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 [...]

“No one with an eye for land forms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the “scabland.” Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face to the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, black rock carved into mazes of buttes and canyons. Everybody on the plateau knows scabland…[]…The popular [...]

The tragedy of the “unsinkable” Titanic – lost in the cold water of the Atlantic – became part of history and pop culture, but the story of the main culprit that caused the disaster is mostly forgotten and only vague descriptions and some photos exists of the supposed iceberg(s). One famous photography taken from board [...]

“No such hypothesis is sufficient to explain either the cataclysms or the glacial phenomena; and we need not hesitate to confess our ignorance of this strange, this mysterious, episode in the history of the globe….” BRISTOW, H.G. (1872): The world before the deluge by Louis Figuier – Newly edited and revised by H.W. Bristow. 2nd. [...]

The latest Accretionary Wedge, the acclaimed gathering of the Geoblogosphere, is hosted this time by Geologist Ron Schott at his “Geology Home Companion Blog” and he is asking for “the most memorable or significant geological event that you’ve directly experienced.“ If a geologist claims to have directly experienced a geological event there are only two [...]

Once, during the long and cold winter nights in the Alps, people gathered around the fireplace to tell each other ancient tales or myths. Some of these myths explain the origin or deal with the curse of glaciers. Various glaciers are said to be the results of an ancient curse: the Langgletscher in Swiss, the [...]

“[]…we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material – especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of [...]

One of the most iconic movie-monsters is without doubt the “mummy“, mostly from ancient Egypt and with human shape (despite the fact that thousands of animal mummies are known). Still today we are fascinated by the effort put into the preservation of these bodies, the ultimate victory above decay and death himself. But there are [...]

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man [...]

“It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier…[]…My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled [...]