also the main link in the Voynich manuscript mystery. [MI]
posted on Aug 7, 2005 - View this thread

The Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary region is under the ocean, off the coast of Massachusetts. For 11 years geologist Paul Valentine has been mapping this area. Sea floor maps are available. Also, there are many images of features such as glacial valleys and moraines. Other photographs show underwater life.
posted on Jul 23, 2005 - View this thread

Slot Canyons of the American Southwest
posted on May 30, 2005 - View this thread

The Jura's made of karst limestone and, in many places, riddled with holes. Luckily, hidden holes that surprise hikers are tucked away in the dark forests -- on the open pastures, where cows of economic value wander all about, there are far fewer holes, and those holes that remain are curtained all about with barbed wire and, sometimes, stone walls.
posted on Apr 19, 2005 - View this thread

More than 16,000 photos related to the USGS from the years 1868 through 1992 are now available online where they may be easily searched, viewed, and downloaded free of charge. These are old stereo pairs, sites drowned by dams, geologists and surveyers in horse drawn wagons, petroglyphs, national parks, Mount St. Helens, John Wesley Powell, hoodoos, arches, ruins, mines...
posted on Apr 14, 2005 - View this thread

The U.S. Army Permafrost Tunnel provides researchers a unique opportunity to study the composition and behavior of ice structures, ice-saturated soils and frozen bioorganics dating over 40,000 years before present.
posted on Apr 5, 2005 - View this thread

Instead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice.
posted on Jan 21, 2005 - View this thread

Mount St. Helens Erupting.
Anybody have any money riding on this?
posted on Oct 1, 2004 - View this thread

Can we predict volcanic eruptions? PBS aired a NOVA program called "Deadly Shadow of Vesuvius" in 1998 which suggests that we can by monitoring small scale earthquakes which "swarm" as an eruption approaches. Why is this important now? Look at this map, which indicates the occurence of over 40 earthquakes under Mount St. Helens just today, with 10 being over 3.0 on the Richter scale. The Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network has issued a series of alerts with more detail. National Geographic is reporting that an eruption is imminent.
posted on Sep 30, 2004 - View this thread

Virtual Iceland Field Trips. 'Interactive geological map of Iceland showing 7 areas for which virtual field trips can be viewed. Choose, for example, according to the geology or age of the country to see the variation in landscape. '
posted on Jul 20, 2004 - View this thread

Sustainable oil? Over the past few years there's been a growing theory that oil is not created from the decaying remains of ancient biological life but is in fact a product of the Earth's geological processes and that the current estimated oil reserves may be off by a factor of 100. This theory was made popular by Thomas Gold at Cornell way back in 1992 and has led to much more recent research (warning: heavy scientific conent) which supports the theory.
posted on Jul 15, 2004 - View this thread

Ice Age Floods Institute. In recent geological time immensely powerful, cataclysmic Ice Age Floods regularly swept across the Pacific Northwest. A proposed Ice Age Floods National Geological Trail is in the works. Virtual tour of Glacial Lake Missoula.
posted on Apr 19, 2004 - View this thread

Quake to hit LA "by September 5," predicts a geophysicist at UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Some skeptical, while others say it's not junk science.
posted on Apr 15, 2004 - View this thread

GEODE (Geo-Data Explorer) is a free service offered by the U.S. Geological Survey.
It allows the user to retrieve, display, and manipulate multiple types of information, such as satellite images, geologic maps, graphics, live camera feed, three-dimensional images, and spreadsheet data.
posted on Jan 28, 2004 - View this thread

Earth Scientist's Periodic Table.
posted on Dec 30, 2003 - View this thread

6.5 Quake Hits Central California. Felt for over a minute in San Jose, about 50 miles south of San Francisco. Interesting time to discover the oft-defunded USGS's instant earthquake news page. Talk about dynamically generating your pages your pages from the ground up...
posted on Dec 22, 2003 - View this thread

Yellowstone supervolcano threatens world destruction - That's about it, folks: "Volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres, almost two and a half feet, since 1923, indicating a massive swelling underneath the park. "The impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend." says Professor McGuire. "Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash" The Yellowstone caldera has been acting up in recent months and we're supposedly overdue for the big one. But don't flee to the East coast: A super tidal wave will get you there. I hear Tierra Del Fuego is nice, except for the Ozone Hole problem. Have a nice weekend. Y'all.
posted on Sep 12, 2003 - View this thread

Have you ever wondered... Just how long would it take to travel through a theoretical hole to the other side of the earth? Apparently 42 minutes.
posted on Apr 23, 2003 - View this thread

The Melting Snows of Kilimanjaro. Lonnie Thompson, a professor of geology at Ohio State University, writes in the latest issue of Science magazine that the icepack on Mt. Kilimanjaro may disappear within 20 years. Aside from the fact that most of the recent activity could be pegged to global warming, ice cores indicate that a deep drought 4,000 years ago halted the original growth of the icepack. Interesting info on this also available via OSU's research news area here.
posted on Oct 18, 2002 - View this thread

Bus-size jade boulders found in Guatemala Great NY Times story [Google'd here] of archeologists tracking down a mother lode of translucent blue jade after it was exposed by a hurricane. The vein solves the mystery of where the ancient Olmecs got the jade for beautiful carvings like these. Olmec civilization, famous for its colossal stone heads, is itself considered something of a mother lode for later Central American peoples like the Maya. Meanwhile, some scientists in Guatemala are digging up things that are much less fun than jade.
posted on May 27, 2002 - View this thread

Next Thursday, NASA will announce the discovery of huge water ice oceans on Mars. Lying less than a metre beneath the surface south of 60° latitude, the water ice reservoirs if melted would form an ocean 500m deep covering the entire planet. NASA insiders believe these findings could result in a manned landing within 20 years.
posted on May 26, 2002 - View this thread

50 foot long single spar crystals found in a Mexican cave 1,000 feet below the surface! Smithsonian has links to other related sites. This one has pictues. More pictures can be found in the April 2002 print issue of Smithsonian.
posted on Mar 26, 2002 - View this thread

About 250 million years ago all of the continents were joined in a single land mass called Pangea. Then they broke up and drifted apart to their present positions. Plate tectonic projections forecast that 250 million years from now, the continents will once again join up into a single land mass now dubbed Pangea Ultima. JRR Tolkien couldn't have dreamt up a better Middle Earth.
posted on Dec 7, 2000 - View this thread