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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

The lake of Alleghe in the valley of Cordévole is today exactly 242 years old. The moment of the birth of the lake is well known, at 7:02 in the morning of January 11, 1771 the river flowing through the valley became dammed by a landslide coming from the mountain Piz. Fig.1. General view of [...]

In the early morning of December 28, 1908 a 30 to 42 seconds long earthquake with a reconstructed magnitude of 6.7-7.2 hit the Italian cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria. The earthquake damaged 90% of the buildings and broken pipes fuelled a firestorm, an aftereffect known from many other earthquakes; however one of the most [...]