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.

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Geology in the News

  • July 22, 2008. Bears vs. geologists in Kamchatka: Bears 2, Geologists 0. Reuters

  • July 22, 2008. CHAITEN IMAGES.

  • July 22, 2008. Okmok Volcano continues to erupt (it's in the Aleutian islands of Alaska).

  • July 22, 2008. Oil prices are down to $126 a barrel. The idiots are cheering, because they don't remember that $126 was a new world record price on May 16th, 2008. Nothing changes the fact that the global energy equation has changed, probably for ever. BBC News

  • July 17, 2008. Water "widespread" on early Mars.
    Naturally there is the inevitable commentary about early Mars as "benign" for life. I shall have wait patiently to read the papers (allegedly in Nature and Nature Geoscience) to see how the authors deal with the conclusion from the Rover lander that Mars water was always too acid to support life: New chemical results from the Mars Rover points to the likely conclusion that the planet's water was always too salty for life. Maybe we can now stop believing NASA's hopelessly optimistic spin and concentrate on real planetology. Real planetology will tell us that Earth is the only planet we've got, so we should start taking better care of it. The paper is in Science. National Geographic News, May 29, 2008.

  • July 17, 2008. Water and the Colorado River. Background from the BBC. BBC News

  • July 17, 2008. Kilauea continues to erupt. A lava bench collapses where Hawaiian lava reaches the ocean. The increase in flow between Pu'u O'o and the sea is no big deal, and the new fountain halfway down was spectacular but short-lived (see the USGS image archive site below). Explosions occur as the lava meets the sea.

  • July 16, 2008. A Cretaceous anoxic event and extinction at 93 Ma are linked to massive volcanic eruptions. The paper is in Nature.

  • July 16, 2008. Fifty years ago: the world's highest tsunami. Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 9, 1958. Feature on Geology.com

  • July 11, 2008. Oil prices go over $147 before settling at over $145. BBC News OnLine

  • July 10, 2008. Llaima volcano in Chile is erupting.

  • July 9, 2008. Natural ice dam breaks in Argentina: in mid-winter! Terra Daily

  • July 8, 2008. The new MESSENGER spacecraft reaches Mercury and some old questions are answered.

  • July 3, 2008. It looks as if oil is headed higher again: prices went over $145 on London markets this morning. BBC News

  • July 3, 2008. Remember the Daisetta sinkhole? The city and its residents are looking for someone to sue. No word on the alligator... Liberty Vindicator Previous stories:

  • July 2, 2008. Another new record for oil prices: they closed at over $143 today. Forbes

  • July 1, 2008. The recent Chinese earthquake was "very unusual" according to MIT. I suppose it depends what you mean by "unusual". This was a very large quake on what we know is a major continental plate boundary. We know that the topography changes by 10,000 feet in only 30 miles!! That kind of topography erodes quite quickly (in geological terms) unless it is renewed on some relatively short time scale (in geological terms). I don't think you can argue that the earthquake along that boundary was surprising; and when you are dealing with continental crust, earthquakes tend to be large, as they are along the southern edges of the Himalayas. So really, this is a story that gets a headline, but I'm not sure of its scientific significance. Terra Daily

  • July 1, 2008. The crater lake at Ruapehu is unusually warm, but that doesn't mean an eruption is imminent. It's been unusually warm since May. Stuff site.

  • June 30, 2008. The Waiho Loop moraine in New Zealand. Who cares? Moraines typically record the farthest extent a glacier advances: usually a cold period, of course. The Waiho Loop moraine was dated several years ago, and it seemed to coincide with a dramatic cold event in the Northern Hemisphere called the Younger Dryas. Thus the Younger Dryas was extended to be a global cold event. Now an elegant study shows that the Waiho Loop resulted because a huge landslide fell on the Franz Josef Glacier, altering its flow and leading to the formation of the Waiho Loop. So the Younger Dryas may be back to a regional event, set up by a glacial flood out of the North American ice sheet. Any of you heading for New Zealand will love the Franz Josef Glacier, by the way. It almost reaches the sea, it's accessible on a short hike, and it has gorgeous blue ice... Geology Times. The paper will be in Nature Geoscience: here's the abstract. Thanks to Alison Johnston for this story!

