What do volcanoes mean to you? This is perhaps not a question to ask a volcanologist (cue: a paean to their current flame); but what do they mean to the publics? Fire and brimstone? Death and destruction? Of humans pitted against mountains? Or is it something else? Perhaps the answer is obvious, but it is certainly something we need to …[Read More]
One of the delights of talking to children of primary school age is their disarming ability to ask really simple questions that demand straightforward answers, but leave you struggling to throw your academic caution to the wind. Even with the questions of the biggest, the smallest, the oldest and the youngest there are still different ways of (over)interpreting …[Read More]
A tweet from Jenni Barclay about a Pirate Scientist gave me an excuse to visit the newly opened reading rooms in the Bodleian’s Weston Library.. William Dampier was a seventeenth century pirate, and later maritime adventurer, whose several books of ‘Voyages and Discoveries’ make for fascinating reading. In 1699, he set sail in HMS Roebuck …[Read More]
A fascinating story has emerged this week from a paper in Nature Geoscience by Amanda Lough and co-workers (Lough et al., 2013), on the discovery of a new volcano deep beneath the ice of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The discovery is partly a story of scientists looking in a place where no-one had looked before; …[Read More]
If you are ever in Chile and have the chance to take a mid-morning flight south from Santiago towards Puerto Montt or Concepcion, make sure you try and book a window seat on the left hand side of the plane. Once the early morning cloud has cleared, you could be in for a treat as …[Read More]
Beware of the sealions (‘cuidado lobos marinos’) declares the sign at Valdivia fish market, which stretches along the docks in this southern Chilean city. And it’s no joke either, as a large clan of these creatures has set up stall in the estuary beneath the fish market, ready to feast on the daily pickings cast …[Read More]
Over on her Georney‘s blog, Evelyn Mervine has recently posted a nice piece with some spectacular images of columnar jointing. This seemed like a good opportunity to dust off some field photos, with some more examples of polygonal joint sets in lavas from a variety of settings, to illustrate the diversity of forms that cooling-contraction joints …[Read More]
November 7th marked the 175th anniversary of one of the largest earthquakes to have struck northern Patagonia. The earthquake, which is estimated to have had a magnitude of 8, had an epicentre close to Valdivia, and was accompanied by significant ground shaking and subsidence as far south as Chiloe island, and a major tsunami that …[Read More]
