Links, more links, and columnar basalts

Real life has taken both Highly Allochthonous bloggers away from the internet for much of this week, so this weeks’ link-sharing is necessarily curtailed.

New Accretionary Wedge

The latest collection of themed geology writing, focussing this month on ‘Important Geological Experiences’, is up at Outside the Interzone. If, like Chris, you’ve been starved of geoblogging for a while, it’s a good place to start catching up.

Columnar basalt meme

The latest meme to circulate in the geoblogosphere has led to a columnar basalt bonanaza: Lockwood’s post is your gateway to lots of cool pictures. We both have some (admittedly tardy) contributions. Chris saw some rather nice columnar basalt flows on his recent trip to Yellowstone: although the caldera is best known for its more explosive eruptions, some of the more minor eruptions that followed the last big explosion did produce basalt flows instead.

Columnar basalt flow near Tower Fall, Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Chris Rowan (2010).

Anne has a nice illustration of how water (of course) can interact in cools ways with volcanic landforms: here are the Toketee Falls,, in the southern Oregon Cascades.

Toketee Falls, S Oregon Cascades. Photo by Anne Jefferson.

More exoplanetary excitement

Yet another planet has been found in the Gliese 581 system, and has caused some excitement: it is not only quite small (3-4 times Earth mass), but it is found at the right orbital radius for liquid water to possibly exist on it’s surface. Inevitably, this has led to some rather breathless headlines about ‘new Earths’. Brian Romans nicely explains how ‘in habitable zone’ does not necessarily mean ‘habitable planet’, while Chris Town runs through the depressingly long list of media outlets that have failed to grasp this point.

Other interesting links