Geology in the News

This is a selection of stories, subject to the following rules. First, I don't guarantee close daily coverage of everything that happens (because I have things to do apart from maintaining this Web page). Second, the site has to be generally accessible. (Many journals make their pages accessible only to people who have paid a subscription to the written version.) Third, I choose newspapers and news sites that tend to keep their pages accessible for more than two weeks over those that do not. Fourth, I keep older articles archived for varying lengths of time, depending how important I think they are (or interesting, at least); whether they have been updated or made redundant; and whether the site has dropped them. For example, I've had to limit stories from the New York Times. It is a fine paper, but its new policy is to take off its stories within DAYS and then charge for access to them. I'll attach a warning notice to each item which is likely to be short-lived.

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Geology in the News, 2007

  • December 31, 2007. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, XII: The complex geopolitics of energy resources and supply from the Caspian region. Get an atlas and read these two stories. Then imagine our country's leaders trying to understand it. It's OK to weep. No wonder Vladimir Putin is winning this economic war.

  • December 28, 2007. The Coachella Valley in southern California has developed a severe subsidence problem because the ground water is being over-pumped. This is a familiar story in other places.... The Indio Sun

  • December 24, 2007. Conditions on early Mars: warm, wet, sulfur-rich. No carbonates. Doesn't alter the conclusion that Mars was warm and wet rather briefly, and has been cold and arid ever since. The paper was in Science last Friday. Terra Daily

  • December 23, 2007. Coal mining by mountain-top removal: the Hobet-21 mine in West Virginia. With these sites you could set up many students exercises with Google Earth.

  • December 20, 2007. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, XI: Russia wins another round in the struggle for Caspian Basin energy.

  • December 18, 2007. The Gods Must Be Restless. National Geographic feature article in the January 2008 issue, describing the cultural baggage that goes along with living with volcanoes in that country. Isn't it reassuring that the United States would never allow faith-based beliefs to interfere with important national issues? National Geographic

  • December 16, 2007. Clear-cutting steep slopes, and landslides: is there a link? It's a no-brainer for anyone who has done Geology 1. Even so, you can still hire a geologist to tell you it's OK to clear cut a slope of 50 degrees that was already classified as at "moderate risk" for landslides. Here's an example from Washington State. Seattle Times

  • December 12, 2007. A scare scenario? The Hayward Fault is the most dangerous urban fault in the US. Maybe so: but just because it's the 140th anniversary of the last Big One doesn't mean that there's a sudden jump in the likelihood of a repeat. It's only one more day in 50,000. Publicity for the work of the USGS is OK in my book: it's a vital and underfunded agency. But scare tactics are not OK. The National Geographic reporter isn't any better. It's ALWAYS true that a major quake may strike the Bay Area next year, or tomorrow. National Geographic News

  • December 11, 2007. Small eruption at Tavurvur, outside Rabaul. But it's from a new vent, so must be watched carefully. Papua New Guinea National

  • December 7, 2006. Another coal mine disaster in China. < href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7132017.stm"> BBC News OnLine

  • December 6, 2007. A flood from the North American ice sheet occurred just as the climate changed dramatically in Europe about 8000 years ago: unlikely to be coincidence! The paper is said to be in Science this week, but it is not! National Geographic News

  • December 5, 2007. Snowball Earth was really a slushball. Not a new idea, but a new contribution that suggests this same conclusion. In a commentary, Jay Kaufman points out that the new work is a simple model that doesn't address all the issues. However, I don't think that Kaufman accepts Snowball Earth any more than I do. I've argued for years that "Slushball Earth" is more like it, and others much more qualified than I am have produced *evidence* on that point. The paper and commentary are in Nature, which doesn't make its papers generally accessible on the Web. Terra Daily.
    Previous stories:

  • December 2, 2007. Background summary of the Hudson Canyon, an undersea valley off New York. Clastic Detritus blog site.

  • December 1, 2007. Massive slow-moving landslide in Austria could become disastrous. Terra Daily

  • December 1, 2007. Eruption of Popocatepetl, near Puebla, Mexico. AFP on Google

  • November 30, 2007. Tungurahua erupts in Ecuador, showering ash on nearby villages. International Herald Tribune

  • November 30, 2007. Geological after-effects of building the Three Gorges Dam in China.

  • November 27, 2007. What do you do when paleoclimatic evidence directly contradicts paleomagnetic evidence? This one's really fun. The best quality of geological evidence you could wish for from both fields gives contradictory answers, and not just trivial differences. I'd go with the paleoclimatology in this case, but we do need to know how the paleomagnetics could be wrong. The paper was in Science last Friday, so it will be freely available on the Web in a few months. Terra Daily

  • November 26, 2007. The sliding rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. Photo essay on Geology.com

  • November 25, 2007. Eruption of Concepcion, in Nicaragua. International Herald Tribune. For Google Earth image, fly to 11° 32' N, 85° 37' W: Concepcion is the smaller of the volcanoes making the island.

  • November 25, 2007. Visiting Mount Yasur, in Vanuatu. Sydney Morning Herald travel section

  • November 24, 2007. List of some currently operating volcano Webcams. Wired blog

  • November 22, 2007. Carved in Cataclysm: the channeled scabland of the Pacific Northwest. I've only just been given a copy of this. It's a long feature published in Pacific Northwest, a magazine of the Seattle Times newspaper. It's a concise story with very fine images. Seattle Times

  • November 22, 2007. Enormous submarine slide off Africa, 60,000 years ago. The terrific thing about it is that the researchers traced it in sea-floor sediments for 1500 kilometers down to the abyssal sea floor, where it spread out in a layer 150 km wide. When you add up the sediment, it adds up to ten times the sediment carried to the oceans by all the rivers in the world put together, yet the whole event took probably only hours from beginning to end. Unfortunately the paper is in Nature, which does not make its papers generally available.

  • November 22, 2007. Subsidence under Shanghai. China Daily

  • November 21, 2007. Oil closes at $98 a barrel, another new record. And for a 20-point bonus, can you remember when it was less than $80? Answer and previous stories if you scroll down to November 6, 2007. Terra Daily

  • November 20, 2007. The analysis of jade reveals a vast trading network across and around the South China Sea over 2000 years ago. National Geographic News

  • November 20, 2007. Dozens killed in a methane explosion and fire in a Ukrainian coal mine. The factoid that this is the "worst mining accident in the country's history" is completely meaningless, given that the Ukraine was formed only in the 1990's with the break-up of the Soviet Union. Mining accidents here in the Donetsk basin and elsewhere had a much higher death toll a hundred years ago, before the introduction of machines into coal mining. I'm not down-playing the significance of this new disaster, just protesting the ignorance behind the use of the offending phrase. BBC News OnLine

  • November 20, 2007. A new variant on the Noah's Flood-Black Sea hypothesis. This time it's the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet, which is suggested to have raised sea levels by four feet, flooding low-lying areas in (among other global areas) the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and driving farmers to spread their skills westward over Europe. The paper is in Quaternary Science Reviews. It is really an appraisal of radiocarbon dates, and the bottom line is that the dates do not contradict the idea. That's a long way from real data from archaeology and geology that *confirm* the idea.

