Thawing may be a welcome sight for Alaskans following a remarkably cold winter and early spring in much of the state. But with melting comes the threat of rapid flooding in low-lying areas as river ice breaks up and periodically jams.

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One of my earliest blog posts (in 2008) was a list of my favorite depictions of geologists in movies. I've revisited it once or twice. It came to mind as we prepare to offer a showing of "Tremors" as a geology field studies fundraiser at the State Th...

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I've been riding the last few weeks down around the Rio Grande and Central Avenue in Albuquerque. I'm trying to make sense of Albuquerque's relationship with a drying Rio Grande.

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NASA is moving quickly to define next year's Artemis III mission in Earth orbit, a crewed flight that will test rendezvous and docking capabilities between the agency's Orion spacecraft and commercial landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. Since a February announcement adding an Artemis mission ahead of crewed landing missions to the Moon's South Pole region, engineers have been evaluating mission profile options and operational considerations for Artemis III to ensure the test flight helps the agency and its partners reduce risk ahead of the next Americans landing on the Moon during Artemis IV.

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In a process that played out over thousands of years, a retreating ice sheet carved, scoured, and shaped the landscape of the present-day Great Lakes. In northern Lake Michigan, this sculpting left distinct ridges and valleys running north-to-south along the lake floor. Some parts of those ridges, made of erosion-resistant rock, have remained above the waves of the big lake, forming the Beaver Archipelago.

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Way back in 2014, John Hutchinson posted some photos from the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Trelew city, Patagonia, Argentina. John's original tweets are long gone (quite rightly), but happily we reposted the photos on SV-POW!, so they live on.

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Climate finance in the multipolar era will be driven less by collective targets and more by the need to manage geopolitical security risks in a less stable world....

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NASA's Perseverance Mars rover recently took a self-portrait against a sweeping backdrop of ancient Martian terrain at a location the science team calls "Lac de Charmes." Assembled from 61 individual images, the selfie shows Perseverance training its mast on a rocky outcrop on which it had just made a circular abrasion patch, with the western rim of Jezero Crater stretching into the background. The selfie was captured on March 11, the 1,797th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, during the rover's deepest push west beyond the crater.  

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Sound the clarion! It's time to help SV-POW! once more!

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Monday 11 May 2026 at 2p Eastern (11a Pacific)

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I gave a talk to an Oakland group the other day that discussed three geology-related topics: quarries, landslides and earthquakes. Landslides were the hardest topic to condense. This post will serve as a home page for things I've posted a couple dozen times over the years on this blog.

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The complete specimen of Laueropterus. Yes, it's new pterosaur time again and indeed it's another Moernseim non-pterodactyloid monofenestratan. Following on from the description and naming of both Skiphosoura and Makrodactylus, this time out t...

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Starting in early April, NASA satellites began to detect a patch of brownish, blue-green water lingering off the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The colors and patterns were most intense in the shallow coastal zone where the waters of Raritan Bay, Delaware Bay, and Chesapeake Bay merged with the Atlantic Ocean--an area known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight. 

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The Barelas (aka "Little Ditch") was running when I rode up to its heading this morning. Hardly ever see that. It's a favorite. Guy walking his dog told me the Farmers Almanac says we're gonna have a wet summer. Epistemologically solid.

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NASA and SpaceX are targeting a mid-May launch to deliver scientific investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. 

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Very belatedly, I come to an email from Joe Parish, who on 8 March -- a full month ago -- emailed me to draw my attention to a life reconstruction of Camarasaurus that was published in 1880: one year earlier than the 1886 "atlantosaur" by Jules Blanadet that we thought was the oldest.

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Kieran Wilson, LINK's principal investigator at Katalyst Space Technologies in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Hunter Robertson, a space systems engineer at Katalyst, stand next to their spacecraft inside the SES (Space Environment Simulator) at NASA's God...

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How things in space get their names, progress and awards for Saving NASA Science, and the human side of Artemis II....

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Incidentally GTA6 is coming out in November and apparently it cost $1 billion to make.

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Carved over millennia by the pressure and motion of glacial ice, the valley walls cradling the Tracy Arm fjord in southeast Alaska continue to be reshaped. In summer 2025, following the rapid retreat of South Sawyer Glacier, a large landslide sent rock careening into the fjord, altering the wider landscape in a matter of minutes.

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Campbell Award winner Marina Saguar Urquiola is helping to solve climate change through adaptation finance....

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A thin sliver of Earth's edge is brightly illuminated against the vast darkness of space in this April 3, 2026, image taken during the Artemis II mission. Artemis II was the first crewed flight in a series of missions to test NASA's human deep space capabilities, paving the way for future lunar surface missions.

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Over the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, winds can whip around the globe relatively unimpeded by land. Intrepid sailors termed these southern latitudes the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties on account of the strong prevailing winds.

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