  • June 30, 2008. New information on the Chesapeake Bay impact of 35 m.y. ago. This is a very nice paper (it was in Science last week). Its relevance to life on Mars is zero (I WISH they wouldn't do that! The impact was sterilizing, and any bacteria there now had to have already been in surrounding rocks before they invaded the debris from the cratering event.) National Geographic News

  • June 30, 2008. Centenary of the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. BBC News

  • June 30, 2008. Oil prices reached $143 a barrel in Europe this morning. International Herald Tribune

  • June 27, 2008. Oil prices went over $142 a barrel today, and closed at a new record over $140. BBC News

  • June 26, 2008. Explosive volcanism on the deep Arctic Ocean floor is a surprise. The paper is in Nature this week. National Geographic News

  • June 26, 2008. Oil prices finished the day at an all-time record of over $139 a barrel, after briefly going over $140. CNN Money. Previous record: see June 7, 2008.

  • June 26, 2008. New Greenland ice core shows dramatic climate changes at either end of the "Younger Dryas". Wait for the paper in Science. Terra Daily

  • June 25, 2008. T Boone Pickens and the Ogallala Aquifer. The Ogallala Aquifer supplies water to a tremendous area in the High Plains. But it has been over-pumped for decades, and is clearly a non-renewable resource in economic terms. Its water fuels multi-billion agribusiness over several states, and it supplies several big cities as well as thousands of ranches. Pickens owns land in a corner of Texas where the Ogallala is more impacted than average, and wants to pump and export enormous quantities of water. My opinion is that his stance is morally bankrupt. But then he gave $2 million to the scurrilous "Swift-Boating" of John Kerry ( Update on that sorry business. However, my opinion isn't worth anything. Lawyers, crooked politicians, ranchers, and vigilantes will no doubt feature prominently in the movie.... Meanwhile, we wait to see what will happen in real life. Business Week

  • June 25, 2008. Why the two hemispheres of Mars (north and south) are so different. It's been suggested for a long time that it might be the result of a huge impact. Three new studies, taken together, analyse the hypothesis and cannot falsify it. That's not proof that it's correct, but it's always encouraging when that happens. The papers, and a commentary, are in Nature this week.

  • June 25, 2008. US Supreme Court reduces Exxon's damages bill to $500 million for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In 1994, a jury awarded fishermen and others $5 billion (in 1994 dollars). By 2004, that had been reduced a little, to $4.5 billion (in 2004 dollars). Last year, an appeal court cut it to $2.5 billion (in 2007 dollars). So now the Supreme Court has cut it to $509 million (in even more worthless 2008 dollars). The vote was 5-3. In perspective, $509 million is less than 5 days' profit for Exxon Mobil. And the interest earned by Exxon on the $5 billion it didn't pay is about twice the actual award: in other words, Exxon made a profit on the delay, while the plaintiffs were dying of old age.

  • June 24, 2008. OK, here it comes: another US betrayal of the Kurds. This time it would be to favor the big US oil companies. The geopolitical reality is that the US will abandon the Kurds to their fate again, just as they did after the First Gulf War.

  • June 24, 2008. Encouraging update on the northern Aral Sea. Terra Daily

  • June 24, 2008. New Greenland ice core shows dramatic climate changes at either end of the "Younger Dryas". Wait for the paper in Science. Terra Daily
  • June 20, 2008. Water ice excavated on the surface of Mars by the Phoenix spacecraft. Before you get too excited by the prospect of human habitats on Mars, remember that the first thing the ice did on exposure was to disappear: it sublimated away into the Martian atmosphere.

