“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 [...]

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 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 [...]

“Geologising in a Volcanic country is most delightful,…[]” Geologist Charles Darwin in a letter to his father Darwin is today remembered for his gradualistic view of earth’s history, an essential prerequisite for his view of life, as he concludes in 1859 ” from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have [...]

The flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 and especially the past and present Russian meteors are impressive reminders that the terrestrial biosphere can be affected also by extraterrestrial forces. However contrary to headlines by the general media the connection between mass extinctions and large meteor impacts is still poorly understand. The Scaglia Variegata and Scaglia Cinerea [...]

“Therefore on my return to Shropshire I examined sections and coloured a map of parts round Shrewsbury.” Darwin in his autobiography (1876) “A map is always a decisive criterion of they who aspire to the rank of geologists [E]very one who has not compiled a map, wants the necessary talent of combination . The spirited [...]

We don’t know how much wood a woodchuck would chuck if he could chuck wood, but we know how much sediment he moves per year… Biogeomorphology, also referred as ecogeomorphology or sometimes as zoogeomorphology, is the study of the linkages between ecology and geomorphology, or in simple terms between life forms and landforms. Such two-way [...]

“No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race…[]” Lyell 1863 The debate over the age of the earth generated an even more intriguing question: how old is humankind? Written records date back some thousands of years, but geological [...]

The tsunami of Indonesia 2004 and Japan 2011 showed that they are a common element associated with earthquakes. Modern databases list more than 2.000 tsunami events worldwide in the last 4.000 years, most of them recorded in historic documents, chronicles and even myths – and yet tsunami deposits in the geological record seem to be [...]