  • November 17, 2007. A wild frontier: mining sapphires in back-country Madagascar. BBC News OnLine

  • November 15, 2007. BHP Billiton makes a bid for Rio Tinto. This would create a giant mining company: the world's largest aluminum company, 30% of the world's iron ore, oil, copper, and diamonds. And there are all sorts of international ramifications: for instance, the Chinese may become players in the deal, to try to get a better grip on the raw materials that these companies mine.

  • November 15, 2007. Wednesday's strong earthquake in northern Chile: a summary report. National Geographic News

  • November 14, 2007. Anak Krakatoa is erupting with small ash explosions.

  • November 12, 2007. Kelut calms down, but the island in its crater lake is still growing and there is low-level activity. Clearly there's still danger of a larger eruption, which might include lahars and pyroclastic flows. Terra Daily, November 12, 2007. Previous stories:

  • November 9, 2007. Petrobras, Brazil's national oil company, claims a huge offshore discovery that will allegedly put Brazil in the top ten exporters of oil. CNN

  • November 8, 2007. Yellowstone caldera is rising, probably because new magma is being intruded underneath it. National Geographic News. The rate is high: 7 cm a year, but there's no reason to suppose there will be any eruption at the surface.

  • November 8, 2007. Gold over $800 an ounce, its highest since 1980. Since gold doesn't pay any interest, this means that a lot of people worldwide are VERY worried.

  • November 6, 2007. Oil prices reach a new high over $97 a barrel. BBC News OnLine Previous 2007 stories:

  • November 2, 2007. Supervolcanoes: Yellowstone and its near neighbor Heise. Geotimes

  • November 2, 2007. There is radioactive polonium in dozens of wells in the Lahontan Valley in western Nevada. It's probably from natural processes, because there is uranium in the water aquifer. But no-one is really sure either of source or effects, though there have been excess cancer deaths in the area.

  • November 1, 2007. When will they ever learn?... Building on dunes is not a good idea. ABC News

  • November 1, 2007. Here we go again: "vast" amounts of water ice on the Equator of Mars. National Geographic News When even colleagues are skeptical, you can reach for the shredder. Scroll down to September 25th 2007.

  • November 1, 2007. Lahar threat from Mount Guntur. This is not an eruption. Volcanic mud is held behind dams, but heavy rains and the fact that Indonesian locals are quarrying the dams for building materials (can you believe that?) make the situation hazardous. On the subject of self-destructive behavior, don't forget that Filipinos steal the copper wiring from instruments monitoring active volcanoes..... Reuters

  • October 31, 2007. Glaciers in British Columbia retreat from places that they covered 7000 years ago. Terra Daily

  • October 31, 2007. Moderate earthquake on the Calaveras Fault near San Jose, California last night. San Francisco Chronicle. For a geological perspective, see this accompanying story.

  • October 31, 2007. The most dangerous dam in the world. Don't build dams on a gypsum foundation!!!

  • October 29, 2007. A storm destroys a Mexican oil rig: at least 19 workers are killed. BBC News

  • October 29, 2007. The mailbox that was struck by a meteorite sells for $83,000: is this a great country or what? AP story in the Coos Bay World

  • October 24, 2007. Transporting the rock blocks that were used to build the Pyramids. A canal linked the quarry to the River Nile... National Geographic

  • October 24, 2007. Danger all round a Chinese coal mine. We've known for a while that it's deadly dangerous to work in a Chinese coal mine. But you're in trouble even if you live on the surface above it! AFP story in Terra Daily

  • October 24, 2007. Excavating Herculaneum for lost literature. Times OnLine

  • October 22, 2007. NASA image of the Bingham Canyon copper mine. Still being mined after more than a century, ore is extracted today at half a million tons PER DAY. NASA

  • October 19, 2007. A classic geological hazard: a landslide blocks a New Zealand river.

  • October 17, 2007. How is it that India moved northward so FAST when it broke off from Gondwana? National Geographic News

  • October 17, 2007. A mudflow (lahar) on Bulusan volcano was from heavy rains, not an eruption, but the volcano is threatening a genuine eruption.

  • October 17, 2007. Great excitement in British Columbia over an earthquake swarm under a long-dormant little volcanic cone. Toronto Globe and Mail

  • October 17, 2007. Water levels in Lake Powell -- low. NASA imagery

  • October 15, 2007. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, XI: Iran, Syria, and Turkey jointly plan a natural gas pipeline. (And we're deliberately going out of our way to annoy the Turks over a century-old massacre of Armenians! Why don't we hassle the Sudanese over Darfur instead? -- it might do some good.) UPI story on Terra Daily

  • October 14, 2007. Third-world mining disaster in illegal gold mine. BBC News

  • October 12, 2007. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, X: Getting oil out of the Caspian region to Europe, and the role of Russia in that process. Terra Daily Previous story: October 11, 2007.

  • October 12, 2007. Sinkhole and landslide damage homes and a freeway in San Diego. These big homes were built where they should not have been. If you are a Californian, wonder why it is that you aren't required to do at least one basic geology course sometime during your education!

  • October 11, 2007. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, IX: Dividing up the oil and gas of the Caspian Sea. Terra Daily. Previous episode, October 5.

  • October 9, 2007. Record price for a blue diamond. BBC News

  • October 9, 2007. Has an underwater volcanic center been missed in mapping the Hawaiian Islands? Honolulu Star Bulletin

  • October 9, 2007. Ancient African megadroughts may have affected human migrations about 100,000 years ago. The paper is said to appear soon in PNAS; the lead author is Andrew Cohen, UC Davis alumnus. (Pause for audience applause.) Terra Daily

  • October 9, 2007. An underground coal fire that's been burning in the Yukon for more than 20 years. CBC

  • October 8, 2007. A landslide in South China blocks a river. AFP story on Terra Daily

  • October 7, 2007. The latest news about the "giant diamond" allegedly found in South Africa. It was a hoax, apparently....

