Geobulletin alpha

Unforced variations: Aug 2015 

This month’s open thread. A traditional time to discuss the Arctic sea ice minimum. But NH summer heatwaves, and to be fair, snow in the southern hemisphere, are also fair

Imaggeo on Mondays: Late Holocene Fever 

A huge fall of ice of the Perito Moreno glacier in the Los Glaciares National Park, southwest Santa Cruz Province, Argentina, was voted one of the three best pictures entered into the EGU’s annual photo contest, by the conference participants at the 2015 General Assembly. Perito Moreno glacier is one of 48 glaciers feeding into the Southern Patagonia ice field, which combined with the Northern Patagonia ice field, comprise the largest temperate ice mass in the Southern Hemisphere. Like many [...]

Everything You Thought You Knew About the First Day of Spring is Probably Wrong 

  The Vernal Equinox (for 2015) occurs at 2245 GMT Friday, and there’s a good chance that just about everything else you were taught about it is wrong. Don’t say it’s the first day of spring, because that’s true only in a traditional sense, and most certainly not a scientific one, and if you live in the Southern Hemisphere it’s wrong on both accounts! The quarter of the year between

One year ago today: first icebergs, first Antarctic landing, first penguins! 

A fortunate consequence of a calmer Drake Passage is that our progress across it was quite speedy. When we woke on the morning of the southern hemisphere’s summer solstice, we had nothing but steel blue seas and seabirds for company. … Continue reading

The Fourth International Palaeontological Congress starts well 

MENDOZA, ARGENTINA–After an excellent opening lecture last night by Dr. Beatriz Aguirre-Urreta (“Palaeontology in the Southern Hemisphere: Benchmarks in the History of Discovery and Research”), we got down to the technical talks today in the Mendoza Sheraton for the 4th International Paleontological Congress. There were many presentations to choose from, as usual, so I had

The Polar Vortex: Good riddance! 

I was in Chicago earlier this week, and it was freezing cold once again. My friends in Illinois have had a miserable winter and it wasn't letting go easily. As I started to look at why it was so cold there mid-April, I discovered that I had a post that I started in the winter and didn't finish. It was about the "polar vortex," and I realized that I don't know very much about this thing. So, belatedly, here's my introduction to myself about the polar vortex. For more details and the references [...]

09 March: Greetings from Wellington – 2014 GSA Distinguished International Lecture Tour 

3/9/14 Wellington is a beautiful setting on a harbor set up against green hills, a compact, walkable downtown, and many spread-out suburbs. I gave two talks here to local geoscientists, including one in the largest wooden building in the Southern Hemisphere, a lovely structure with native wood interiors, and the other in a film studio

Antarctic Forum: Can We Navigate Towards ‘Eco-Civilization’ Through Custom Versions of Eco-Tourism? 

 Did the Forum get it right? A month has passed since the Antarctic Forum completed its voyage to the Southern hemisphere; sufficient time to allow for honest reflection away from the ‘halo effect’ of the voyage. Does blending an interdisciplinary group of respected business professionals, academics, spiritual leaders, media, policy specialists and artists in a

Yet Another New Pterosaur: A Pterodacytloid From Tithonian Jurassic Argentina 

New fossil record of a jurassic pterosaur from neuquen basin, vaca muerta formation, argentina Authors: Laura Codorniú and Alberto Garrido Abstract: Discoveries of Jurassic pterosaurs in the Southern Hemisphere are extremely unusual. In Argentina, pterosaurs from the Upper Jurassic (Tithonian) have only been found in the Northwest of Patagonia (Neuquén Basin). These come from

Exploring New Zealand Climate Change in Groundwater 

Alan Seltzer, a senior at Columbia University, traveled to New Zealand this past summer to work on field experiments aimed at reconstructing temperatures in the region over the last 20,000 years. His adviser, geochemist Martin Stute, is working closely with colleagues at Lamont-Doherty to understand how the southern hemisphere came out of the last ice

Imaggeo on Mondays: Capturing the aurora 

The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are created as charged particles interact with the Earth’s atmosphere.  These electrons are part of the solar wind and as they pass through the Earth’s magnetic shield (the magnetosphere); the charged particles collide with those in our atmosphere, emitting light. In the southern hemisphere this phenomenon is known as

Manam Volcano In Papua New Guinea Sends Ash 15,000 Ft Into The Air 

Papua-New Guinea's island volcano Manam has had a very large eruption, sending ash some 15,000 feet into the air, according to John Seach, an Australian volcanologist and frequent source of news from the Southern Hemisphere's volcanoes. John Seach's Twitter feed said about 3 hours ago: Since I am personally not into Twitter, I have not linked the exact feed, just provided a screenshot, but you can get John's info there. He's a good resource for eruptions the rest of the world doesn't [...]

Is the Tharsis Bulge Mars' Tibet? 

Both Mars and Earth have major topographic features of roughly the same dimension and height. On Mars, the Tharsis rise represents a continent-scale area of approximately 5.5-6 km mean elevation. This topographic feature is second only to the planetary scale Martian dichotomy that separates the thick, elevated crust of the southern hemisphere from the thinner northern lowlands. By

Geological Movie Review of The Day After Tomorrow - Part 4 

Geological Movie Review of The Day After Tomorrow - Overview- Building Up Storms -- International Space Station -0:15:41 - We have entered the part of the movie where the major global storms start to manifest themselves. Our first view is from space, in what I can only assume is the International Space Station (ISP) since it was the only space station at the time of the movie (2002) (NASA). The figure to the right shows the space station in the movie (on top) versus an image of the [...]

Crazy Ants Invade the USA 

“Invasive “crazy ants” are displacing fire ants in areas across the southeastern United States. [...] It’s the latest in a history of ant invasions from the southern hemisphere and may prove to have dramatic effects on the ecosystem of the region.” Quoted from The University of Texas at Austin press

Eruptions Summer Plans 

Well, it might seem early for some of you (and wrong for those of you in the southern hemisphere), but summer is upon us. Classes are 100% done here and I’ve spent the last week slowly changing gears from teaching

Interhemisphere Climate Forcing During the Younger Dryas 

Northern Hemisphere forcing of Southern Hemisphere climate during the last deglaciation Authors: 1. Feng He (a) 2. Jeremy D. Shakun (b) 3. Peter U. Clark (c) 4. Anders E. Carlson (a,c,d) 5. Zhengyu Liu (a,e) 6. Bette L. Otto-Bliesner (f) 7. John E. Kutzbach (a) Affiliations: a. Center for Climatic Research, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University

Cusco (11,100 feet) and Sachsayhuayman Ruins 

I can already tel that there will be precious little time to write much on this trip. We are busy and dead dog tired at the end of the day so the photos will have very short captions. Still, a picture is worth a thousand words.Take-off in Lima to the west towards the port city of Callao. This is the place where plundered gold and silver began its journey back to Spain.Arriving in the Cusco Valley and looking down at the high mountains. The stratified hillsides are composed of sandstone and [...]

Stuff we linked to on Twitter last week 

Since it seems much of the northern hemisphere is cold and snowy at the moment, here’s some good reading to curl up with a hot drink over. For those in the southern hemisphere: here’s some good brain food to distract … Continue reading

One Telescope Project 

This article explores the lack of research telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere where conditions for observations are exceptional. Hakeem Oluseyi, an astronomer at the Florida Institute of Technology believes that every country should have at least one research telescope – today only three nations in Africa have