  • June 20, 2008. What are the long-term hazards of exposure to vog (volcanic fog)? Kilauea shows no sign of slowing down its emissions, so it's a valid question for Hawai'i residents. But no-one knows the answers. Honolulu Advertiser. Earlier stories on vog, and eruption status:

  • June 18, 2008. China and Japan resolve a dispute over offshore oil and gas fields, so they can now go ahead and develop them jointly. BBC News

  • June 17, 2008. Tension between Kurdish and Arab Iraqis over the Kirkuk oil fields. The geopolitical reality is that the US will abandon the Kurds to their fate again, just as they did after the First Gulf War. Terra Daily

  • June 17, 2008. China invests heavily in copper mining in Peru. The new economic imperialists! From the Peruvian peasant point of view, this marks yet another change of the exploiters: first the Inca, then the Spanish, then the Americans, now the Chinese. BBC News OnLine

  • June 17, 2008. Insight, or lack of it, into the Hadean: all we have are zircon crystals. The paper is in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. It's said to be online, but I haven't read it yet. National Geographic News

  • June 17, 2008. Two image galleries of Mount Etna, from June and May 2008. Thanks to Kimberly Genareau for the links to Stromboli online.

  • June 17, 2008. Chaiten volcano continues to erupt, and the abandoned town of Chaiten begins to fill with lahar sediment.

  • June 16, 2008. Collapse of part of an Antarctic ice shelf. And don't forget, it's WINTER down there! And still there are people who don't want to see that global warming is real! National Geographic News

  • June 16, 2008. More "super-Earths' are discovered round distant stars. What does that have to do with life out there? NOTHING! Read the news item. What evidence, what scenario, is there for life on these giant balls of who-knows-what? NONE. This wild nonsense takes away from the real story, which is the evidence that much more diversity of solar systems is out there for us to ponder the evolution of stars unlike our Sun, and the planetary systems that surround them. National Geographic News

  • June 15, 2008. Earthquake kills several people in northern Japan.

  • June 14, 2008. Child miners in Bolivia. This is at Potosi. Read some of the old horror stories of the Spanish exploitation of Bolivian labor in these mines over the centuries of the colonial era. Here are Bolivians exploiting Bolivians! And, of course, child labor is illegal (in theory).

  • June 13, 2008. Earthquake under White Island, New Zealand leads to eruption warning. White Island is an active volcano that erupts ash and steam at low levels much of the time. An unusual event like this M5 earthquake naturally makes one wonder whether there may be a danger of a higher level of volcanic activity. Stuff, NZ site

  • June 10, 2008. Promising new diamond discovery in Arctic Canada. Diamonds.net

  • June 11, 2008. The major earthquake in China. The death toll is now 69,000, but could go over 80,000. Five million people are homeless! 34 lakes have been formed by landslides blocking steep narrow valleys, and they present potentially lethal flood threats. Chinese army engineers have completed an emergency spillway on the largest of them, and have bought some time for more work by sacrificing the abandoned city of Beichuan.

  • June 10, 2008. Survey of Krakatau: history and geology, with magnificent images and an update from the May 2008 eruption. Photovolcanic site

  • June 10, 2008. The final story on the lethal collapse of the Crandall mine in Utah: bad mining practices. Wired

  • June 9, 2008. Weird events in the Monterey submarine canyon. A very nice backgrounder explaining current sedimentological research. Clastic Detritus site

  • June 8, 2008. A new diamond-mining ship goes into action for De Beers, along the South African coast. Mining Weekly

  • June 7, 2008. Kashagan, the supergiant oilfield in Kazakhstan's Caspian waters. Backgrounder from Terra Daily

  • June 7, 2008. The price of crude oil reached another all-time high yesterday, closing at over $138 a barrel. BBC News OnLine

  • June 5, 2008. The rise of the Andes: a new model. The paper is in Science this week. Interestingly, the paper is billed as a "review", implying that it surveys and summarizes the state of the art in this field. The comments quoted in the news story suggest that the paper is exciting but not to the point that it's utterly convincing. National Geographic News

  • June 3, 2008. Diamonds grown in the lab. Feature article in Smithsonian magazine, June 2008

