Building the Earth in a sandbox The Main Ethiopian Rift stretches for hundreds of kilometers through Ethiopia, a massive fracture where Africa is slowly tearing apart to birth a new ocean. However, the processes driving this continental breakup remain hidden deep beneath layers of volcanic rock and millions of years of geological history. Today, in a laboratory in the heart of the be ...[Read More]
The 4.5 billion years of geologic evolution has shaped the tectonic processes in Earth we see today. Over the span of time, Earth has changed from being a magma ocean to a tectonically active planet, by transitioning through different tectonic regimes. A silent witness of this journey have been cratons which have survived for billions of years. Therefore cratons preserve clues of past tectonic pr ...[Read More]
As geoscientists, we tend to see geology everywhere. Around Christmas, many people stare at decorated fir trees and twinkling lights; salt tectonicists stare at seismic lines and outcrops and see… trees as well. Tall stems, branching limbs, stacked “tiers” of material; a whole forest of geological Christmas trees hiding in the subsurface. In salt provinces around the world, from the Flinders Range ...[Read More]
