Recent trainings in Senegal have improved trust between farmers and researchers, leading to increased use of climate forecasts and other information....

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 One of the most important things for me in palaeontology as a whole is never to take fossils for granted. It does not matter that some of them are astonishingly abundant and are so well known that they have little scientific importance. We must nev...

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Two weeks ago today Evan and I hosted a different kind of session at the Canada GeoConvention. It was an experiment in collaboration and integration, and I'm happy to say it exceeded our expectations. We will definitely be doing it again, so if you were there, or even if you weren't, any and all feedback will help ensure the dial goes to 11.

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I'm sure you've already seen the sad news about the tornado in Oklahoma - it looks like it has done a lot of damage and claimed a lot of lives.

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National Blog Posting Month - May 2013 - Comfort Prompt - When was the last time you did something that made you uncomfortable but was ultimately worth fighting through those feelings? ---- This is easy. Last Thursday I went to ... Continue r...

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Thanks to a generous gift from an alumnus of Durham University, IHRR is offering a new Postgraduate Fellowship designed to support a PhD studentship for 3 years in IHRR. The Postgraduate Fellowship will fund a new PhD research project located in a s...

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Up above our last hiking stop on Slickenside Ridge, MOH and I came across this wonderful exposure of a breccia (hiking stick for scale). Here's a closer view, showing massive and drusy quartz cementing  the breccia and filling vugs left in the ...

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Where were we before the craziness that was this weekend happened? Oh. Right. Oregon!

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The Planetary Society just returned from a big trip to Washington, D.C. to advocate for continued planetary exploration. Here's what happened....

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First of all, this tornado was not the biggest and strongest tornado ever recorded on Earth, as one Oklahoma City weather-caster said. We don't know the wind speeds yet, and until then it cannot be given an EF Scale rating. I've seen some things ...

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BGS image ID: P687055Neuropteris obliqua (Brongniart). Kidston negative number: Kidston 1246. Quarter plate. Box 3. 

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This place is going to be Theropod Central for a bit (until the huge volume of ceratopsians kick in), so here's an ankylosaur to keep things ticking over. As usual, enthralled though I was with the exhibitions, I didn't pay that much attention t...

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Boarding the Victoria-Port Angeles ferry this morning, a gang of scooters:

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A massive and violent tornado at least a mile wide smashed through Moore, Oklahoma near 3 pm CDT Monday, causing catastrophic damage along a 20-mile long path. The National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma has rated the tornado at least an EF-4 (1...

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Dieser Beitrag auf Deutsch. Today, I'll finally explain a bit about the sneak previews I recently posted. All goes back to a crazy idea I had a long time ago, which I have elaborated on publicly for the first time in my SVP 2011 talk.  I've writ...

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By Chops Some research came out of RSES last week regarding the rotation of the inner core, and how it speeds up and slows down. This research, made by Hrvoje Tkalcic and others, has got a little bit of publicity (http://rses.anu.edu.au/news-events/...

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I need to apologize to my commentators. I only realized that I had a spam comment tab recently, and I found a bunch of great comments buried there - some from 2011!

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A new report by the Columbia Water Center, produced in conjunction with Veolia Water and Growing Blue, could help expose the real nature of water risk in urban and rural areas throughout the country--even in places that most people think of as having...

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Devastation in Moore (Suburb of OKC). This tornado was 14 years to the month after the May 3, 1999 EF 5. It passed very nearly over the same area. Below is from NWS Norman: Below is the radar image showing  a large "Debris Ball" being picked up ...

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Twenty four years ago, the idea of a CORK was sparked and first recorded on a dinner napkin as a sketch..yes, a dinner napkin. We are fortunate to be onboard with two of the scientists who were responsible for concocting the idea back in 1989-Earl Davis and Kier Becker. A third member of the trio is Bob Carson.

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After so many trips back to the '80s and '90s, it's good to return to a book that's properly vintage. Dinosaurs was number 355 in the impressively diverse Little Golden Book series from Golden Press of New York, and was published in 1959. It was a simpler time, when a kids' dinosaur book could be purchased for a mere 25 cents, and palaeoart consisted of lush forests, erupting volcanoes, and giant lizards...all too literally.

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Lens cap (bottom, left of center) for scale.

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Geokittehs are always good for stress relief.

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Shawnee, Oklahoma tornado, May 19, 2013

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(Click the pic for full-size. You know you want to.) Most cinder cones eruptions follow roughly the same story line: they start with a volatile-rich phase, tossing out bubbly, vesicular lava, with gasses acting as the propellant. A large heap of these cinders form around the vent. Since the slope is limited by the angle of repose- the steepest that a loose material of a given nature can be piled without collapsing- cinder cones tend to all look quite similar. The material they're made of is all vesicular basalt, so they vary in size, but not much in overall geometry.

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