Tsunamis: Geology, Hazards and Risks
This book in the Society’s Special Publication series discusses a variety of topics from reviewing tsunami hazards globally to risk modelling. The first four sections are entirely focused on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that was responsible for so much damage. Other papers examine the history of tsunami activity in locations...
Darwin's First Theory - Exploring Darwin's quest to find a theory of the Earth
I have never passed up the opportunity to remind the world that Darwin was, primarily, a geologist, nor that he owed his biological insight to the unique world view of a geologist, who sees objects – be they landforms or species - not as perfect objects, but as the end result of historical processes. And lo,...
Gravity and Magnetic Exploration
This June the Geological Society was selling a copy of Nettleton’s 1971 classic ‘Elementary Gravity and Magnetics’, which covered both disciplines in 121 pages. Now, however, magnetics has become the inevitable ‘must have’ in airborne geophysical surveys, and the last 10 years have seen an explosion in the use of airborne gravity and gradiometry. Not surprisingly...
The rocks don't lie
If the public opinion polls are correct around a third of people in Britain and nearly a half in the US consider it probable at least that the Earth was created in the last 10,000 years. Of these a considerable proportion would explain the rock record in terms of the year-long flood of Genesis. The uncomfortable truth is that a belief universally left for dead nearly two centur...
CAVES AND KARST OF THE YORKSHIRE DALES
This magnificent book on the classic Carboniferous Limestone landscape of North West Yorkshire is a much revised and extended version of one first published nearly 40 years ago. The area covered is largely that of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. So much has happened in Quaternary studies in the last 40 years that a complete rewrite has become necessary. ...
Geomorphological Hazards and Disaster Prevention
This book is advertised as being “accessible to geomorphologists and Earth scientists involved in environmental science, hazard and risk assessment, management and policy”: thus, aimed at specialists rather than generalist hazard and risk managers. Although it is intended to examine “what hazard and risk managers want from...
Buried mountains
A very important article in Nature1 reports on an extensive radar investigation of these mountains beneath the East Antarctica ice sheet. The team led by Sun Bo from China travelled 1235km by tractor train during the survey. The area surveyed was 30 km x 30 km. The radar waves bounce back and the two-way travel time is measured, giving you the ice thickness. The ice is up to 3k...
Venusian volcanicity - are ancient continents and plate tectonics on Venus a supposition too far?
Geoscientist 20.01 January 2010
Venus enjoys scorching temperatures, crushing pressures, and a toxic atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid clouds, yet suggestions are being aired that its past was very different1. ‘Venus Express’ has charted the first map of Venus&rsq...
Titanoboa!
Regional mapping in the Rift Valleys, which occupied me for a decade, was rather like the Garden of Eden, inclusive of snakes. I had a nasty encounter with a seven foot mamba, which struck out head-high and also a miss by inches from a saw-scaled viper. However, the new report by Jason Head (University of Toronto at Mississauga) and others (Nature 5.2.2009) is about something differe...
The climate change ‘experiment’ has already been run, with results that would be disastrous for the world today, according to evidence highlighted in a statement published today by the Geological Society of London.
1 November 2010
Read a copy of the statement online
"A dramatic global warming event took place 55 million years ago” says GSL President Dr Bryan Lovell. ”It ...