Geobulletin alpha

Duck, cover, and hold on during Great Arizona Shakeout 

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Dallas M3.3 earthquake - walks like a duck 

They were pretty ruthless in chopping down the well for Azle, now it looks like fracking waste again near Dallas.  Oh well, they have a seismologist now.  This is coming up quite fast, so he better get a move

Duck Creates "Water Color" Art: Autumn in Yosemite Valley 

You are welcome to call this my strangest blog post ever (and I've had plenty), but I was just captivated today. I live just two hours away from Yosemite Valley, and I visit every chance I get, and a bit of simple math tells me I've been in Yosemite around 80 times in the last quarter century. I never get tired of visiting, but I do have a standing rule of trying to discover something new

Winging it 

These days, my spoken Japanese hardly gets used beyond the "tall cappuccino" level (for which, should you ever find yourself needing to know, the Japanese version is, "tall cappuccino" spoken in a vaguely Japanese accent), so ordering a whole duck to pick up at the weekend for Easter dinner was a bit of an adventure. It was all going fairly well, I thought I'd convinced the butcher that I

Public Parks to Dig Your Own . . . 

Fossil collecting can lead people into temptation. Roadside exposures are OK for people to inspect, as long as you aren't endangering traffic somehow. In some states, riverbeds are public land and you can prospect there. Private quarries are fine, too, as long as you get permission or pay the right fee. But sometimes it can be too easy to duck under a fence, or dig along a streambank, on someone's land. One nice solution is a public park that gives a little room for folks to pick up some of the [...]

Instagram Easter Hunt 

Now that they are sucked up by Facebook, I decided to put this out.  We did an Easter Hunt for the big kids yesterday, and I made up the clues by taking pictures and going to town with Gimp photo filters.  These are new cherry blossoms, with Oilify.  The 'treasure' was money, what else? Here is my duck. Happy

The “Duck-billed” Dinosaur That Wasn’t 

Instead of a long, low duck bill, the beak of Tethyshadros was shaped like a snowplow and serrated. Why it had such a strange beak is a

OK and VA earthquakes Part 2: Walks like a duck 

These are the best felt area maps I can get right now.  I would really like the larger version for OK, but it is not available. I know this earthquake was felt all the way to Chicago, so the lobe is weighted to the NE, like all of these earthquakes. Again, both earthquakes seem a bit more symmetrical than past earthquakes, but they have the same general lobed felt

Another ShakeOut Day 

This morning at 10:20, don't be surprised if you see people all over California hugging trees, or diving under their desks. In fact, I recommend that you join in—and not just because Golden Staters like to go with the flow. The things they're doing will help save them from injury the next time a major earthquake strikes the state, and we're getting into the habit of holding rehearsals coordinated by ShakeOut.org. I'll be at the San Francisco airport at that time; maybe I'll duck too, but [...]

Is There Anything More Pathetic Than Flood Geologists at GSA Meetings? 

Yup. Actually, there is. And this is why the announcement that Flood geologists, those poor dumb souls who are so besotted with a Bronze Age work of fiction, are once again coming to the GSA's annual meeting should have you rubbing your hands with glee. Because, you see, the only thing more pathetic than Flood geologists is the fact that their own research has disproved their inane flood hypothesis. Oh, yes, my darlings. That's delicious, isn't it? Tuck your napkin under your chin and go sink [...]

What Happens When Flood Geologists Practice Geology? 

Creationist geologists have falsified their Flood hypothesis, but can't bring themselves to admit it. A recent issue of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education has an article that follows 50 years of field research conducted by "Flood geologists," strict young-Earth creationists who seek the signs of Noah's Flood in the geologic record. By practicing real geology and replicating its standard practices on their own, it says, "Flood geologists have carefully eliminated the entire [...]

Springtime on the California Prairielands: Violence in a Gentle Landscape (and a gratuitous picture of a duck) 

The gentle wind caresses the waving blades of grass...meadowlarks sing, frogs chirp...it's a serene day in the springtime of the Sierra foothills. Of course the science of geology holds no such sense of peace. Almost every aspect of this peaceful view speaks of violence, both in the recent past, and in the depths of time.Take the layers revealed in the gentle slopes of the first picture above: