After some months of testing and refining, a free-t0-use online version of Volcanoes Top Trumps has been launched by Winning Moves. This should greatly extend the reach of Volcanoes Top Trumps – which is a fun and educational game about volcanoes that has spun off from the NERC – ESRC funded project ‘STREVA‘ – Strengthening Resilience in Volcanic Areas. Why not play t ...[Read More]
Green Tea and Velociraptors
Are the days of parsimony numbered? Probably.
April Wright recently published a cool paper looking at how to bring morphological analyses of evolutionary relationships into the Bayesian realm. This is her take on it – enjoy! Author Bio: My name is April Wright, and I’m a graduate student in David Hillis’ lab at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m largely interested in the estimation and use of phylogenetic trees to ...[Read More]
Geology for Global Development
Landscapes of Ladakh (1)
Recently we undertook some work in Ladakh (India), amongst some beautiful landscapes. To see and learn more – why not come to this event at The Geological Society. Photos: Geology for Global Development (2014)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Phreatic eruptions – the silent assasins
The recent eruption of Mt Ontake, Japan tragically killed at least 50 hikers who were on the volcano at the time. Within hours of the eruption taking place, social media was flooded with first-hand video footage illustrating just how close many survivors came to perishing in an onrushing pyroclastic flow. Despite having a sophisticated seismic and geodetic monitoring system, many news reports stat ...[Read More]
Geology for Global Development
Event: The Lost World of Ladakh: Reclaiming the Past, Sustaining the Future
THE LOST WORLD OF LADAKH: RECLAIMING THE PAST, SUSTAINING THE FUTURE Venue: The Geological Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BG. 24 October 2014, 5.30pm – 8.30pm www.geolsoc.org.uk/Lost-world-of-Ladakh The Geological Society recently co-organised an international conference in Leh, the capital of the historic Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. Sustainable Resource Development in ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Stupid fun things I do in water #1: snorkle in a cold river with baby salmon
Most people like snorkeling in warm water. Well, I have to admit I do too but recently, a old friend and I decided to put on wetsuits and snorkle down part of the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where people often tube in the summer. It was definitely both stupid and fun… here are some pics, thanks to the waterproof camera :
Green Tea and Velociraptors
IPC Day 2 – The evolution of giants
This is a slightly delayed summary of the sauropod symposium on day 2 of IPC4, following sessions the previous day on vertebrate taphonomy and diversity and extinction in the fossil record. This is also the final of these little summaries, and for that I apologise – my laptop is a bit kaput atm, and needs power sockets to run and which were not available in some of the rooms. I might be a little c ...[Read More]
Green Tea and Velociraptors
IPC4 Day 1 – Death is the road to awe
Following on from the previous post, the afternoon symposium was all about the applications and implications of vertebrate taphonomy. Matt Carrano kicked things off with a great talk on how microfossil bonebeds help to guide our understanding of terrestrial palaeoecosystems. Using sites from the well-known but poorly understood Cloverly Formation, he provided a key insight from abundances from ter ...[Read More]
Green Tea and Velociraptors
IPC4 Day 1 – Using the past to inform the present
Welcome to the fourth International Palaeontology Congress! 900 palaeontologists have piled into the land of steak, sun, and malbec in Mendoza, Argentina, for the biggest palaeontology conference that draws from all parts of the field. What I want to do with these posts is just provide snapshot summaries of the talks I’ve been at to provide a window into the conference and the amazing diversity of ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Communicating research results through comics: is the permeability of crystalline rock in the shallow crust related to depth, lithology, or tectonic setting?
Mark Ranjram, a Masters student in my research group, wrote a paper on crystalline permeability that is coming out in a special edition of Geofluids on ‘Crustal Permeability’ early in 2015 (other cool papers in early view here). Here is Mark’s awesome response when I asked him if he wanted to write a plain language summary: