Geobulletin alpha

Granbury, Texas: a lakeside landslide that threatens an apartment block 

In Granbury, Texas a landslide over the weekend is threatening an apartment block, home to 16 families. The cause of the landslide is

Macraster sp. echinoid from the Duck Creek formation of Texas 

Not only does the Duck Creek formation have ammonites, it has some echinoids as well. I found a couple of nicely inflated specimens of the irregular echinoid Macraster. I sent pictures of my find to a friend in Texas, who is familiar with the Duck Creek formation, and he said they could be either M. elegans or M. washitae. Macraster has a suboval shaped test with a sub rectangular cross section. The adapical surface has the typical five arm imprint of the ambulacra which is where the feet of [...]

Mortoniceras sp. ammonite from the Duck Creek formation of Texas 

Before I started on my adventure in Oklahoma I landed in Dallas and drove north to a site that a good friend had suggested I visit. It was a creek that exposed the Duck Creek formation (Cretaceous, Albian stage) in a couple of spots. Having never collected in Texas before, but seeing plenty of field reports from those who had, I knew the Duck Creek formation should produce some nice fossils. I was not wrong. I found four specimens of the ammonite Mortoniceras sp. washed out in the creek bed. [...]

Return to Paraguay: Conserving the Taguá, a Living Fossil 

In 1972, mammalogist Ralph Wetzel and colleagues were studying armadillo ectoparasites in the Paraguayan Chaco when they came upon a peccary (what we call javelina in Texas) that didn’t look like those already known to science. The result was Catagonus … Continue reading

It’s Beginning to Look Not a Lot Like Christmas 

Much of the eastern two-thirds of the United States was balmy on Christmas Day, with high temperatures more than 20°F above average from Texas to Maine. According to NOAA, 789 daily high temperature records were tied or broken on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the continental United States. What's behind this unusual

Under Pressure 

The Styrofoam cups brought on board the JR from Eagle Pass, Texas have made their trip down to the bottom of the Ocean! read

Another pitch for the Fish Injection Treatment 

Reference Texas has closed the book on how a set of wells could turn earthquakes on and off in Azle.  I know they were injecting gas frack waste for a while (in my head).  But they can never admit it. Let's pretend they were honest, and everybody promised not to sue (Ha!).  Then we would conclusive proof that it is stress corrosion that caused all these New Madrid-type earthquakes.  The cure

Lepidus praecisio, A New Coelophysoid Neotheropod from Texas 

The early fossil record of dinosaurs in North America: A new neotheropod from the base of the Upper Triassic Dockum Group of Texas. 2015. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. Lepidus praecisio is a coelophysoid neotheropod more closely related to Coelophysis bauri than to Allosaurus

Dewind Remediates Seepage at Dam in Tyler, Texas 

Dewind One Pass was involved in constructing a cut-off wall to address seepage issues at Tyler Dam in Tyler, Texas. The earthen dam was constructed of clay, but the foundation soil consisted of a very permeable silty sand material. The remediation involved a mixed-in-place soil, cement, and bentonite cutoff wall on the downstream face of the dam, about halfway between the crest and the toe. Dewind won the job, and the City's consulting geotechnical engineer narrates this video explaining [...]

Cleaning, Sorting, Consolidating recent finds. 

Hey All, I just got back from a vacation to Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado and am working on cleaning and identifying my finds. Sorry for the lack of updates but I will be back in a week or two with new content. In the meantime, enjoy some scenery from the places I visited.Ammonite in North Texas Bois d'Arc formation in OklahomaGreen River formation in Kemmerer, WYNeozoic Rhyolite flows with Geodes from Dugway, UTWeeks formation, limestone near Delta, UTMarjum formation near Delta, [...]

Texas clears everybody of causing earthquakes - as long as they don't do it again 

Reference That's it, somehow I was hoping that someone in Texas would come clean on how they made earthquakes turn on and off.  They took these wells that were re-injecting deep brine for years, added something to the mix, and turned on earthquakes.  They have now promised not to do it again, and we'll never know. You and I know what it is, and we don't have to go into it.  Suffice to say

Glacial Lakes Increase In Third Pole Region 

In an area of Earth that many call the Third Pole region, near the Tibetan Plateau, scientists with the University of Texas and the Chinese Academy of Sciences say that[...] The post Glacial Lakes Increase In Third Pole Region appeared first on Lake

States Show Their True Colors on Fracking – One Enacts a Ban, While Two Others Prohibit All Local Bans 

Three states have recently taken a stand for or against controversial bans on hydraulic fracturing. Oklahoma, Texas, and Maryland have all passed laws within the past month relating to hydraulic fracturing bans. Oklahoma Last Friday, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed Senate Bill 809, which prohibits local governments from choosing whether to have oil and gas … Continue

An El Nino connection to the floods in Oklahoma and Texas? 

There were more flash floods across the Hill Country of Texas into the eastern part of the state as well on Monday, and a Flash Flood Emergency was declared in the Austin area. Now, look at the sea surface temperature anomalies for the globe right now, with the signs of a developing El Nino (the warm water off south America stretching westward along the Equator) and also note the warm

Big M4 earthquake in Texas 

Well south of the previous activity.  Looks like there was a little injection activity before.  That's what I love about Texans -- they never learn.  Somebody slipped the good stuff into the

Irving, Texas, M3.3 earthquake 

Well, I thought they had found the culprit who was injecting gas frack waste, and I guess they didn't.  This is right back to the size that knocked the baseball player on his keester. In all cases where they totally stopped injection, the earthquakes have stopped dead.  I guess the stuff is still getting in.  Perhaps they should be like those other states and pass the famous legislation:

Somebody still injecting in Texas for earthquakes 

Normally if they get the injection to stop, then the earthquakes stop dead.  But these earthquakes are migrating up NE megathrust.  Somebody is injecting there and we can expect more and larger

Oklahoma City's Doomsday Clock Resumes its Normal State of Disrepair 

It has stopped ticking.  Such a beautiful mechanism and probably gone forever.  Either they have secretly shifted frack waste injection, or have started treating the water with silica.  The northern section is still active because nobody cares about damage up there.  But that area is such a mechanism mess, with several thrust-shear pairs, that it will probably never go boom. Down in

A mafic sill in Antarctica 

My friend and colleague Lauren Michel, the King Family Fellow at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, sent me this image from her recent trip to Antarctica: (click to enlarge) This is a beautiful example of a mafic igneous sill, probably of the rock known as “dolerite” (or diabase, to us Yanks). Lauren and I think it must be part of the Ferrar Large Igneous Province.

Growing forests with fire 

In the summer of 2012, Heather Alexander traveled to a remote larch forest in eastern Siberia, gathered together piles of dry twigs and branches, and lit a match. Alexander, a biologist at the University of Texas at Brownsville, is a fire starter. Her work aims to understand whether increasingly common fires in the boreal larch forests of north-eastern Siberia are unleashing more carbon into the atmosphere or, paradoxically, helping the forests capture and store atmospheric carbon by promoting [...]