  • October 5, 2007. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, VIII: Kazakhstan. Once again, let me ask, "Are we paying attention as Russia wraps up all these supplies?" and again the answer is No. Terra Daily Previous story: September 27, 2007.

  • October 5, 2007. Drilling into the San Andreas Fault.

  • October 5, 2007. Increased earthquake activity under Mount Augustine may be a sign of an impending eruption. Alaska Report. For Google Earth fans, Augustine is 59° 22' N, 153° 25' W, and it is an awesome sight from 50,000 feet! Previous eruption: stories from February 10, 2006:

  • October 4, 2007. The diamond world never ceases to amaze me. You can't make up stories like these. This is the adventure of De Beers and the Zeppelin: and it's 2007, not 1907. It's sad, too: read from top to bottom:

  • October 4, 2007. People who have never done a geology course, episode #523. Indonesia is thinking about building one of the world's longest bridges (18 miles long) that would run within 30 miles of Krakatau. It would link Java and Sumatra. It would also cross one of the busiest sea lanes in the world, with hundreds of container ships run by incompetent crews passing by every month. Obviously, no-one has read about the tsunami that followed the gigantic eruption of Krakatau in 1883, and no-one has figured out that the bridge would have to be built on the huge thicknesses of volcanic ash sediment that coats the coasts and the sea floor from repeated eruptions of Krakatau. AFP story on Spacemart site

  • October 4, 2007. Volcano erupts on a Red Sea island. This lies on the slowly spreading Red Sea rift, off the coast of Yemen.

  • October 1, 2007. The end of the Bre-X scandal? Geotimes. I don't know whether John Felderhof is still vulnerable to civil suits about his role in the management of Bre-X; it is true that he, the chief geologist, was the only executive to retain a LOT of money after the company collapse, enough to buy a palatial mansion in the Cayman Islands. That doesn't mean he's a crook; he might just be a prudent money manager. Google "Bre-X" for more stories than you need about the company's history!

  • September 27, 2007. The geopolitics of oil pipelines, VII: Turkmenistan. Terra Daily. For previous two stories, see August 24, 2007.

  • September 26, 2007. Mining in the Australian outback and its repercussions. National Geographic News

  • September 25, 2007. Small eruption and lahar on Mount Ruapehu, in New Zealand.

  • September 25, 2007. Water on Mars? Forget it... at least over the past several billion years. Ice, yes: liquid water, no. That's been the common-sense conclusion for years, IMHO, but there have been many optimistic claims for recent water in the last few years, each one accompanied by massive NASA publicity. The latest summaries, consisting of several papers in Science this week that will be freely available on the Web in a few months, have had astonishingly little publicity (surprise, surprise).

  • September 17, 2007. You really shouldn't buy beach front property at a place called Washaway Beach! (You can't make up stuff like this!) Seattle Times story with image links.

  • September 16, 2007. Aftershocks after large offshore earthquakes hit western Indonesia again. Part of the problem is that the Mentawi islands were apparently the worst hit. They are largely populated by non-Muslim aboriginals, so seem to be low on the priority list.

  • September 11, 2007. Want to work as a garimpeiro in a Brazilian gold mine? Check these pictures of your possible future work place, and then get back to your textbooks! BBC News in Pictures

  • September 7, 2007. The source of the K-T asteroid. The paper is in Nature, so it won't be generally available on the Web. It is a terrific paper. Assuming the orbital mechanics and computer programs are done properly, the authors identify the KT asteroid as most likely a member of a family of asteroids formed in the Jurassic as a result of a major collision in the asteroid belt, that were then spread out into the inner Solar System over the next 100 million years. The crater Tycho on the Moon may have been formed by another member. As Claeys and Tagle mention in a commentary (also in Nature), it is spine-chilling to think that the dinosaurs were doomed before most of them had even evolved! There will be discussion and LOTS of empty speculation, but unless the foundations of this paper are flawed seriously, it will become a classic. Instructors in History of Life courses should make sure they understand the outline of the story: it's accessible to and should be fascinating for undergraduates.

  • September 6, 2007. Arsenic levels are critically high in water supplies in the Indian state of Bihar. BBC News. Previous story: BBC News OnLine

  • September 5, 2007. The ongoing eruption of Pavlof (in Alaska).

  • September 4, 2007. Spectacular burst of activity from Etna.

  • September 4, 2007. Eruptions of Shiveluch may cause aircraft diversions. Russia IC

  • September 1, 2007. Closure: the Utah coal miners are given up for dead.

  • August 31, 2007. It came from outer space. A Canadian man's doorstop turns out to be a meteorite. CBC

  • August 27, 2007. Los Angeles may be enjoying a lull in seismic activity: enjoy it while it lasts! Terra Daily. The paper is in Geology, which is not freely available on the Web.

  • August 24, 2007. The politics and geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines VI. Russia plays the energy card against Germany. Terra Daily

  • August 24, 2007. The politics and geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines V. Azerbaijan and its oil. Terra Daily

  • August 24, 2007. Child labor in Kyrgyz coal mines. BBC News OnLine

  • August 23, 2007. The Bush administration plans to expand mountain-top removal for mining coal. New York Times. Download it now before they start charging money for it! Previous stories:

  • August 22, 2007. World's oldest diamonds found in zircons that are over 4 billion years old. They may be microscopic, but they are important because diamonds form under great pressure, deep in the crust (or mantle), and that was not the prevailing view for the zircons. This is a wait-and-see situation: we need more data AND more ideas. National Geographic News

  • August 22, 2007. Disaster in yet another Chinese coal mine. This time, a local river flooded and poured down the mine shaft!

  • August 22, 2007. Montserrat's volcano has calmed down (for now). International Herald Tribune

  • August 22, 2007. Ethiopia's only volcano erupts. This happened over a week ago, but details are just coming in from this remote region. APF story on Terra Daily

  • August 22, 2007. Perspective on "Kurdish" oil. Terra Daily

  • August 21, 2007. How to identify a meteorite. Aerolite site

  • August 20, 2007. The politics and geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines IV. This time it's Kazakhstan: and this time it's not Russia, it's China.

  • August 20, 2007. Eruption at Karangetang, in Indonesia. TIME

  • August 19, 2007. 44 acres of lava bench collapse on the south coast of Hawaii. Honolulu Advertiser

  • August 18, 2007. Easy slippage along some segments of the San Andreas Fault: talc in the serpentine? San Francisco Chronicle

  • August 18, 2007. Restoring the river: a perspective on the Mississippi. Feature article in Geotimes, August 2007

  • August 17, 2007. Large earthquake in the south of Peru. Over 500 people were killed.

