For anyone who spent the 1980s jamming to British band Echo & the Bunnymen, this is a familiar sight. The cover of their third studio album, Porcupine (1983), features the band nonchalantly standing in front of the gushing white foam of Iceland’s Gullfoss waterfall. Mentioned in local written stories and beamed across the world in …[Read More]
Latest posts
Geology Photo of the Week # 12 – Nov 18-24
Check out this beauty! AMAZING. Those crystals are a few centimetres in size, flawless and have a great colour. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where it came from. I know, I know, this is the cardinal sin, so I apologize for that. I hope you enjoy looking at it all the same. Cheers, Matt
Peering into dinosaur skulls – the best application for medical technology
Most of what we know about dinosaurs comes from their skeletal remains. Rarely, we get tiny glimpses into their soft tissue anatomy through skin impressions and even rarer, preserved tissue fragments, mummified over time, and their ecology and life habits through combining interpretation of this from what we can glean from trace fossils (footprints, poop, …[Read More]
Guest Blog: Earthquakes in the Steppes of Central Asia
Tim Middleton is a first year PhD student in the Department of Earth Science at Oxford University – studying active tectonics in central and eastern Asia. He has recently joined the GfGD National Committee as our Advocacy Development Officer. Here, Tim describes his experience of fieldwork in Kazakhstan and the importance of studying the landscape to …[Read More]
Who the devil are this ‘public’ everyone keeps rambling on about?
The last two posts in this series, based on a recent paper by Ted Nield and Iain Stewart, addressed the issues of why should scientists bother communicating, and what do people in general already know about science, and geoscience in particular. Oddly, these are the most fundamental questions when it comes to science communication, but …[Read More]
Friday Photo (57): Active Geology – Sinking Buildings from Ancient Greece
These foundations were once part of a building in ancient Greece. Over thousands of years, active faults have lowered the land and the foundations have sunk below sea level. Geology can have a big impact on relatively short timescales. (c) Geology for Global Development
The Palaeobiology Database – a quick intro
A substantial portion of my PhD involves contributing to the Pal[a]eobiology database, the largest current online database of global fossil occurrences, literature references, and taxonomic data. It’s a public resource, so anyone can access the information contained within the database (yay for open data!). The project is very much on-going, but currently over a million taxonomic …[Read More]
GeoTalk: Dr Stephanie Henson
GeoTalk, featuring short interviews with geoscientists about their research, continues this month with a Q&A with Dr Stephanie Henson (University of Southampton) who tells us about her work on marine ecosystems, and gives great advice to young scientists. If you’d like to suggest a scientist for an interview, please contact Bárbara Ferreira. First, could you introduce …[Read More]
In the News – November 2012
GfGD’s Director, Joel Gill, shares some of the things that have caught his eye in the news recently: Natural Disaters: The past couple of weeks have seen a significant number of natural disasters, from earthquakes in Guatemala and Myanmar (Burma) to hurricanes in the Atlantic – impacting developing nations such as Haiti, and a landslide dam …[Read More]
SpotOn London – a global conference
SpotOn London was held this weekend at the Wellcome Trust, shockingly, in London. The name stands for Science Policy, Outreach and Tools Online, with each of these representing three individual but strongly interwoven strands during the two days. As far as conferences go, it was pretty interactive. Each session was live-streamed, and through that and …[Read More]