Topic
geology
- Richat Structure
The Richat Structure in the Saharan Desert of Mauritania. An eroded geologic dome.
- Coast
- Mount Api
The karsting limestone of Mount Api , Malaysia.
- The Central Pangean Mountains
TheCentral Pangean Mountains. If you go back to the Permian, you’d find the Appalachians, Massif Central, Atlas Mountains, and Scottish Highlands were all part of a single range cutting through the Pangean supercontin…
- Seaflooding
A harebrained scheme to flood deserts, create ecosystems out of dead zones, sequester carbon, and create new economically productive geographies — through "seaflooding". Take places like the Dead Sea, which is already…
- Portals Into Earth
From John McPhee's Annals of the Former World: Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional…
- The Kalevala and the Underworld
I just finished Robert Macfarlane's Underland, a book about all things "underworld" — catacombs, cave exploration, underground rivers, tree root networks, and geologic time. He ties these stories together with histori…
- Subterranean Trees of Magma
From the world of geophysics, a massive-scale seismic research project has been happening surrounding the island of Réunion, a shield volcanic dome over an Indian Ocean hotspot. Researchers have been using a stream of…
- Places: Remnants of an Ancient Lake
Lake Chad spans 4 national borders in the central Sahel: Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. Since the 1960s it's shrunk to about 5% its ancestral size, due to overuse, mismanagement, and climate shifts. This NASA pho…
- Weekend Reading: LiDAR, Auto Generated Textbooks, and Paleo Plate Tectonics
🛣 Creating Low-Cost LiDAR This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 diff…
- What Did the Earth Look Like?
In the spirit of yesterday's post on the Earth of the past, this interactive map lets you browse back in time to see what oceans and landmasses looked like all the way back to 750 million years ago. Try typing in your…
- Weekend Reading: How We Collect Data, Mapping the Camp Fire, and Earth's Great Unconformity
🗺 How We Get Data Collected in the Field Ready for Use My colleagues Bill Dollins and Todd Pollard (the core of our data team), wrote this post detailing how we go from original ground-based data collection in Fulcru…
- Annals of the Former World
I majored in geography in college and always liked earth sciences. I dabbled a bit with classes that were related, but not core to geography study — your basic geology courses and a class in geodesy. One of the…
- The Diminishing Coast
Yesterday I read this fascinating piece on the state of Louisiana's gulf coast. This slow, man-induced terraforming of the coastline is permanently eradicating bayou communities, and becoming a high-profile issue in t…