March 1929 the German meteorologists Alfred Wegener, Johannes Georgi (1888-1972), Fritz Loewe (1895-1974) and Ernst Sorge (1899-1946) arrived to Greenland, searching a site for a coastal base camp – a starting point for an ambitious expedition to the inner ice sheet – they found it in the Kamarujuk Fjord. One year later 18 scientists, 25 [...]

“Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.” “A Dream Within A Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) There is lot fuzz about the discovery [...]

“The Valley of Gwangi“* (1969) is considered one of the most notable prehistoric-monster-movies of all times – this fame is based on the unusual story (adapted from a script by special effects pioneer Willis “King-Kong” O’Brien) but more so on the stunning creature effects featured in the movie and produced by special effects legend Ray [...]

The first day of the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” was a great success – half a million people visited the official opening of the first World’s Fair at Crystal Palace, a 20 acres large greenhouse located in Hyde Park of central London. Fig.1. Lithograph by Joseph Nash depicting the [...]

Fig.1. “Mother Earth”,  the nourisher of all things, from the alchemistic work “Atalanta fugiens” (1618) by Michael Maier (image in public domain). “Surface conditions on Earth, have been for most of geological time regulated by life…[]…This new link between Geology and Biology originated in the Gaia hypothesis” NASA geologist Paul Lowman (2002) In 1965 James [...]

April 19, 1770 British Captain James Cook reached for the first time the south-eastern coast of Australia. The continent of Australia had been “discovered” by Europeans already in 1606, but only in 1642 the size of the new “island” was realized. However the first geological descriptions of the new continent happened only at the beginning [...]

In October 1845 British geologist Charles Lyell was visiting Boston, when he noted an advertisement proclaiming that a “Dr.” Albert C. Koch would exhibit the 114 foot long skeleton of “that colossal and terrible reptile the sea serpent” to the paying public. Lyell dismissed this claim soon as a fraud , as the skeleton was [...]

Since old times people – especially geologists – speculated about the interior of Earth. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) imagined an allegoric center of the Earth: a frozen wasteland, not reached by the divine light, where Lucifer is entrapped in eternal ice. The French Sci-Fi author Jules Gabriel Verne (1828 – 1905) based “A [...]

In a letter dated to March 30, 1759 the Italian mining engineer Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795) proposed to the physician and fossil collector Prof. Antonio Vallisnieri the subdivision of earth’s crust in various classes of rocks. Based on his observations along the foothills of the Alps, Arduino recognized a stratigraphic column with 4 classes: unstratified or [...]

“William Smith Never saw a coccolith But using macrofossil data He ordered all the English strata” An anonymous clerihew dedicated to W. Smith William Smith, born March 23, 1769, introduced in his “Strata – Identified by organized Fossils” (1816) the “principle of faunal succession” into stratigraphy. Geological maps before Smith mapped and catalogued rocks based [...]