Category Archives: tectonics

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again: an introduction to How the Earth Works

For a couple of years now, I’ve been telling a story at the beginning of the introductory geology course I teach, called How the Earth Works. I like to think it gives a flavour of the kinds of stories you can tell about the Earth, if you know how to look: stories of how the world slowly remakes itself over hundreds of millions of years, of how the very high was once the very low, and will be again. This is that story. Continue reading

Categories: academic life, basics, deep time, geology, geomorphology, ice and glaciers, outcrops, past worlds, rocks & minerals, science education, tectonics

A Seismic Summary of 2017

Why 2017 was a quiet year – and an examination of the provocative hypothesis that 2018 may not be. Continue reading

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, geophysics, tectonics

Venus stays out in the cold

We basically have a huge generation gap with Venus, and we really need something to launch in the early- to mid-2020s so we can maintain some kind of continuity.” I’m not a planetary scientist, but I’m still disappointed that two … Continue reading

Categories: planets, tectonics

An unremarkable year – seismically, anyway.

Political pundits seem fond of geological metaphors such as ‘earthquake’, ‘seismic shift’, ‘tectonic shift’ and ‘tsunami’ – and they’ve certainly had plenty of reasons to use such metaphors in the past 12 months, as both my birth country and my … Continue reading

Categories: earthquakes, geology, tectonics

The geodetic fingerprints of shallow thrusting in Nepal

NASA’s Earth Observatory put out this great image last week, which shows the ground displacement in Nepal resulting from last month’s devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake, which has claimed at least 8,500 lives. The vertical displacements have been calculated by comparing … Continue reading

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, structures, tectonics