Did you know you can illustrate geology with food? It’s true! And tasty. Just about every foodstuff can be dragooned in the interests of education – you’re limited only by your imagination and the concept you wish to illustrate. Some foods are more suited for specific geologic processes than others. It turns out that Oreos® [...]

I’m not being facetious. I spent a good portion of one Sunday reading the pamphlet for the Geologic Map of the Silver Lake Quadrangle, Cowlitz County, Washington (pdf). And I was enthralled. There’s high excitement in that data. There’s a whole history contained in it, over forty million years of oceans, deltas, volcanic eruptions, flood [...]

One of the best karst geologists in the world was technically a geographer. That’s the thing with physical geography: women were allowed to do it, and some of them made it just as geological as they liked. Dr. Marjorie Sweeting (1920-1994) certainly loved doing geology. Let’s call her what she was: geographer, geomorphologist, and distinguished [...]

There’s a fundamental fact one learns about trees when growing up in dry country forests: they’re flammable. Folks in Flagstaff, Arizona can tell what part of summer it is by the smell. If it’s all piney-fresh, it’s May or early June, and everything’s still safely damp from the spring snowmelt; if it smells like warm [...]

… Mount St. Helens exploded with a fury that surpassed expectations. Things have calmed down considerably since that day. Even the trees are growing back. To quote myself, “This is the view of Mount St. Helens from Elk Rock Viewpoint. In the center left, you’ll see Mount Adams peeking over a ridge. In the center, [...]

Oh, my darlings, will I have treats for you! Lockwood and I are in the midst of our geoextravaganza tour down the Oregon coast and across the Josephine Ophiolite. Lots of hot volcanic action round here, but there’s a huge metamorphic story to be told. There’s going to be a lot to absorb and process [...]

I’m rather a bit in love with a dead woman. I met her in a moment of desperation, when I was running low on Dame Agatha Christie and had finished all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stuff, and still had a yearning for turn-of-the-last-century detective literature. There she was, one of the helpful [...]

You never hear of the other Lyell. Sir Charles, you know quite well: he set the infant science of geology firmly on its feet and inspired Charles Darwin. But there’s another Lyell who was a geologist, and without her, Charles Lyell would have found his work far more difficult, if not impossible. When he married [...]

Taking care of the only habitable planet we’ve got for the foreseeable future seems like an excellent idea. I’m with The Tick: “You can’t destroy the Earth! That’s where I keep all my stuff!” It’s also where a lot of the cool geology is. I mean, yeah, there’s plenty of that on other worlds, but [...]

Here’s a word you don’t often apply to a forest: eroded. We don’t expect live trees to be eroded. The slope they’re standing on, sure: that can erode. Maybe the soft alluvial soil down by the river erodes in a flood, leaving roots exposed and trees more prone to fall in the wind. But would [...]