A (hopefully) brief pause

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Chris Rowan

Sorry for the sparse posting over the past few days – I’m about to depart on a trip back to my homeland, and because it’s not just a holiday this time – I’m doing some lab work – I had some preparatory work to get through. Cutting lots of rock samples down into teeny tiny cubes so they’ll fit in the machine I’m going to be using was a little bit fiddly and time-consuming, as it turned out.
Once I’ve set up back in the UK, I shall return with geopuzzly answers and other rambling. Stay tuned.

Categories: bloggery

Geopuzzle #14

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Chris Rowan

This authors of the paper the figure below comes from claim that it’s a fossil of some kind:

gp14.jpg

Do you agree? What do you think it is, and how old do you think it is?

Categories: fossils, geology, geopuzzling

Volcanoes triggering volcanoes?

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Chris Rowan

There’s lots of volcanic action in the Aleutians arc at the moment, with three volcanoes: Okmok. Cleveland, and Kastochi, all erupting at various points in the last month or so.

Aleutiansvolc.jpg

The Volcanism Blog and the Eruptions blog have both been keeping us up to date with the waxing and waning of these eruptions. However,given my past interest in possible seismic triggering of volcanic eruptions, it’s possibly no surprise that I’ve been wondering whether the near-simultaneous eruption of three volcanoes in the same geographic region is entirely a coincidence. Could the eruption of one have triggered the others?

Continue reading →

Categories: geology, volcanoes

More thoughts on illustrating geological time

Posted on August 11, 2008 by Chris Rowan

What is the best way to represent geological time? When I was working on my little timescale project, I had one very specific aim in mind: I wanted a scale that clearly showed the names and ages of all the different geological periods, without becoming ridiculously big. As it turns out, this isn’t very easy. From a temporal perspective the divisions of the timescale are somewhat irregular, ranging from tens of thousands of years in length (the Holocene) to a couple of billion (the Proterozoic). In fact, if you plot the entire 4600 million years of Earth history linearly, even the periods which last tens of millions of years, which is most of them, are pretty narrow.

timescalelin.jpg

Continue reading →

Categories: basics, deep time, geology

While I’m asking you for your opinions…

Posted on August 8, 2008 by Chris Rowan

The Seed overlords would like to find a little bit more about who you are. If you take the time to complete this survey, you are rewarded with the chance to win Apple stuff.
Some of my fellow Sciblings have also been enticing their readers to reveal themselves, and give them some bloggy feedback. I’ve found this sort of exercise valuable in the past, so consider the comments below an open forum. Who are you? What brought you here? What (if anything) keeps you coming back? Are there any subjects you’d like to see me talking about more, or less? Is there anything else I should do to aid the more geologically-challenged to take their first steps in a larger (and cooler) world?

Categories: bloggery, public science