What is a Marker Bed?
I’ve had a couple requests to give a few more examples of what a geological marker bed (a.k.a. marker horizon) actually is, and more fully explain why I chose Marker Bed as the title...
Category: Volcanoes
Maybe Not So Extinct After All
This one will be short so I can get back to work, but it was too good to pass up a quick summary. (I am literally weeks away from having all the pieces in...
It Hasta be Shasta
My most recent post (A Show of Hands) certainly woke up some of the usual suspects, and although it was not my intention to spark such impassioned rebuttal, it is comforting to realize that...
Yellowstone Hydrothermal Explosion
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...
Harmonic Tremors are Really Cool
Those of us who celebrate the earth and its processes are having a real good time in Iceland (late November 2023). Please don’t think me insensitive: while the situation is surely fraught with peril...
Pompeii vs. Herculaneum in 79 A.D.
Susie just loves to visit Italy, and suffers the twenty-plus hour one-way trip whenever she can find the time (and airfare). I tagged along several years ago, and while the focaccia bread on the...
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...
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...
