Geobulletin alpha

Traffic Jams and Trash on Everest 

An article on NationalGeographic.com explains how the popularity of “climbing Everest” has resulted in inexperienced climbers creating traffic jams on the mountain and littering the landscape. Ways to reverse this are

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 

Smithsonian.com has an article about Japan’s Orphan Tsunami (“orphan” because it was then unlinked to any earthquake) and how it was connected to an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction

Again! Charles Darwin Was Wrong.. About The Tree Of Life 

Well.. I guess the headline "Darwin Was Wrong" always sells! But The Guardian should have thought a little before publishing this. It is an article on how the recognition of lateral gene transfer i.e. the transfer of genes aross taxonomic groups is proving Darwin's idea of a tree of life wrong. Read this passage: Evolutionary biologists say crossbreeding between species is far more

How Some Invasive Organisms Get to the USA 

The Los Angeles Times has an article about how some invasive organisms get to the United States by hitching a ride on container

Genghis Khan And Interdisciplinary Research 

State of the Planet has quite a readable account of how a period of warm climate in the early 1200's may have produced an abundance of grass and livestock in Mongolia, fueling the expansionist ambitions of Genghis Khan. Here is an interesting passage from the article: In 2013, Avery Shinneman, a biologist at the University of Washington, will analyze sediments at selected lakes in order

Shale Boom Not Happening Outside USA 

A RigZone.com article explains why the natural gas from shale boom that has occurred in the United States is not making much of a bang in many other

Unconservative designs with AASHTO LRFD for deep excavations 

Dimitrios at Deep Excavation LLC wrote this article a couple of months ago for his monthly newsletter. He contends that for multi-level braced excavations, the AASHTO LRFD code could produce unconservative results. From his article: The currently adopted design methods for AASHTO (2010) LRFD appear to produce inconsistent and possibly unsafe designs for many multi-level braced excavations. Limit-equilibrium analyses combined with LRFD methods appear to severely underestimate benchmarked [...]

Ontario - Endless Incompetence 

One article Ok, now I am getting crotchety again.  This means I will probably fall off the radar, and stop anything internetish.  I find it is not healthy for me to bitch.  But before I go, we play the game of. GUESS THE MULTIPLE Bruce Waste Storage No physics at all in the concept.  Situated on the world's worst rock, it is kept going by the need to spend scads of money.  God knows

Of divorce lawyers and scholarly publishers 

I was reading an article recently about crowd-funded startups. One of the featured startups aims to make divorce more painless. That started me thinking about divorce lawyers. Their web-sites say they will “guide you as painlessly as possible through the jungle of legal rules and practices” and “have not only your best interests in mind, but also

The great David Rose con no. 9234: The hard proof that finally shows that he makes stuff up. 

I know that in this context, late is probably little better than never, but the Daily Lies has now corrected Rose's fabrication concerning my opinions. The modified article no longer has the offending content, and at the bottom they have added:An earlier version of this article said climate scientist James Annan was predicting the true rate of global warming as about half that predicted by

The Bone Worm 

Scripps Institution of Oceanography has an article about bone worms – tiny organisms that live on whale carcasses that have fallen to the seafloor. They are mouthless and gutless and drill into the bones of their

The Cost of Anti-Evolution Legislation? 

An article on TheGuardian looks at the debate over The Louisiana Science Education

New Criteria for NSF Grant Proposals? 

ScienceMag.org has an article about proposed legislation that would assure that NSF funds are being spent on “high quality

World's oldest experiment is a geological fluid dynamics experiment! 

John Mainstone with the eighth drop in late 1990, about2.5 years after the seventh drop fell!In an article on April 30, CNN reported from Hong Kong about an experiment related to many geological processes--those in which the properties of a material are not linear.  In this experiment, the so-called "pitch drop, a substance like the petroleum tar is placed in a funnel, and the rate at which the pitch drops is measured.  The experiment began in 1927, the last pitch drop was [...]

Landslide Over the Black Rapids Glacier 

The Alaska Dispatch has an article with photos that tell the story of a landslide covering the Black Rapids Glacier during the 2002 Denali Fault

QGis 2.0 – the new features 

Thanks to Nathan, Anita Graser and Tim Sutton, who already wrote about new features of the new QGis-Release 2.0. The release date isn’t published yet, but we think it should be in the next months. In this article I will list some awesome new features, that will push QGis on a new level if professionality. [...]Related Posts:Das neue QGis Logo – jetzt mitbestimmenInstall stable version of QGIS on Ubuntua web-map with OpenLayers (part 3)Free worldwide rain data from the Precipitation [...]

An Answers in Genesis chat about the ice age(s) 

Answers in Genesis had its first ever live chat on Facebook today, where people could discuss the article When Was the Ice Age in Biblical History with one of the authors. Unfortunately, the author who chatted was the editor of Answers magazine, Mike Matthews, not Andrew Snelling, AiG’s geologist. The basic idea of the article

How to live 

Respecting nature is so often portrayed as being contrary to the interests of people that you’d think it’s an either/or proposition. The article above by Scientific American reports on research on people, and finds that the nature preserves protect them too. None too surprising, and long overdue. P.S. I know I’ve been scarce. I’ve been

Up Goer Five: writing excercises 

The Up-Goer Five meme of explaining science in less than 1,000 words received some belated criticism of being a poor exercise in science communication. Yes, just like not every article should be a one-draft 5-minute stream-of-consciousness quick-write, not every piece should be … Continue reading

A call for increased public engagement in geology higher education (Geology Today) 

So, it has finally arrived! My first academic article available for free on my blog. Please click on the link below to access the .pdf version of the article, and please leave any thoughts on the article in the comments below. This is an electronic version of an article published in Geology Today: complete citation information … Continue reading