Chernobyl and Evolutionary Change
It was early in the 1960s and my family had recently relocated from Nebraska to the Los Angeles Basin. Those were scary times! The Soviets were threatening to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, and...
Category: Marine
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...
Oops, Our Bad…
Real science — by definition — is open to continuing reinterpretations as more data become available, often leading to adjustments of accepted models. An excellent example of this unavoidable truism was the basis of...
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...
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...
Going Up?
There have been a flood of articles over the past couple days with the same overarching message: the climate crisis is irreversible and we have already moved beyond the threshold we’d need to stay...
What’s Next?
I spend quite a bit of time thinking about what the earth is going to look like when humans are no longer around to take care of it. I had a student once who...
Barometric Air Pressure 101
A Request… Please hit the Subscribe button and sign up for updates to this blog. It costs you nothing and gives me nothing, other than a bit of emotional validation for my efforts. What...
A Search for Alien Life
Are we alone in the universe? Whether you are coming at this as a biologist, anthropologist, or religious scholar, this is a question which has occupied — and befuddled — thinking minds for centuries,...
Plastic Water Bottles: Friend or Foe?
I read yet another article about the dangers of plastics (this time from Newsweek on 09 January, 2024). I could go on and on about the possible permutations of the controversy and potential dangers...
