Earth Magnetism and Rock Physics

Going deeper underground – why do we want to know how rocks behave?

Stephanie Zihms August 12, 2016

Photo taken at the Soapbox Science event courtesy of Sarah Caldwell (smcneem)

Imagine you find yourself standing atop a wooden box in the middle of your home town, on a rainy weekend day, with the sole aim of talking to passersby about your research work. It can be a rather daunting prospect! How do you decide what the take-home message of your work is: which single nugget of information do you want members of the public to take away after having spoken to you? Even more im ...[Read More]

Who do you think most deserves the title of the Mother of Geology?

Laura Roberts-Artal August 4, 2016

Much ink is spilled hailing the work of the early fathers of geology – and rightly so! James Hutton is the mind behind the theory of uniformitarianism, which underpins almost every aspect of geology and argues that processes operating at present operated in the same manner over geological time, while Sir Charles Lyell furthered the idea of geological time. William Smith, the coal miner and canal b ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Using geophysical techniques to unlock the secrets of the past

Félix Rodríguez Cardozo June 13, 2016

The nature surrounding the man . Credit: Félix Rodríguez Cardozo (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Unravelling the secrets of past civilisations is tricky at the best of times. More so if many of the records which hold clues about how communities lived, built their homes and temples, as well as how they fed themselves, were destroyed by subsequent invaders. In these instances, as Felix Rodriguez Cardozo explains in today’s post, geophysical techniques (such as Lidar, which very recently hit the ...[Read More]

Great walls of fire – Vitrification and thermal engineering in the British Iron Age

Fabian Wadsworth and Rebecca Hearne May 25, 2016

It’s long been recognised the peoples of European prehistory occasionally, and quite deliberately, melted the rocks from which their hilltop enclosures were made. But why did they do it? In today’s blog post Fabian Wadsworth and Rebecca Hearne explore this question. Burning questions Throughout the European Bronze and Iron Ages (spanning 2600 years from 3200 BC to 600 BC), people constructed stone ...[Read More]