Tectonics and Structural Geology

San Francisco: Where the Plates Meet

William Elder November 30, 2020

View on the Golden Gate Bridge from the Presidio of San Francisco, showing the serpentine bluffs on the foreground, Fort Point under the arch of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands on the far side. Credit: William Elder.

San Francisco has been a natural gathering place for people across the millennia. It is not a coincidence that this city, situated at the entrance to the largest estuary on the U.S. West Coast, owes its dramatic setting to active geology on the North American plate margin. The first people of the San Francisco Peninsula, the Ramaytush Ohlone, cared for the land here for thousands of years before E ...[Read More]

Franciszka Szymakowska (05/02/1927 – 2007): the woman whose drawings unraveled the geological history of the Carpathians

Anouk Beniest November 27, 2020

An artists illustration of Franciszka Szymakowska (credit: Annique van der Boon)

Franciszka Szymakowska was born on the 5th of February in 1927 in Krakow. She was lovingly known as “Niusia” (Antoni 2007). About her early life, not much is known. Franciszka did her studies at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Jagiellonian University and graduated in 1952. During her studies, she started to work at the Polish Geological Institute. She remained affilia ...[Read More]

Mind your head: Overcoming Anxiety

Jean Holloway November 18, 2020

Credit: Suzy Hazelwood. Distributed via Pexels

This Mind Your Head blog post is a follow-up from Jean Holloway’s talk during the online short course on mental health that aired during the last EGU General Assembly, where she discussed overcoming anxiety. Anxiety is excessive worry or fear, and is a normal part of life, until it becomes frequent or debilitating. This post is written by someone with lived experience as an academic who struggled ...[Read More]

Chi Jishang (1917-1994): the diamond hunter who shaped her own future

Anouk Beniest October 27, 2020

An artists illustration of Chi Jishang, (credit: Annique van der Boon)

Chi Jishang was born on the 25th of June 1917 in the Anlu County in the Province of Hubei, central China, but she moved to Beijing when she was four years old. Because her family was poor and she had three older siblings, her parents did not allow her and her younger sibling to go to school at the age that they should go to school. As a child, Chi was bright and very curious. She would ask her sch ...[Read More]

Features from the Field: Angular Unconformities

Samuele Papeschi October 21, 2020

The worldwide famous angular unconformity at Siccar Point, between vertical layers of Silurian graywacke (below) and gently dipping Devonian layers of the Old Red Sandstone Fm. (above). Photo © Dave Souza via Wikimedia.commons

An angular unconformity is an erosional surface that truncates older, tilted sedimentary layers and that is overlain by younger layers, oriented parallel to the unconformity. The discovery and interpretation of angular unconformities, like the famous Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar Point, Scotland, marked a paradigm shift in the geological theories of the 18th century. At that time, the theo ...[Read More]

TS Must-Read – Wilson (1966) Did the Atlantic close and then re-open?

The Must-read team October 13, 2020

J.T. Wilson published “Did the Atlantic close and reopen?” in 1966, giving birth to the so called “Wilson Cycle”. The article is a key steppingstone for the theory of plate tectonics, and it is a must-read paper not only in tectonics studies but also in paleontology and stratigraphy. The questions raised can be generally abridged in two: “Why regions with similar fauna can be very far from each ot ...[Read More]

TS Must-Read – Mckenzie and Parker (1967) The North Pacific: an example of tectonics on a sphere

The Must-read team September 30, 2020

The paper describes how large, rigid, aseismic regions can be defined with Euler’s theorem, which describes the geometry of motion on a sphere, i.e. the Earth’s surface. Points on these large and rigid blocks move in relation to other blocks describing small circles set by their rotation pole. The paper describes this as “paving stone theory”, where tectonic plates are “paving stones”, and success ...[Read More]

Ana Margarida Neiva – A woman as hard as granite

Rita Solá September 24, 2020

An artists illustration of Ana Neiva, (credit: Annique van der Boon)

Ana Neiva was born on May 7 1941 in Cedofeita, Porto, northwest Portugal – a city carved in granite. Her childhood and youth were spent in Coimbra, where her father worked. João Cotelo Neiva was an eminent geologist and professor at the University of Coimbra, one of Europe’s oldest universities. His influence was decisive for her interest in geology and her scientific career. ...[Read More]

TS Must-Read – Wilson (1965) A New Class of Faults and their Bearing on Continental Drift

The Must-read team September 15, 2020

In 1965, JT Wilson published “A New Class of Faults and their Bearing on Continental Drift” (https://doi.org/10.1038/207343a0). This is one of the papers that led to a paradigm shift in Earth Sciences and would become one of the bases of plate tectonics. The concept of the transform fault, introduced in this paper in a very smart way, is fundamental in tectonics textbooks nowadays. Indeed many of ...[Read More]

TS Must-Read – Dietz (1961) Continent and ocean basin evolution by spreading of the sea floor

The Must-read team September 2, 2020

Dietz 1961 “Continent and Ocean Basin Evolution by Spreading of the Sea Floor” paper was ground-breaking for plate tectonics. Almost literally, as it discussed the sea-floor spreading theory. Certainly away from the consensus at the time, this article is a classic in divergent tectonic settings and it may be an interesting piece of work for ECS working in tectonics and, more particularly, in conti ...[Read More]