  • August 17, 2007. The politics and geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines III. The Caspian. Terra Daily. Previous two stories, August 13, 2007.

  • August 16, 2007. Egypt: more people, same amount of water: golf courses or villages? Terra Daily site

  • August 15, 2007. Report about a meteorite shower that hit Cali, Colombia on July 6th. Meteorite Guy site

  • August 14, 2007. Why is the asthenosphere slippery? Terra Daily

  • August 14, 2007. Eruption of Soputan, in Indonesia. Terra Daily

  • August 13, 2007. Lucille Jones says a major earthquake is overdue for the Coachella Valley in Southern California. This sort of apocalyptic pronouncement is unusual for her: I don't know why she did it. National Geographic News.

  • August 13, 2007. The politics and geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines II. Terra Daily

  • August 13, 2007. The politics and geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines I. Terra Daily. This one's interesting. It has pay-offs for Iran and Turkey, and it also reduces Western Europe's growing dependence on Russian gas. The Americans don't like it because of a knee-jerk antipathy to Iran. What they fail to recognize is that tying Iran into international networks reduces the incentives for Iran to disturb that equilibrium by fostering trouble.

  • August 12, 2007. Mud volcano still growing offshore from Trinidad. It won't last long! AP story, Washington Post

  • August 12, 2007. Another eruption of Shiveluch, in Kamchatka. RIA Novosti. Previous story: March 29, 2007.

  • August 9, 2007. Russia is now flexing its muscles over the division of the energy-rich Caspian Sea. Once again, WAKE UP, WASHINGTON!!! Terra Daily. Previous story: scroll down to August 1, 2007.

  • August 7, 2007. The early history of the asteroid Vesta. Terra Daily site

  • August 2, 2007. A collection of excellent volcano images from ABC News. Includes a new one from Bulusan. ABC News

  • August 1, 2007. The Russians try to claim much of the Arctic Ocean floor as theirs. Is anyone paying attention in Washington? No.

  • August 1, 2007. Life on Montserrat, twelve years after the big eruption. BBC News OnLine

  • July 30, 2007. Bulusan in the Philippines continues its intermittent eruption.

  • July 29, 2007. Drought in the American West? Look at this image.... National Geographic News

  • July 26, 2007. Active offshore fault zone along the coast of Lebanon. So far so good: but there's a lot of gratuitous hype here. Was this fault definitely linked to the earthquake and possible tsunami of 551 AD. Maybe (but what's the linking evidence?) Is it on a periodic cycle of occcurrence (unlikely, and certainly not documented AT ALL!). Clearly, this is a ripe area for detailed research if it wasn;t such a dangerous place to work. The paper is in Geology, which does not make its papers generally available. National Geographic News

  • July 19, 2007. Catastrophic Ice-Age floods cut the English Channel between England and France. Terra Daily

  • July 16, 2007. Earthquake in northwest Japan causes a small leak at a nuclear plant: no big deal, say the Japanese authorities.

  • July 16, 2007. Alert level lowered at Mount Gamkonora, on the island of Halmahera in southeast Indonesia. Google Earth fans go to "Baru, Maluku Utara, Indonesia", then Mount Gamkonora is the volcano looming to the east-northeast of that town. The white covering is not snow but volcanic ash.

  • July 13, 2007. Rio Tinto is set to buy Alcan for $38 billion, the largest ever take-over in the mining industry. Rio Tinto, which is Anglo-Australian, would become the world's largest aluminum company, ahead of the Russian company Rusal and Alcoa.

  • July 13, 2007. The subsidence of London.

  • July 12, 2007. Russia continues to build its spider web of oil and gas pipelines to control energy supplies to Europe. And as I've said before, we are so bogged down wasting money and effort and blood in Iraq that we are not paying attention.

  • July 9, 2007. Darwin Award candidates # 2. They ignored the warnings: six teenagers die on a volcano. IOL

  • July 8, 2007. Darwin Award candidate # 1. She ignored the warnings. Hong Kong tourist falls into volcanic crater. AND she imperilled the lives of others who felt they had to try to rescue her. Earthtimes

  • July 8, 2007. How kimberlite eruptions may work. Science News

  • July 6, 2007. Keep out of those hot springs!!! US Geological Survey Fact Sheet

  • July 5, 2007. Oldest Antarctic ice core completed: 800,000 years of history. The paper is in Science. National Geographic News

  • July 5, 2007. Update and images for Klyuchevskaya eruption in Kamchatka.

  • July 5, 2007. Mystery solved: the disappearing Chilean lake. NASA. Previous story: Missing: one lake in Southern Chile. BBC News OnLine, June 21, 2007.

  • July 2, 2007. Update on the geysers buried by a landslide in Kamchatka.

  • June 29, 2007. Alrosa, the Russian diamond company, will soon begin selling independently, by-passing De Beers. JCK OnLine It's not clear what will happen.

  • June 28, 2007. Saving Holland: a review of the flood threat and potential counter-measures. Technology Review, MIT

  • June 28, 2007. Fiery opinion piece about the Indonesian mud volcano, or at least the Government's failures in dealing with its effects.

  • June 28, 2007. Faults in the Greater Seattle area. Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce

  • June 27, 2007. Wind power factoids. OK, it's not geology, but it's relevent to energy concerns. Which countries have the greatest installed wind power generative capacity? 1. Germany; 2. Spain; 3, United States; 4. India; 5, Denmark; 6, China; 7, Italy; 8, UK, 9, Portugal; 10, France. Given the US potential, let alone area, that's scandalous. Furthermore, which countries generate the greatest percentage of their needs from wind? 1. Denmark; 2. Spain; 3. Portugal; 4, Germany; 5, India; 6, UK; 7, Italy; 8, US. Scandalous again. All this comes from a new item in Nature today, which of course will not be freely available on the Web.

  • June 26, 2007. A crater for the Tunguska explosion? Probably not. BBC News OnLine

  • June 18, 2007. Big oil strike offshore from Ghana. BBC News OnLine

  • June 13, 2007. New calculations suggest that Mars may have had an ocean maybe 3 billion years ago. Press release from UC Berkeley. The paper is said to be in tomorrow's Nature, though it won't be freely available on the Web. Previous stories:

  • June 13, 2007. Retrospective on the 1912 eruption of Novarupta. Geology.com

  • June 9, 2007. The Kilbuck slide outside Pittsburgh is back again. You may remember this from last year. Excavation for a Walmart superstore triggered a landslide that cut a major highway for weeks and cost a lot of money. Now, it seems, the slide may be re-activating. Stay tuned. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
    It's the back story that makes this one so much fun. It looks as if Walmart chose the lowest bidder (again). These previous stories move from the geology to the background deals.

