One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes.  That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan.  It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday…

My friend has written a paper on Pantelleria (which I am a co-author of), and I thought it was a good opportunity to discuss some of the techniques we can use to reconstruct a volcano's magma chamber…

The deadliest mass extinction that we know of, 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period,  took a long time to kill most of Earth's life, and it killed in stages. It wasn't superior…

A new study in Nature shows that Santorini may have reactivated roughly a century before the Minoan "super-eruption", a lot quicker than had previously been thought.  How is it possible to time…

I think most people - certainly myself - get that grim "what, another one?" feeling when you first hear news that there has been a big earthquake. But is it justified? In other words, have we…

Welcome to the world's slowest clock. The 'argon-argon clock' works by measuring the ratio of the amount of radioactive potassium in a sample of rock to the amount of its decay product, argon. As…

For the 41st Accretionary Wedge Ron Schott asked for "the most memorable or significant geological event that you've directly experienced."  I had to think long and hard about this, because I…

How old is the water in your drinking glass? What about the ice cubes floating in it? Any answer is bound to make reference to the water cycle (evaporate, rain, repeat). Still, for most practical…

As I have a long train journey and not much to do, I can use it to write about this recent open access paper on Eyjafjallajökull written by a couple of my colleagues in the lab. As it is open access…

There isn't really much geologically significant about this photo, other than that the castle is Made of stone.  However, I wanted to finish this week of photos instigated by Evelyn in Wales,…