Good News Bad News

It looks like there is a fairly quick solution to global warming. The bad news is in involves India and Pakistan nuking each other.


Apparently even a limited nuclear exchange would have dire climatic consequences. A large one would be catastrophic.

Italian Earthquake

I spent some time yesterday trying to sort out the tectonics of the Mediterranean for a blog post on the Italian earthquake. What the I learned is that the tectonics of the Med are very complicated.
Highly Allochthonous does and excellent job with it though,
and Here's the official USGS account.

Few and Proud

Today in 1985 (don't you DARE do the math) I graduated Marine boot camp at Paris Island South Carolina. I have pictures but no scanner right now so you'll have to wait till next year to see em.

New time scale... now in COLOR

Geologists use a variety of techniques to divide the Earth's history up into manageable units The boundaries between these units mark large changes to the Earth or the Earth's biosphere: extinction, faunal turnover etc. The "official" (this whole process is remarkably unofficial) time scale for North America is put out by the Geological Society of America and is called the DNAG scale (Decade of North American Geology). As we get more and more refined radiometric dates and as old tems exit and new terms enter (like I said: remarkably unofficial) the scale needs to be updated. So here's the new one: know it, learn it, live it, love it. (or just click on it to go to the GSA web site and print it. )