  • June 5, 2007. There seems to be a danger that W. R. Grace will avoid legal consequences from its asbestos poisoning of so many people in Libby, Montana. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. For previous stories, see the link with that story. If you're not familiar with it, it is absolutely gruesome.

  • June 4, 2007. 180,000 people evacuated after Chinese earthquake. That seems a little extreme after an earthquake that killed three people. It wouldn't work here! Reuters story

  • May 30, 2007. Update on the La Honda slide in San Mateo County, California. San Mateo County Times

  • May 29, 2007. Increased melting of Greenland ice. Live Science

  • May 29, 2007. A natural mud volcano in Iran. PressTV Iran

  • May 29, 2007. A concrete dam to hold back the Javanese mud flow? I can't believe this is serious! Unless my arithmetic is very far wrong, the mud would overflow this dam in about 6 days. Do it for yourself: calculate the holding volume of the dam from today's story, then rummage through previous stories for estimates of the rate of flow, and work it out yourself. The ask what foundation this dam is going to be built on: hot mud. Would you even think of doing that? How are you going to get the materials to the site in the first place? Anyway, it's going to take 8 months to build, they say, so it will be even more money poured uselessly into Indonesian construction companies with no prospect of any concrete results (Sorry!). Of course, that's been the story of this sorry affair from the beginning.

  • May 27, 2007. Ocean view lots for sale on Lo'ihi, in Hawaii: only $40! And if you don't see the joke, take Geology 1! Honolulu Star-Bulletin

  • May 24, 2007. Another 38 Russian coal miners die in a methane explosion.

  • May 24, 2007. An impact that did in the Clovis people, and also started the Younger Dryas cold period? This was a set of talks at a meeting: it's not published science yet. And if there really is a lot of iridium, then it wasn't a comet! If Jim Kennett weren't involved, I'd call it rubbish right now: but I respect Jim's work.

  • May 23, 2007. Water in the Middle East. This BBC feature article summarises the water issues that lurk under the conflicts between Israel and its neighbors. And when you add up the numbers, there is no solution. This is not news, either: tension over water dates back before the founding of Israel. BBC News OnLine

  • May 23, 2007. Update on the Papua New Guinea eruption. Radio New Zealand They'll have a long wait! Previous story: Waves hit an island in Papua New Guinea as the volcanic island next door has an eruption. Reuters, May 22, 2007. This is a local phenomenon, not a large tsunami. If you're one of the villagers, however, it's a serious business.

  • May 22, 2007. Alcan resists Alcoa's takeover attempt. BBC News OnLine. Previous story: Alcoa will try to take over Alcan. Talk about turning the clock back. Alcan was spun off from Alcoa nearly 100 years ago because of anti-trust laws! If the take-over is successful, the new Alcoa would become the world's largest aluminum corporation (just as it was a century ago). BBC News OnLine, May 7, 2007.

  • May 22, 2007. Weather forecast for Honolulu today: VOG. That's short for volcanic fog: sulfury and unpleasant. Honolulu Advertiser. Note the nasty little remark about the chief weather forecaster sitting in his air-conditioned office while the vog swirls outside. As you probably know, most Hawaiian homes don't need or have air-conditioning.

  • May 22, 2007. You really have to pay attention if you buy a home site on a steep slope! Here's what to do. If you even remotely suspect landslide danger, make an offer on the property contingent on a certified engineer's report. And get the realtor to sign off on that report. That way you'll have someone to sue if there's a landslide, even if the previous owner is safe in the Cayman Islands.

  • May 19, 2007. What is happening under Mauna Loa on Hawaii?

  • May 18, 2007. New coal-mine safety rules to cut down methane explosions. AP story in San Francisco Chronicle. I had been sceptical about the Sago Mine explosion being attributed to lightning, but now I understand the mechanism. It wouldn't have happened unless there had been old equipment left around in a methane pocket, so there is some residual blame for the mine owners: it wasn't just an "act of God".

  • May 18, 2007. Collapse of a large area on the Hawaiian coast where lava reaches the sea: more than originally thought.

  • May 18, 2007. Aftermath of the Chilean earthquake of last month. The Independent. Previous story: scroll down to April 22, 2007.

  • May 16, 2007. Meltwater on the surface of Antarctica, 2005. More than ever recorded before. Those of you who have seen "An Inconvenient Truth" will remember the section in which Al Gore shows older versions of this kind of image for Greenland and Antarctica, and explains the ways in which the melting might feed back into ice loss. This, then, is the image he'll be showing now, with the story gettng worse each year...

  • May 16, 2006. Retreat of the Athabasca glacier in Canada. NASA image

  • May 15, 2007. The politics of Vesuvius. You have to love this story: it's a movie plot without the apocalyptic scenes at the end (yet). Daily Telegraph

  • May 15, 2007. Russia scores another victory in the energy struggle around the Caspian, this time increasing its grip on gas from Turkmenistan.

  • May 10, 2007. Mapping Canada's ice-age ice cap. A new gravity survey shows up those areas that were depressed a lot by the weight of the ice and are still recovering. The paper (in Science) reconstructs two very thick domes of ice, one on each side of the current Hudson's Bay.

  • May 10, 2007. Monitoring Kick-'Em-Jenny, an underwater volcano in the Caribbean. NSF press release

  • May 8, 2007. Some images from Etna's ongoing eruption. KFVS

  • May 8, 2007. NASA image of Nyiragongo and the threatened city of Goma. NASA

  • May 7, 2007. A British tsunami in 1607? National Geographic News. The deadliest natural disaster in the history of the UK was actually the aftereffects of the Laki eruption of 1783. And for Kate Ravilious to claim that a "tsunami swamped England" is hyperbole that outclasses the hyperbole already injected by the authors. It's interesting, too, that the "we're-all-doomed" crowd touting Cumbre Vieja in the Canary Islands as a potential tsunami course is cheering for the Bristol Channel tsunami. Their own research was shot down in flames last year (see September 20, 2006). Here's what I wrote about the Bristol Channel when this idea was published three years ago: and note how the evidence cited back then is apparently the same as that used again this year.

