Category Archives: deep time

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

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

How the UK’s tectonic past is key to its seismic present

Today I learnt something very interesting that I didn’t know before – that intraplate earthquakes in the UK mostly occur in western England and Scotland, not Ireland, eastern Scotland or southeast England (where I grew up). The cause of this … Continue reading

Categories: deep time, earthquakes, geohazards, tectonics

A new recipe for Large Igneous Provinces: just add BIF, then wait a couple of hundred million years

Here’s a new paper that proposes the biggest of big ideas: a 240 million year causal chain that runs from the Earth’s surface, to the core mantle boundary, and back again! Here’s how it supposedly goes: 1. Banded iron deposits … Continue reading

Categories: deep time, geology, past worlds, volcanoes

Remagnetisation spoils the paleomagnetic party again

Did the Earth have a magnetic field before 3.5 billion years ago? Previous paleomagnetic studies of the world’s oldest mineral grains – the Jack Hills zircons, which have maximum ages of 4.4 billion years – claimed that tiny inclusions of … Continue reading

Categories: Archean, deep time, palaeomagic, paper reviews