Welcome to the new home of Highly Allochthonous, and thank you for joining us. We realise this change is rather unexpected; believe us, we share your surprise. But these things do happen in geology: just when the planet seems to have settled down into some sort of equilibrium, a mountain range shoots up, an ocean opens, or a big asteroid streaks in from the outer reaches of the solar system to shake things up a little, and suddenly the world is a very different place. This pattern of events has shaped the construction of the geological timescale, so it seems only appropriate to borrow the name of a geological period for the title of our opening post. As this is the third incarnation of the blog, the Tertiary is the obvious choice; and it’s actually looking for something to do anyway, having been cast out of the official timescale by some overly pedantic geochronologists.

Anyway, we’re keen to get back to our usual blogging schedule, and we’re excited about the new possibilities opened up by the move to our own digs. But first, a couple of housekeeping notes:

• We are now the proud owners of the domain all-geo.org. We have some ideas for the front page, but for now, as it links though to the blog, you can simply rejoice that you can now get to Highly Allochthonous without having to remember how to spell ‘allochthonous’.
• It turns out that transferring all of our posts, comments and images over from Moveable Type into WordPress is non-trivial*, and while we’ve done our best to get everything straight, there is likely to be the odd broken link here and there. If you should happen to find one, please let us know.
• The look and feel of the blog may be subject to slight tweaks as the whim takes us. We didn’t get much time to pick out the curtains, after all.
• Finally, we would really appreciate it if those of you with blogs and Twitter accounts would help us to spread the word about our new address.

*translating from scientese: really _____ing hard.

After some discussion, Anne and I are putting Highly Allochthonous on hiatus whilst we consider our future here on Scienceblogs.
This decision is not made lightly. But the events of the last 24 hours have forced us to consider whether we can continue to contribute here without damaging our public and professional credibility.
Seed Media run this space and can therefore invite whoever they want to contribute to it; but allowing the employees of a major multinational to blog, not in a personal capacity, but on behalf of that multinational, raises serious questions about impartiality and conflicts of interest that, as scientists, we find hard to ignore. However, regardless of how the current furore is resolved, it has merely added to our feeling that although we have both enjoyed, and benefited immensely from, our time here at Scienceblogs, the network is moving in a direction that we may not want to follow.

Hutton’s Unconfomity, Siccar Point. Here, deposition began again after some time and upheaval…

No long-term decision has been made on future blogging, except there will be future blogging, at some place on the Internet. Hopefully you will join us again when we work out where that will be.

One of the blogging commandments should probably be: know thy readers! Therefore we are following the example of Janet, DrugMonkey and various others (who are themselves riffing from Ed Yong’s original idea) and asking you, our readers, to tell us a little about yourselves.

• Who are you? Academic or professional geologist, student, enthusiastic rockhound, general browser?


• What’s your level of science education? Postgraduate, undergraduate, school, dropped it like a hot potato at earliest opportunity?


• What originally brought you to this blog, and what keeps you coming back (if indeed, you intend to)?


• Which of the topics covered here do you particularly enjoy? Is there anything you tend to skip?


• Are there any topics that would you like us to write about more often?


• If you lurk rather than commenting, are you content with that? Are there conditions that you think might suck you into commenting?


• If you could ask us to write one post explaining one basic concept in earth science, what would that concept be?


• And finally, we have to ask: which is better, water or rocks?