  • June 3, 2008. Water, Israel, and the Palestinians. This news item is so messed up that it distorts the reality of the situation. I have no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians can share up the rainwater that falls on the West Bank and enters that aquifer. BUT what is vital for Israel is the headwaters of the Jordan. If you look at the large map you see the Golan Heights, east of the Jordan, and extending north. The Golan Heights protect some of the Jordan headwaters from Syrian intervention. And notice too how Israeli-controlled territory extends far north on the west of the Jordan: that protects Jordan headwaters from Lebanese intervention. I have taught for a long time that no sane Israeli government can cheerfully trade away those territories unless their present water supplies are somehow protected. Israel is a world leader in wise water use: but desalination is not going to be a long-term solution, given the rise in fuel prices. National Geographic News

  • June 3, 2008. Illegal tin mining in Nigeria. BBC News

  • June 2, 2008. Chaiten volcano continues to erupt, and the abandoned city of Chaiten begins to fill with lahar sediment. NASA satellite image For previous information on the eruption, scroll down to May 15th.

  • June 2, 2008. OK, so there's a newly found extrasolar planet out there. It's colder than Pluto. "A shot in the arm for ET search", proclaims National Geographic. Another nail in the coffin, I would comment. Wouldn't it be nice to see some reality to scientific interpretation, rather than relentless optimism that is not supported by the actual evidence? Of course, if you're a science reporter, you can only use the quotes you get, no matter what you think privately.

  • June 2, 2008. The methane of Lake Kivu. BBC News OnLine

  • May 30, 2008. Two years of flow from the Java mud volcano.

  • May 28, 2008. A new 100-carat diamond is sold for $6 million. BBC News

  • May 28, 2008. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is said to have been stabilized. BBC News OnLine

  • May 28, 2008. The last Snowball Earth melted quickly in a methane burst. I haven't read this yet. National Geographic News

  • May 27, 2008. Saving salmon from a fish farm near Chaiten volcano. AP on Google. For previous Chaiten stories, scroll down to May 15, 2008.

  • May 27, 2008. Picture gallery of the current eruption on Etna. Thanks to Kimberly Genareau for the link

  • May 27, 2008. Low flow on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The Iraqis are asking Turkey and Syria to release more water from the upstream dams. Good luck! Either way, the Kurds lose.... Terra Daily

  • May 27, 2008. The Gerlach geothermal system in northwest Nevada. The companies involved have to be careful not to cripple it by competitive over-drilling, as happened in the Geysers field in northern California some years ago. Terra Daily

  • May 26, 2008. The major earthquake in China. Death toll is now 65,000, but could go over 90,000. Five million people are homeless! 34 lakes have been formed by landslides blocking steep narrow valleys, and they present potentially lethal flood threats. Chinese army engineers have completed an emergency spillway on the largest of them.

  • May 23, 2008. California's new gold rush. BBC News Online

  • May 22, 2008. Scary scenario for a Southern California earthquake. USGS report summarized on Terra Daily

  • May 22, 2008. Oil prices reach $135 a barrel. That means the price has doubled in a year. BBC News

  • May 21, 2008. Oil prices reached $132 a barrel this morning: who knows what will happen by the end of the day? BBC News

  • May 20, 2008. Photo galleries from National Geographic. This one is on caves, but there are links to others related to Earth science. National Geographic Science

  • May 20, 2008. Oil prices close above $128 a barrel, another new record. BBC News OnLine

  • May 16, 2008. Once again, you can't make up stuff like this.... You remember the large sinkhole that opened under Daisetta, Texas. A 7-foot alligator has appeared in it.

  • May 16, 2008. Oil prices rise above $127 a barrel. BBC News OnLine

  • May 15, 2008. More about the sediments on the surface of Mars. More strange optimism about life. And it is NOT in Science this week. I wish they wouldn't do that! National Geographic News

  • May 15, 2008. Ash eruptions increase in intensity at Chaiten, in southern Chile. There's now a serious possibility of pyroclastic flows. For Google Earth fans, ask to go to Chaiten. Volcan Chaiten lies in an obvious caldera almost due north of the town, with a newish bare-rock volcanic dome in the center of the caldera.

