Geobulletin alpha

Wooster Geologists in Bristol, England 

Bristol, England — Cassidy Jester (’17) and I are spending the weekend in Bristol after finishing our fieldwork in Dorset this week. Our travel and lodging arrangements required a couple of days here before we go to London on Monday and then our separate ways. We’ll continue to sort out our specimens, work on a

“We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope. 

In discussions of open access, it’s pretty common for us biologists to suffer from arXiv envy: the sense that mathematicians and physicists have the access problem solved, because they all put their work on arXiv. That’s a widespread idea, which is why we see tweets like this one, which floated past in my stream today: @RaoOfPhysics

Crushing Ice to Learn About Glaciers & Icy Moons 

To understand how quickly ice from glaciers can raise sea level or how moons far across the solar system evolved to hold vast, ice-covered oceans, we need to be able to measure the forces at work. A new instrument designed and built at Lamont does just

Imaggeo on Mondays: The British Winter Storms 

This week’s imaggeo on Monday’s photography is Godrevy Lighthouse in North Cornwall (UK) experiencing the full force of the 2013/14 British Winter Storms which caused damage across the south west of the country. During mid-December 2013 to mid-February 2014 the UK was hit by six major storms bringing record precipitation, strong winds, huge waves and generating overall hazardous conditions. Despite the overall consensus being that these winter months were very wet, the question arose: did [...]

Iron Fertilization Won’t Work in Equatorial Pacific, Study Suggests 

Over the past half-million years, the equatorial Pacific Ocean has seen five spikes in the amount of iron-laden dust blown in from the continents. In theory, those bursts should have turbo-charged the growth of carbon-capturing algae, but a new study shows that the excess iron had little to no

Geo Talk: One of the youngest EGU 2016 General Assembly delegates sends sensor to space 

Presenting at an international conference is daunting, even for the most seasoned of scientists; not so for Thomas Maier (a second year university student) who took his research (co-authored by  Lukas Kamm, a high-school student) to the EGU 2016 General Assembly! Not only was their work on developing a moisture sensor impressive, so was Thomas’ enthusiasm and confidence when presenting his research. Hazel Gibson and Kai Boggild, EGU Press Assistants at the conference, caught up with the [...]

Earthquake swarm ~125 km north of Kolbeinsey Island 

Donations Please remember to support my work with donations. My main job in this writing is to convert hard to read data about earthquakes or volcanoes into human readable format. It might not sound like a lot, but … Continue reading

New papers on paleoseismology, tsunami, and active tectonics (May 2016) 

Today’s paper round-up covers a very wide spectrum of earthquake related studies. We have work on tsunamis, turbidites, and lake paleoseismology, paleoseismological data from Asia, Archaeoseismology, mud volcanoes, the ESI-2007 scale, and an explanation on what the rise of the Andes is driven by. Enjoy reading! Melnick, D. (2016). Rise of the central Andean coast by earthquakes straddling the Moho. Nature Geoscience. Ansberque, C., Bellier, O., Godard, V., Lasserre, C., Wang, M., [...]

Please remember to support my work (writing on this website) 

Please remember to support my work with donations or by buying from Amazon. My work takes often several hours during the day and my social income is low by any standard. The month of may is also going … Continue reading

Top 10 Unknown Theropods Under 1 Ton 

This is just a list of Theropods (non avian) that were around 1000 pounds.  Image by Shallowell (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons 1. Szechuanosaurus (Szechuan lizard) This was a 20 to 23 foot long 6 to 7 feet and 1000 to 1300 pounds. It’s teeth were 2 to 3 inches long and were thin, serrated and

The Diversity of Echinoderm Anuses! 

This week, in the category of "one of those posts only Echinoblog could write"! Let us explore the vibrant diversity of echinoderm anal structures!! Perfectly SAFE for Work! even though it contains the word "anal" and "anuses" several times! WOO!! Echinoderms are pentaradial (aka pentameral). That is they show a form of radial symmetry wherein their body always occurs around a

Holy moly writing fest, Batman! 

So it’s holy because, well, Easter, and there’s also been a ton of writing in the past few days. I am still healing from surgery but it’s going great, and am back at work, attending art class, and gaming nights round friends’ houses once again. I lost the urge to write when I was stuck

Back in Punta Arenas 

We are pack in Punta Arenas, Chile now. We docked about 8:00 this morning. Now that we're back in Chile, the work is not over! Today Uffe, Dave, and I spent much of our time in the warehouse packing samples for shipment home.The samples have to stay at -20°C during the whole trip back to the U.S. We pack them in special insulated boxes with a lot of "blue ice", which are special ice packs that stay very cold. Here, Uffe and Dave are helping our lab tech Cindy pack a box of soil samples. You [...]

Geotechnical Nightmare #6 

Now we get to the worst part of my fears.  Remember that this is a work of fiction.  My mind does not accept that any of this is actually happening. The pixies have stopped irritating me by moving piles back and forth, and are now going for it.  They will cross the river and completely remove the toe of the slope.  If my fears are realized this will cause all the houses to visit the river.

Taxonomy Day 2016! Museum Collections are the Taxonomist Habitat! 

TAXONOMY DAY will soon be upon us!  On March 19th Several years ago, biologist Terry McGlynn declared a DAY FOR APPRECIATING TAXONOMISTS! who had supported his work. In Biology, Taxonomists are those scientists who IDENTIFY species and work towards classifying and understanding their evolution and "place" in the natural world. Which species is it? The common one? The one we eat?

Making it all work: the crew 

Wednesday is the last day of the cruise – we are zig-zagging back along the coast and will head back to Newport tonight. I am finally getting the hang of walking and living on a continuously rocking

Communicate your Science Video Competition finalists 2016: time to get voting! 

For the third year in a row we’re running the EGU Communicate Your Science Video Competition – the aim being for early career scientists to communicate their research in a short, sweet and public-friendly video. Our judges have now selected 3 fantastic finalists from the excellent entries we received this year and it’s time to find the best geoscience communication clip! The shortlisted videos will be open to a public vote from now until midnight on 21 April; – just ‘like’ the video [...]

Geology Photo of the Week #52 – Looking from the past to the future 

This weeks photo is a beautiful yet sad reminder that Arctic research and work is still a dangerous undertaking just as it was for the early Arctic explorers. The following text is by Vladislav... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Sunbathing in the microscopic desert jungle 

The desert has its own palette, distinctive and at the same time subtle yet dramatic. There are many factors at work creating the patterns and hues of arid lands - obviously the kind of sand, the kind of rock,

Proud of the Linux world 

Sometimes I have something to tell, but also need to realize that it is not so easy to explain. How many times have you heard of Linux, or maybe Ubuntu? Probably very often, right? I imagine that the comments were (between you and those who spoke, newspaper or friend who is): “Do I need to delete Windows?”, “It is easy, just if you know to program!” or “but there are problems with the printer…” But what makes me proud is when I ask the question, but you [...]