Author Archives: Chris Rowan

Weird rocky exoplanets

Obtaining the composition of rocky exoplanets from the spectral signature produced when their dying parent star eats them is already pretty mind-blowing. But the results – which suggest that on some of these worlds, quartz is substituted for olivine in their … Continue reading

Categories: geology, planets, rocks & minerals

How to spend a lot of money on a problem without making any progress in solving it, nuclear fusion edition

I’ve been known on occasion to mock fusion for being eternally 25 years in the future, and this article on the latest potential advances doesn’t really help me assess how credible the people and approaches that star in it actually are. But … Continue reading

Categories: climate crisis, society

Diversity (or lack thereof) in geoscience: are we hyping up the wrong things?

Via Dr Sarah Greene, some data from a survey of student attitudes to STEM careers, including geosciences, at a college in the SW US indicates that they care more about whether their career can help people or the environment than the … Continue reading

Categories: geology, science education

Why do we get earthquakes a long way from plate boundaries?

There’s already a lot of good info out there about this week’s magnitude 5.9 earthquake near Melbourne, Australia. I wanted to dig a little more into the broader reasons you can get earthquakes like this in places you might not … Continue reading

Categories: earthquakes, geohazards, geology, tectonics

The unthanked shoulders we stand on

Via Liz Hide on Twitter, a thought-provoking acknowledgement of the important role the in discovering and excavating the paleontological treasures in many museums’ collections. On a similar theme, I think of the story of Alfred Wegener and continental drift. The … Continue reading

Categories: fieldwork, geology, history of science, society