Author Archives: Chris Rowan

New at Erratics: the challenges of teaching geology in high school

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Chris Rowan

Our newest Earth Science Erratics blogger, Erin Parker, is a teacher at an urban public high school in Wisconsin, who every semester is presented with the task of teaching “150 boisterous students” about earth science. In her first post, she … Continue reading →

Categories: links, teaching

Stuff we linked to on Twitter last week

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Chris Rowan

Volcanoes From Callan Bentley comes the “xenobomb”: an amazing natural mash-up of deep earth and surface magmatic processes. http://blogs.agu.org/mountainbeltway/2012/02/18/the-xenobomb/ Although his neologism has kicked off a small terminology debate in the geoblogosphere: http://ron.outcrop.org/blog/?p=1492 Earthquakes Clever. China tests active subsurface monitoring … Continue reading →

Categories: links

Scenic Sunday: a hike across Hawaiian lava

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Chris Rowan

Fortunately, the schedule for my recent trip to the Big Island of Hawaii included a couple of days of field excursions – I think the conference organisers realised that they would happen regardless, so they decided to make them official … Continue reading →

Categories: outcrops, photos, volcanoes

The soundtrack of our unquiet Earth

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Chris Rowan

I’ve coming down off an intense few weeks’ of travelling: first to this years’ ScienceOnline conference (some thoughts about which might appear here soon), then to a conference on Hawaii’s Big Island (which I’ll definitely be writing about), and then … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes

How I (mostly) slept through the one of the largest earthquakes to hit NW Europe in 200 years

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Chris Rowan

In the early hours of 13 April 1992, the border region in western Europe where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands meet was shaken by a magnitude 5.4 earthquake, caused by northeast-southwest extension in the Roer Valley Graben. The shaking was … Continue reading →

Categories: academic life, earthquakes

Stuff we linked to on Twitter last week

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Chris Rowan

Welcome to the first Highly Allochthonous Sunday link-fest of 2012. We realise that technically this is the second Sunday of the new year, but we trust that you’ll forgive us… Other posts on All-geo Metageologist discusses How stone walls reflect … Continue reading →

Categories: links

How useful are lectures, really?

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Chris Rowan

There has been an interesting discussion amongst the geologists on Twitter, that I’ve archived over on Geotweeps Discuss…, over the role of the lecture in undergraduate education. This was in response to an NPR story claiming that in physics at … Continue reading →

Categories: academic life, science education

Geological mayhem and destruction in 2012: not the end of the world, just business as usual

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Chris Rowan

We don’t live on a boring planet. 2012 will be plagued by natural disasters, but so is every other year. Continue reading →

Categories: antiscience, climate science, earthquakes, geohazards, palaeomagic, public science, volcanoes

Our Highly Allochthonous travels in 2011

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Chris Rowan

As 2011 draws to a close, ’tis the season for retrospectives, and we’re surprised that no-one this year seems to have started up the travel meme that has been so popular in the geoblogosphere in the past. After all, it … Continue reading →

Categories: by Anne, fieldwork, photos

Two more earthquakes shake Christchurch

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Chris Rowan

Just as it seemed that seismic activity was finally dying down in Christchurch, the city has been shaken by two more earthquakes. The USGS currently has the first shock pegged as a magnitude 5.8, and the second as a magnitude … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, focal mechanisms, geohazards