Author Archives: Chris Rowan

Golden spike or no golden spike – we are living in the Anthropocene

This is not going to go well. After 15 years of discussion and exploration…Twelve members of the International Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted against the proposal to create an Anthropocene epoch, while only four voted for it. To be … Continue reading

Categories: climate crisis, deep time, geology, public science, society

We are late bending the climate change curve – but bending it still matters

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic introduced us to the idea of ‘bending the curve’: that acting early to reduce infection rates made a huge difference in whether the peak in infections was manageable or not. The exponential nature … Continue reading

Categories: climate crisis, geological thinking, society

The changing picture of the Martian core

It’s now been almost a year since NASA’s InSight lander – home of the first seismograph ever deployed on Mars – was declared dead. But the picture of the Red Planet’s interior being deduced from the four years of seismic … Continue reading

Categories: geophysics, planets

Rivers might not need plants to meander

Here’s a new study that, if true, this would have some big implications for the nature of the sedimentary record for a lot of Earth History. Research from 1.2 billion year-old sediments in Scotland adds the oldest evidence yet against … Continue reading

Categories: geology, geomorphology, past worlds

Has Earth’s mantle always worked like it does today?

This seems to be the latest round in the eternal battle between the geophysics data which strongly suggests whole mantle convection (and for quite some time, if ideas about the origin of all the weird junk at the core-mantle boundary … Continue reading

Categories: deep time, geochemistry, geology, geophysics, past worlds