  • May 6, 2007. How safe is New Orleans, post-Katrina? Bad news.... National Geographic News

  • May 4, 2007. Methane from Lake Kivu. Not as "green" as it's touted, but never mind. It is true that Lake Kivu will keep on making more of it, so it might as well be burned quickly rather than oxidise slowly. And what better use than to power a brewery? BBC News OnLine

  • May 4, 2007. The North Aral Sea continues to recover.

  • May 4, 2007. More evidence that the anomalously large earthquakes that occasionally hit Hawaii are due to the weight of the growing volcanoes loading the crust. We've thought that for a long time, but it will be good to have more evidence when it's published. So far it's a talk at a meeting. USA Today

  • May 4, 2007. Erosion on the English coast. Will Roger Middleditch become a refugee from global warming? New York Times. WARNING: this won't last long on free access.

  • May 3, 2007. Groundwater problems for Perth, in Western Australia. BBC News OnLine

  • May 2, 2007. Giant volcanic plume from Jupiter's moon Io. National Geographic Photo inthe News

  • May 2, 2007. The underground ice of Mars. National Geographic News

  • May 2, 2007. The source of the New Madrid earthquake zone. It may well be the surface expression of the subduction of the long-disappeared Farallon Plate of the US West Coast, still going down in its old subduction zone which is now beneath the center of the continent. The paper is in Geophysical Research Letters. I've seen this phenomenon used as an explanation for some anomalous geology in the Mediterranean, on a smaller physical and time scale, so the theory is not new. But it's a daring extrapolation!

  • May 2, 2007. Russia plays the oil card against Estonia this time. Reuters . Previous targets have been Ukraine and Belarus. Scroll down to January 9, 2007 for more details.

  • May 1, 2007. Ambitious plan to re-engineer the Mississippi delta. Washington post Warning: I do not know how long their stories last on free access.

  • May 1, 2007. Arctic sea ice is melting three times faster than we had thought. Unmitigated bad news. National Geographic News

  • May 1, 2007. Kilimanjaro's glaciers may last 40 years rather than 20 years. Is that good news? Only for today's tourist guides. The end result is the same. National Geographic News

  • April 30, 2007. Chinese miners and lung disease. BBC News OnLine

  • April 29, 2007. A very British earthquake. None of that extreme foreign stuff: one person hurt, walls cracked, bricks fall on cars, etc. etc. But newsworthy in a nation starved of earthquakes and volcanoes.

  • April 27, 2007. The Paleocene/Eocene warming pulse: associated with the opening of the northeast Atlantic and the massive eruptions that went with it. The paper is in this week's Science, so will be freely available on the Web later this year. This story makes a lot of sense. It becomes another event in which continental splitting has a dramatic effect on life. Examples include the KT boundary (Deccan Traps) and the Permo-Triassic boundary (Siberian Traps), and there are several others for which we need more accurate dating. You may ask why this one gives a boost to evolutionary radiations, while the other two I named are associated with mass extinctions. Good question! [± asteroid impact? scale? duration? existing paleogeography?] Stay tuned.

  • April 27, 2007. Montserrat government says there's no reason to extend the warning zones around Soufriere Hills.

  • April 24, 2007. A new island formed by global warming. This is Warming Island, or Uunartoq Qeqertoq in Inuit. It was thought to be a peninsula of Greenland, mostly hidden under the ice, but now that the ice-cap has receded, it turns out to be an island. If I can find a latitude and longitude, I'll see if it shows up on Google Earth. The Independent

  • April 24, 2007. Nature copies the movie: a close analog of Superman's kryptonite is discovered.

  • April 23, 2007. The prehistoric landscape under what is now the North Sea. BBC News OnLine. The Web site for the research project is here

  • April 22, 2007. Chilean earthquake causes landslides and big waves. Here's what I suspect happened. Southern Chile is fiord country, with deep, steep-sided valleys, and deep water in narrow fiords close to shore. The earthquakes along this Southern Chile coast are typically not as big as those in the Peru-Chile trench further north, so that the quake mentioned here was M6.2. Even so, such a quake can start rockslides and landslides. Dropping down very steep slopes into deep water, slides can generate shock-waves that are locally huge and destructive, especially if they are funneled along fiords. They may not be formally tsunami, but they can be more destructive because the waves are generated so close to shore, while most tsunami are generated out to sea. Three people are reported dead after being hit by such waves, and seven are missing. A Google Earth search for Puerto Aysén gets you the flavor of the terrain, but there is not enough information to locate the tragedy caused by the waves.

  • April 22, 2007. Great satellite image of Venice, for that lecture about subsidence. NASA

  • April 20, 2007. The Atlantis tsunami? A tsunami component to the end of the Minoan civilization has been suggested several times over the last few decades. Maybe this new evidence is compelling, maybe it isn't. Wait until it's published! And note that this item on BBC "news" is actually an ad for a BBC TV show. Scandalous! BBC News OnLine

  • April 20, 2007. A geological tourist visits the Guilin area in southern China. Geotimes.

  • April 19, 2007. Fossil diatoms drilled from under the Ross ice Shelf reveal Antarctic paleoclimate. BBC News OnLine. So far, this is just a talk at a meeting: wait for the publication.

  • April 19, 2007. Nevado del Huila erupts in Colombia, generating what looks very much like a lahar.

  • April 18, 2007. Drilling into a subduction zone. BBC News OnLine

  • April 17, 2007. Piton de la Fournaise is now emitting "the eruption of the century". The [London] Times OnLine. Thanks to Gry Barfod for this link!

  • April 16, 2007. There's never a dull moment in geology. The latest worry for geologists is a growing fad for collecting meteorites. The nomads of the Sahara desert love the idea! And. of course, meteorites have NO intrinsic value. BBC News OnLine

  • April 13, 2007. Astoria, landslide capital of Oregon. The Daily Astorian. Use the free search window and "landslide" to find recent articles about events leading to today's story. WARNING: This link will last only 30 days on free access. If you want the stories, DOWNLOAD THEM NOW!

  • April 11, 2007. Mount St. Helens' dome distorts its crater glacier. The Oregonian. WARNING: This piece goes off free access in two weeks: if you want it, download it NOW!

  • April 10, 2007. The quake that caused the Solomons tsunami lifted Ranongga Island by 3 meters.

  • April 7, 2007. A new twist on diminishing ground water: Yemen and its khat crop. BBC News OnLine

  • April 6, 2007. How to grow gypsum crystals 30 feet (10 meters) long. The paper is in Geology, so it won't be freely available on the Web.

