Older Than Dirt
“How old is the earth?” has been a recurring question for centuries, and the dates and procedures used to estimate its age have surely evolved with time. Enter “age of the earth” into your...
Category: Marine
What’s in a Name?
This one will of necessity be short — duty calls. I recently published a post regarding the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The subject continues to prompt countless articles that run the full gamut:...
El Niño Southern Oscillation
I’m probably going to get most of this wrong, but since even the guys driving the Cray supercomputers don’t really understand the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and what makes it tick, I guess...
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...
Thermosteric Sea Level Rise
The SciTechDaily website had an interesting article (28 May 2026) that summarized an international study about how climate change is affecting global sea level rise. The team included researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric...
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...
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...
