Quicksand (a.k.a. Liquefaction)
I had a great question a little bit ago on the Ask GeoMan section of my GeoMania educational website from Elizabeth in Lake Oswego, Oregon. She’d been walking on Nye Beach on the central...
Category: Tectonics
Strickler’s Laws of GeoFantasy
I love being a geologist. Along with being able to spend my life outside and in nature (and drink a lot of beer in my salad days — it’s one of the requirements for...
Earthquakes: Prediction and Control
As discussed in a couple earlier posts (Intro to Quakes and the Richter Scale), earthquakes are gonna continue to rattle our teeth and level our cities, and there’s not a hell of a lot...
Earthquakes and the Richter Scale
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 Brief Introduction to Earthquakes
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 Brief Introduction to Volcanoes
Before we get started I gotta come clean: The year was 1957, I was six years old in southeastern Nebraska, and Pop had called a family meeting to inform my sister and I that...
Super Volcanoes
kaBoom2 The headline of the article in Global Times (8/10/22) sounded ominous: “Earth overdue for volcanic super eruption. Explosive pressure builds up over millions of years, new research finds.” The article reports that “super...
Water, water everywhere…
I’ve been a collector of good ideas for as long as I can remember. But just like an on switch cannot exist without an off, or an up without a down, for every positive...
West coast tectonics
I had an interesting question come across my GeoMania website a while back: “If Mt. St. Helens and the whole west coast is a convergent plate boundary with subduction, how come there are no...