  • April 4, 2007. Trying to tap the methane dissolved in the waters of Lake Kivu. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near when they start up the pumps! France 24.com

  • April 4, 2007. Spectacular eruption of Piton de la Fournaise, on the island of Réunion. Great images on both these sites:

  • April 3, 2007. Tsunami hits the Solomon Islands: villages wiped out. There had been a large earthquake offshore, variously reported as M 7.5 to M 8. Note that villagers say they ran inland when the water receded. Given the track record of the Solomons government since independence, this was not taught in schools or as public education: it's built into the folk wisdom of these coastal villagers. The tsunami hit in daylight, so the warning recession was visible.

  • April 2, 2007. Ash from Santorini reached Egypt. This is really important, and the story doesn't do it justice. We know that the winds were blowing from the northwest when Santorini erupted, bacsue that's the pattern of sea-floor ash. People have always suspected that the ash could have reached Egypt, but this is the best claim yet (though the evidence still has to be published). It's nutty to say that "cities [were] leveled" or "settlements... were buried": enough ash didn't reach Egypt to do that. But what this will do is to sort out archaeological chronologies of Egypt and the Aegean, because the ash should mark one particular year. Ash in the Greenland icecap says 1628 BC, but there has been heated argument in Mediterranean archaeology about matching Egyptian and Aegean events. This new find should settle that (eventually). National Geographic News.

  • April 1, 2007. Status report (I didn't say progress report) on Indonesian mud volcano. The Times
    Previous stories:

  • March 30, 2007. The Silverpit structure in the North Sea may not be an impact crater. Like the story on March 27, this is so far only a talk at a meeting. We should wait for the publication and the ensuing discussion. BBC News OnLine. Previous stories:

  • March 29, 2007. Ash explosion at Mount Shiveluch, in Kamchatka. NASA satellite image. You can tell it was s sunny windless day, and the image was taken around mid-day. Test yourself: how could I infer those three things?

  • March 29, 2007. Measuring the temperature at the top of the core (4000° C).

  • March 27, 2007. An impact crater may be buried under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California. Don't get too excited yet (read the story). The age is estimated at middle Eocene. National Geographic News

  • March 26, 2006. Mount St. Helens may be an active volcano for a century.

  • March 25, 2007. Eruption of Batutara in Indonesia. Monsters and Critics

  • March 25, 2007. Magnitude 7 earthquakes in Japan and Vanuatu.

  • March 23, 2007. Prediction of a 'slow earthquake' under Kilauea in the next few days. Honolulu Star-Bulletin

  • March 23, 2007. The arsenic crisis in Bangladesh and neighboring regions in India. There's a very good update in Science this week. But it won't be freely available on the Web for a few months. Eventually it will be here

  • March 22, 2007. The oldest ocean crust (in the Isua Formation) shows evidence of both ridge systems and of subduction zones at 3.8 Ga: in other words, plate tectonics much like today's. Even though there was likely to have been little continental crust, the plate tectonic system operates on ocean crust. The paper is in Science, so will be on the Web in a few months at this site

  • March 22, 2007. Global boom in coal-fired power generation. Christian Science Monitor

  • March 19, 2007. The crater lake at Mount Ruapehu overflowed and caused a lahar, but it caused only minor damage. The danger is now over.

  • March 19, 2007. Pumping ground water is drying up the Republican River in Colorado. Christian Science Monitor

  • March 19, 2007. Would you like to buy a volcano? Stuff.co.NZ. Ask Google Earth to fly you to Mangere, New Zealand, and you'll see the crater a little south of town.

  • March 19, 2007. Iran sticks its fingers into the Caucasus, using natural gas as a lever. The whole thing sounds strange. Armenia doesn't have enough electricity for itself BBC News OnLine

  • March 17, 2007. Small eruption continues the activity at Stromboli.

  • March 15, 2007. Russian oil diplomacy wins another round. BBC News OnLine

  • March 14, 2007. Surprising amount of activity under Yellowstone.

  • March 12, 2007. A part of the Atlantic floor where mantle is exposed, not crust. Newsweek

  • March 12, 2007. Peru's looming water crisis as its Andean glaciers melt. BBC News OnLine

  • March 12, 2007. What is amber? Your questions answered. American Chemical Society

  • March 11, 2007. Trouble for Cancun's beaches: the barrier island story all over again. AP story on PhysOrg site. Ironic twist: see this background story from a year ago! Wired News

  • March 11, 2007. Sudden eruption of Stromboli. Stromboli simmers all the time, so it doesn't take much to set it off. Fortunately it usually erupts lots of runny lava, without powerful explosions, gas, and ash. All the same, it's a powerful volcano. Stay tuned.

  • March 10, 2007. Folklore helps at tsunami time. BBC News OnLine

  • March 10, 2007. Montserrat's Soufrière Hills volcano has reached a dangerous size and activity level.

  • March 7, 2007. Meteorite strikes computer table in Illinois. OK, what are the odds of that?? AP story at San Francisco Chronicle site

  • March 7, 2007. Estimates of large amounts of methane hydrates in deep sea environments. National Geographic News

  • March 7, 2007. Traces of ancient water on the Martian surface: they may have been from springs, not from lakes or oceans. National Geographic News

  • March 6, 2007. Earthquake kills dozens of people in Padang, Sumatra.

  • March 6, 2007. Tungurahua in Ecuador is threatening to erupt again.

  • March 5, 2007. The world's longest cave waterway (under the Yucatán). National Geographic News

  • March 5, 2007. The Canadian diamond rush still continues. Feature on MSNBC

  • March 3, 2007. Coastal erosion at Shishmaref, Alaska. It is being accelerated because the permafrost under this barrier island is melting. BBC News OnLine. You can check out the setting on Google Earth (just ask Google to fly you to Shishmaref). You can see that the barrier island is a chancy place to build a village anyway. There's no obvious source for sand to replace what's being washed along the shore. If you fly along the barrier island chain going northeast from Shishmaref, you find places where the sea has broken through into the lagoons, and places where storms have washed sand right over the barrier island. It's very much like the barrier islands off the Carolina coastline, without as many people.

  • March 2, 2007. Feature article on Chinese coal mines. Time magazine. Previous story: A canary in the Chinese coal mine.Toronto Globe and Mail, February 3, 2007. I don't know how long their stories remain on line.

  • February 28, 2007. Assessing earthquakes from balancing rocks in Western American desert regions. PhysOrg

  • February 27, 2007. Extra water in the mantle below much of eastern Asia. It should give geologists and geophysicists a lot of harmless fun figuring out the causes and implications.

