Author Archives: Chris Rowan

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

Posted on July 28, 2023 by Chris Rowan

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

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Chris Rowan

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

Posted on May 26, 2023 by Chris Rowan

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

A volcano erupted on Venus in the 1990s!

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Chris Rowan

Exciting news that there was a volcanic eruption on Venus in the early 1990s, shown by changes in the size of crater between two passes of the Magellan probe‘s radar over the same area. There have been hints of volcanic … Continue reading →

Categories: planets, volcanoes

Earth’s inner core has an inner core?

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Chris Rowan

We all know that the Earth’s mostly iron core is divided into a molten outer core and solid inner core. But that may not be the whole story: some just-published seismic data suggests that the Earth’s inner core is divided … Continue reading →

Categories: earthquakes, geophysics