Geobulletin alpha

The 2016 Great Geobakeoff – the results! 

It's been a bumper year for geobaking - our highest ever number of entries! Thank you and a huge round of applause to everyone who took part. Continue reading

Results from a short visit to the Florissant Fossil Quarry 

As part of my vacation last fall I had an hour or so to kill in my schedule and happened to be passing near Florissant, Co. The town is well known for the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument which preserves an ancient lake bed from the Eocene that was near a field of volcanoes. The volcanoes would erupt with lots of ash and this would rain onto the lake and the surrounding environment. As the ash settled it would cover anything that happened to be floating on or above the lake surface. [...]

Mapping the coseismic effects of the Ecuador earthquake(s) 

A team of Ecuadorian and French geologists has started to map the coseismic effects of the M7.8 earthquake that hit Ecuador on 16 April, 2016. The quake occurred at a depth of about 20 km and caused more than 600 fatalities, mainly in the area near Muisne. Two strong aftershocks of M6.7 and M6.8 shook the epicentral area on 18 May, among hundreds of smaller shocks that were recorded. The mapping is coordinated by the Instituto Geofísico. First results

Maniraptoran Dinosaurs Show No Decline In Disparity Before Mass Extinction 

Its hard to unravel and unpack complex phenomenon like patterns of faunal turnover during mass  extinctions. The methods chosen, the materials (fossils) available for study and the granularity of the study influences the results. My last post was about a modeling study that concluded that for 40 million years before the mass extinction,  extinction rates exceeded the evolution of new species

Nenana Ice Classic 2016 

Just a quick note since I’ve been tracking this statistic for a few years, but the Nenana Ice Classic tripod went down this afternoon (Apr 23, 3:39 Alaska Standard Time). See the earlier post for what this is and why it says something about the climate (see posts on 2014 and 2015 results). With this

Photo Contest finalists 2016 – who will you vote for? 

The selection committee received over 400 photos for this year’s EGU Photo Contest, covering fields across the geosciences. The fantastic finalist photos are below and they are being exhibited in Hall X2 (basement, Brown Level) of the Austria Center Vienna – see for yourself! Do you have a favourite? Vote for it! There is a voting terminal (also in Hall X2), just next to the exhibit. The results will be announced on Friday 22 April during the lunch break (at 12:15). In addition, this [...]

Sailing into a Storm as We Head for the Agulhas Plateau 

The team aboard the JOIDES Resolution just finished at their first coring site off southern Africa. The first results? "Awesome." Sidney Hemming describes the process in words and

Imaging Brooding Brittle Stars Babies! 

Greetings! So, today I am en transit from my month long research trip in Paris back to home base in Washington DC!  So, in the meantime I thought I would share the results of this great new imaging project presented in GigaScience by some colleagues at CapeTown University in South Africa whom I met while I was visiting a few months ago!!  Jannes Landschoff, Anton duPlessis and Charlie

My latest paper: hillslope preconditioning 

In a new paper, we examine the distribution of landslides from two earthquakes in New Zealand to see if hillslope preconditioning - the idea that the legacy of one trigger event can influence slope behaviour ins subsequent event - occurred. The results suggest that this might have been a factor in the area affected by both

The 100 Geosites Photo Competition 

        Just before the start of Earth Science Week 2015, we announced the results of our 100 Great Geosites photo competition – 13 images which form a 2016 calendar now on sale at the Society! Last night, … Continue reading

100 Great Geosites photo competition – the results! 

      We’re delighted to announce the winners of our photography competition, ‘100 Great Geosites.’ Based on the Society’s list of 100 geosites in the UK and Ireland, published last year, the 13 images will all feature in a … Continue reading

Apply now to take part in the 2016 GIFT workshop! 

The General Assembly is not only for researchers but for teachers and educators with an interest in the geosciences also. Every year the Geosciences Information For Teachers (GIFT) is organised by the EGU Committee on Education to bring first class science closer to primary and high school teachers. The topic of the 2016 edition of GIFT is ‘The Solar System and beyond’. This year’s workshop is co-organised with the European Space Agency (ESA) and will be taking place on 18–20 April [...]

What would a tsunami in the Mediterranean look like? 

     A team of European researchers have developed a model to simulate the impact of tsunamis generated by earthquakes and applied it to the Eastern Mediterranean. The results show how tsunami waves could hit and inundate coastal areas in southern Italy and Greece. The study is published today (27 August) in Ocean Science, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union

Create Maps Online: A comparison of 6 webmap providers 

Working with a desktop GIS might be a good choice for geodata-experts, GIS-people in general and everyone who is inside the fields of geosciences. If you don’t want to struggle with a desktop mapping software or you “just want to create a map” for your publication, business data, website or professional service the following online mapping solutions might be the one-stop-shop for your needs. Shortlinks to results: ArcGIS online CartoDB MapBox SimpleMappr MangoMap Click2Map [...]

New Old Faithful Geyser Video available 

Jim Westphal (1930-2004)The results of a video-probe that descended into Old Faithful in 1991 are available on YouTube here (copyrighted video). My colleague in this project was the incredible experimentalist, Jim Westphal of Caltech, we were aided by long-time collaborator and Yellowstone Park geologist, Rick Hutchinson, and the efforts of the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service this year made it possible to get the best possible quality video on-line. The challenges in [...]

The 2015 Great Geobakeoff – the results! 

We launched the second annual Great Geobakeoff with some trepidation. Had geobaking fatigue set in? Was everyone too busy watching the General Election to notice? Is it in fact impossible to bake a hidden fossil cake? Of course, our concerns … Continue reading

Slope failure 

The new ELI today is 'Failing slopes; modelling how rock cliffs and slopes can collapse   This activity encourages pupils to investigate the factors which affect the angle of slope at which materials fail and slip. The idea could be used in a lesson on slope failure itself, or as an application of the physics of friction. Results obtained from an actual investigation are recorded in

Animals fifty million years into the future 

Pupils from Box School in Wiltshire, UK have been trying out the Earthlearningidea 'Fifty million years into the future; investigating how animals become adapted to their environments'.   Click here to see their

EGU15 Discussion: Geology and International Development 

Yesterday, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna played host to an informal discussion on ‘best practice’ when working in the global South. Organised by Geology for Global Development, the event gave people an opportunity to reflect on the skills and practices that could be integrated into our geoscience work to promote sustainability and support development work. Here are some of the themes and ideas… we’ll be publishing a full report on our [...]

How conveniently can you package your results? 

A couple of weeks ago, Mike sent me a link to this interview with ecologist James O’Hanlon, who made this poster (borrowed from this post on O’Hanlon’s blog): We had a short email exchange which quickly converged on, “This would work well for some projects, but not for others.” That’s the same conclusion I came