  • February 24, 2007. The first concrete balls are dropped into the Javanese mud volcano. BBC News OnLine. Previous stories:

  • February 23, 2007. Significant uplift under Pozzuoli, the famous town west of Vesuvius. It may not mean much, but you always pay attention when there's evidence of activity near and under a major dangerous volcano. Check out Pozzuoli on Google Earth (ask to fly there), then gain enough height to survey the region: mottled with old craters, and Vesuvious a few miles to the east beyond Naples. Live Science

  • February 23, 2007. Lakes and rivers under the Antarctic ice cap. Two separate research results here.

  • February 22, 2007. Eruption at Nevado del Huila, in Colombia. NBC4 TV, Los Angeles. There's a slide show with it.

  • February 22, 2007. The diamonds of Sierra Leone. BBC News OnLine

  • February 22, 2007. Competing for footage of the Ruapehu lahar (if it ever happens!). (see my skepticism below).

  • February 17, 2007. The science of fulgurites. Science News. The paper is in Geology, which is not freely available to the peasants.

  • February 15, 2007. More evidence of PAST water on the surface of Mars. No quibbling about that: the question is how long ago, and for how long? One guess was billions of years ago, and only for weeks or months: not long enough for life to evolve. And whether there is STILL water or not is not clear at all (to me).

  • February 14, 2007. Optimistic projection for world oil supplies. National Geographic News

  • February 8, 2007. The sounds of an ocean-floor hot-water vent. National Geographic News

  • February 6, 2007. Ancient volcanic blast in the North Cascades. This was a cataclysmic eruption near where Mount Baker stands today, and it occurred about 4 million years ago. It was not as big as the much more recent explosive eruption that formed Crater Lake, but it was still very large. The paper is due out in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, which is not available on the Web to the peasants. National Geographic News

  • February 4, 2007. Image of Santa Maria volcano in Guatemala. NASA

  • February 1, 2007. Exxon Mobil reports the largest profit ever made by a US company. BBC News OnLine

  • January 31, 2007. Damage from the Exxon Valdez oil spill is still there. USA Today.
    Previous stories from December 2006:
    Happy Christmas, Exxon! The penalty Exxon Mobil owes for the massive Alaska oil spill of 1989 has been reduced (AGAIN!). And when indeed they do pay it (don't hold your breath), it will of course be in deflated dollars, unadjusted for nearly 20 years' inflation.

  • January 24, 2007. The mud volcano in Java was likely set off by a drilling operation.

  • January 23, 2007. The expanding Sahara Desert. BBC News OnLine. Previous story: The devastating decrease of Lake Chad. BBC News OnLine January 15, 2007.

  • January 21, 2007. A tourist visit to Paricutin. Hartford Courant

  • January 19, 2007. 30,000 Brits killed by Icelandic volcano!!! Yes, maybe, in 1783. IT COULD HAPPEN AGAIN!!!! Of course, if you accept the premise. This, by the way, is part of a PR campaign for a BBC TV show. There is a real scientist involved, who is no doubt getting lots of endorphins from the whole sorry affair. It isn't as if it was new science: this general picture has been known for years. though the numbers seem to have multiplied (see, for example, this story from, 2004. If there was a publication, one could look more carefully at the assumptions and extrapolations and see whether they hold up. BBC News OnLine

  • January 17, 2007. Disaster anniversaries from the 1990s.

  • January 15, 2007. Image of Karymsky volcano in eruption. NASA image

  • January 15, 2007. Using stalagmites for climate research in California caves: ongoing research at UC Davis. San Francisco Chronicle

  • January 15, 2007. Red alert for impending eruption at Mount Karthala in the Comoros. Reuters

  • January 12, 2007. Where did Odysseus really live? Geological clues suggest it wasn't modern Ithaca.

  • January 11, 2007. Hiking over fresh lava in Hawaii. Travel section, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  • January 10, 2007. The results if (when) Vesuvius erupts. BBC News Europe The background is that there has NEVER been an effective plan for evacuating Naples: it would not and could not work if the eruption comes as quickly as it did in 79 AD and in the earlier one described here. So this is nothing new: only the scale of a likely catastrophe is multiplied. Previous story, March 2006: BBC News

  • January 10, 2007. President Bush removes an offshore drilling ban from Bristol Bay, Alaska, the richest salmon fishing area in the world. That ban has been in effect since the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. MSNBC

  • January 9, 2007. Russia plays the oil-supply card (again). Funny how the breaks in supply occur in the dead of winter. Ostensibly, this is about a dispute between Russia and Belarus. In reality, however, it is also a reminder to Europe about their energy vulnerability. Presumably, the Russians expect that the Europeans will pressure the Belarussians to cave in. In any case, this is a typical unsubtle Russian power play, with pipelines rather than tanks. And we're not watching because we're up to our ***** in the Iraqi quagmire. Notice the American press coverage of this and the previous confrontations? Negligible. BBC News. Here is a background piece from the BBC. Previous stories:

  • January 8, 2007. The Mississippi delta is slowly sliding into the Gulf of Mexico. The paper is in Geophysical Research Letters: presumably it documents the evidence!

  • January 5, 2007. Methane on Titan seems to behave like water does on Earth. The paper is in Nature, so it's not available to the peasants. National Geographic News.

  • January 5, 2007. Life in the stone industry in India. BBC News OnLine

  • January 3, 2007. 24th anniversary of the first eruption of Pu'u 'O'o on Hawaii, the longest eruption on the island in 600 years. Hawaiinews.com

  • January 3, 2007. Human-caused earthquakes. Three words of warning. First, the section about human-built reservoirs causing earthquakes is not new: it was discovered as Lake Mead filled on the Colorado River in the 1930s, and cases have occurred repeatedly since. Second, mining has caused collapses and subsidence worldwide, though the case (and size) of the earthquake in Newcastle, Australia, is new as far as I know. Third, all the story is based on a short talk at AGU: there is no paper yet to allow us to judge the evidence (especially for the Newcastle quake). National Geographic News

  • January 1, 2007. Great image of the eruption of Sheveluch in Kamchatka. NASA

    For current geology news items, see Geology in the News.

    For news items archived from 2006, see Geology News from 2006.

    For news items archived from 2005, see Geology News from 2005.

    [For news items archived from 2004, see Geology News from 2004.

    [For news items archived from 2003, see Geology News from 2003.

    [For news items archived from 2002, see Geology News from 2002.

    [For news items archived from 2001, see Geology News from 2001.

    [For news items archived from 2000, see Geology News from 2000.

    [For news items archived from 1999, see Geology News from 1999.

    [Return to Geology Department at UC Davis