Geobulletin alpha

My first "aha" moment. 

Mary Lou's second entry: When teaching kids how scientists work, often times we tell them that scientists come up with a testable question, then go about trying to answer it. That is true on some levels, but the reality is, deciding what to investigate is a bit more complicated. Here's what I mean... read

A napkin was the key to the invention of the CORK 

Twenty four years ago, the idea of a CORK was sparked and first recorded on a dinner napkin as a sketch..yes, a dinner napkin. We are fortunate to be onboard with two of the scientists who were responsible for concocting the idea back in 1989-Earl Davis and Kier Becker. A third member of the trio is Bob Carson. read

Ice Capades 

Fieldwork is exciting and inspiring, leading scientists to new ideas and places, and observations about how the world works. Spring on Alaska’s North Slope provides an especially productive environment for fieldwork. When the sun never sets, it’s easy to linger in the field and the lab long into the well-lit night. Our team spent about

Building the team 

The Lamont Icepod team is a blended mix of engineers and scientists learning from each other through the design and testing of this new instrument. With a range of talents and backgrounds, the project mixes: seasoned field workers with those new to field work; experienced instrument developers with those newly learning this end of engineering;

Acrotholus audeti: a New Miniature Pachycephalosaur from Santonian Cretaceous Canada 

Scientists have named a new species of bone-headed dinosaur (pachycephalosaur) from Alberta, Canada. Acrotholus audeti (Ack-RHO-tho-LUS) was identified from both recently discovered and historically collected fossils. Approximately six feet long and weighing about 40 kgs in life, the newly identified plant-eating dinosaur represents the oldest bone-headed dinosaur in North America,

LRRD at EGU Vienna. 

Meriam prepares to welcome visitors after setting up the booth Our Meriam is back from Vienna, Austria, where she and Beth Fisher displayed our Em2 at the European Geosciences Union annual General Assembly.Over ten thousand scientists, from 95 countries, attended the meeting.Meriam visited with some old friends, like Dr. Guido Zolezzi (pictured below), and made many new ones.A special thank you to Sebastien Castelltort, who invited Meriam to speak during a pop-up [...]

Who Becomes Dominant After a Mass Extinction? 

“These scientists have identified an outcome of mass extinctions–that species ecologically marginalized before the extinction may be ‘freed up’ to experience evolutionary bursts then dominate after the extinction.” Quote from H. Richard Lane, Program Director, National Science

Large Hurricane on Saturn 

“NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole. [...] The hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on

Archosaurs Recovered Quickly After Permian Mass Extinction in Anisian/Olenekian Triassic Tanzania 

Many scientists have thought that dinosaur predecessors missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during the Earth's largest mass extinction, approximately 252 million years ago. The thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia. It turns out that scientists may have been looking for the starting line in the

Mechanism for cooling the planet 

A newly discovered mechanism for cooling the planet - potentially, according to its discoverers, more significant even than the well-known chilling effects of volcanic eruptions - has now been further investigated. The mechanism in question is the action of difficult-to-study atmospheric molecules known as "Criegee intermediates", whose existence was first theorised in the 1950s by German chemist Rudolf Criegee but not confirmed until recent years by scientists using methods which have only [...]

Python Script for “depth vs. data” plots 

Today I want to share a Python script that I wrote to plot some lab data against the core depth it was taken from. I know its not very special if you are a Python guru, but I know that many students and scientists have problems to visualize their data in a proper way. My idea [...]Related Posts:introduction to R: learning by doing (part 2: plots)plotting raster data in R: adjusting the labels and colors…reading shape files in RMatLab, SAS, STATA, SPSS, Excel users: Try R, damn [...]

[jules' pics] Vienna 

Japanese travel rules do not allow scientists like us to stay in foreign longer than the length of a business trip, even at their own expense. A few weeks ago, however, we drank a great deal of sake with a man from IIASA, which is near Vienna, and he accidentally invited us to extend our trip and visit him on the Monday after the EGU. This meant that we got to spend last weekend recovering

Exploring a changing coast in the face of sea level rise – Galveston, Texas 

Over 80 scientists gathered at a conference here this week to share their latest research on past, current, and projected future sea level rise and to discuss how this information can be used to shape policy. Despite their diverse perspectives and expertise, one thing the scientists agreed on for sure: the rates and impacts of sea level rise are local and communities are facing a growing

Porania pulvillus:Cool Discoveries via the Encyclopedia of Life, SERPENT and Flickr! 

Image by Geir Friestad via Flickr. Norway I think. I've always been a big fan of how the vast body of available images and crowd-sourced information can be beneficial to scientists but also interesting and engaging to the citizen scientist!  From tracking down videos and images of rarely seen benthic ctenophores (here) to helping to locate invasive brittle stars! (here) As I've said in

Conference report – EGU highlights, Day 4 

Large international science conferences are extraordinary events. For a week at a time, scientists emerge from their offices and laboratories and join a throng of thousands, negotiating their way through tens of thousands of presentations across multiple parallel sessions. For many of those attending, the scale of the event is less important, though, than the

Lufengosaurus Embryonic Bonebed Found From Sinemurian Jurassic China 

The great age of the embryos is unusual because almost all known dinosaur embryos are from the Cretaceous Period. The Cretaceous ended some 125 million years after the bones at the Lufeng site were buried and fossilized. Led by University of Toronto Mississauga paleontologist Robert Reisz, an international team of scientists from Canada, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China,

Geosciences Information for Teachers Workshops 

The EGU’s Geosciences Information for Teachers (GIFT) programme offers teachers the opportunity to hone their skills in the Earth Sciences.  The General Assembly Workshop is one of GIFT’s most important activities of the year and combines presentations on current research by leading scientists with hands-on activities presented by educators to teachers attending the event. Natural Hazards

What Does a Geologist/Earth Scientist Look Like? Let Us Know! 

Look! A geologist! And he's an old white guy with a rock hammer! No stereotypes here (Photo by Mrs. Geotripper). A post today over at Jacks of Science bemoaned the stereotypes of scientists as indicated by stock photography. Some of the pictures of "scientists" at work were a bit hilarious, but it was also a bit sobering to think that stock photography sites are the places that authors

Did Life Originate in a Hapophile (High Salt) Environment? 

A structural biologist at the Florida State University College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago. Professor Michael Blaber and his team produced data supporting the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable

A Library of Giant Landslides 

A new method for detecting big landslides is allowing scientists to understand the dynamics of these elusive events almost instantly, without traipsing to remote mountains or scrambling up rugged peaks months, or even years, later. In a recent study in the journal Science, Göran Ekström and Colin Stark, geophysicists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, have catalogued the 29 largest landslides since 1980 using satellite images and recordings from a global network of [...]