Wire Gold
I had a question come in about Marker Bed and figured the response could make a great blog post that would wreak lethal damage upon a pair of fowl avians with one ballistically-launched projectile:...
Category: Earth Materials
Bats
Thanks to the nature of my job as an exploration field geologist, I have spent a lot of time underground. Again, because of the nature of my job, most of my time underground has...
Primary v. Secondary Industry
There is a lot being said these days about bringing back our nation’s lost glory. This causes me indigestion on multiple levels. Fortunately, two of them are easy to reconcile: I cannot agree with...
Deep Sea Mining: Part 2
Before we jump into the deep water, a couple possibly irrelevant tangents: I love the earth, am fascinated by its processes, and wish it a long and happy life. Anybody who has opened their...
The Phantom Tollbooth
It was 1981, and we were continuing our exploration for copper, zinc, gold, silver, and cobalt in a massive sulfide deposit in Southwestern Oregon, just north of the California border. It was a vigorous...
Desalination (and political suicide?)
Another short one. I tried to abandon poli-sci over fifty years ago, but here I am… old and staring down toward the end of the tunnel, and sucked back into the swamp. I saw...
It’s Still All About the Water
This one will be short, but really, what is there to say at this point when absolutely none of us know what is actually happening? A recent article in the New York Times titled...
White Sand Beaches
I got a question from Jane who, while reading Marker Bed, became intrigued by the reference to quartz sand on page 29 of the print versions. (By the way, if you have not yet...
Reflection v. Refraction
It was late afternoon on Christmas and I was driving west into the setting sun. It had been wet most of the day, but the rain machine had turned off for a bit, the...
Paleontology: How the Earth Makes a Fossil
We’ve spent a couple recent posts discussing geologic time and the two methods earth scientists use to describe and measure it. We started with a general introduction to earthtime and absolute age dating (Intro...