  • May 6, 2008. Oil prices reach $122 a barrel for the first time. Remember those happy days when oil was only $100 a barrel? Scroll down to January 2, 2008! Reuters.

  • May 5, 2008. Oil prices briefly hit $120 a barrel for the first time. BBC News OnLine

  • May 3, 2008. The Deccan Trap eruptions across the KT boundary were very rapid and therefore had dramatic pulsed environmental effects. The paper is in JGR, and I haven't read it: but here is the abstract. JGR abstract

  • April 30, 2008. Mysterious and prolonged earthquake swarm near Reno, Nevada. National Geographic News

  • April 29, 2008. Documenting the global effects of the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina, in Peru. The effects seem at first glance to be Tambora-like, rather than the smaller effects of Krakatau and Pinatubo. Presented by UC Davis's own Ken Verosub and Jake Lippman. National Geographic News

  • April 29, 2008. When did the Sierra Nevada reach its present elevation? Maybe as long ago as 12 Ma in the central Sierra at least. The question brings implications for continental climate history as well as geophysics. The paper will eventually appear in PNAS. Terra Daily

  • April 29, 2008. Reconciling radiometric dating by different methods. Dating can now be much more precise and accurate. The KT boundary was at 66 Ma and the Permo-Triassic boundary is 252 Ma. And there are implications for the earliest history of the Earth, too. The paper was in Science last week. Terra Daily

  • April 28, 2008. New earthquake hazard maps for the United States. US Geological Survey

  • April 26, 2008. Quick-clay landslides and the city of Gatineau in Eastern Canada. I don't usually look at the Ottawa Citizen, and I don't know how long these stories will last. If you want them, DOWNLOAD THEM NOW!! Ottawa Citizen.
    Previous stories, which likely led to the background review story above:

  • April 24, 2008. The perils of field geology, # 3245: rabid bobcats. Tucson Citizen

  • April 22, 2008. Alert level raised at Anak Krakatau volcano. Reuters

  • April 22, 2008. The Europeans and natural gas from Turkmenistan. With the US ignoring Caspian oil and gas, the Europeans are going after it on their own. Read this one all the way through: I love the sardonic analysis of this writer. And I wouldn't trust the Turkmens one little bit. Terra Daily

  • April 22, 2008. Oil prices close at over $119 a barrel (another new record). BBC News OnLine

  • April 22, 2008. Large underwater volcano found on the Reykjanes (mid-Atlantic) Ridge, southwest of Iceland. This is old news from earlier this month, but the previous site I used was ephemeral. National Geographic News

  • April 22, 2008. Satellite image of a huge copper mine in Mexico. NASA Earth Observatory

  • April 21, 2008. Oil prices in New York briefly hit $117. BBC News OnLine

  • April 21, 2008. Oil prices and the US dollar. How much is the rise in US oil and gas prices related to the mismanagement that has eroded the value of the dollar over the past eight years? Here are the numbers. Geotimes

  • April 21, 2008. Melting of the Greenland icecap: spectacular and scary. This will eventually be publshed in Science.

  • April 20, 2008. Ancient hematite mining in Peru. Not for making iron, but for grinding ochre. Thousands of tons of it!

  • April 18, 2008. Another new record high for crude oil price: it closed at over $115 a barrel. OK, trivia time. What was the price of oil when the Bush administration took over? Less than $40/barrel. BBC News

  • April 18, 2008. Earthquake in Illinois! (And on the anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.) Fortunately it was about magnitude 5. National Geographic News

  • April 17, 2008. Satellite imagery of isostatic rebound. Akimiski Island in James Bay (part of Hudson's Bay) has rebounded so much since the Laurentian Ice Sheet melted that there are terraces along its spouth coast clearly visible from satellite. (You could probably use Google Earth to scan many other appropriate coastlines: especially the west coast of Finland.) NASA Earth Observatory

  • April 17, 2008. Mysterious swarm of (small) earthquakes off the Oregon coast. It's happening in a "quiet" part of the ocean crust. These swarms occur on land n "quiet" areas: a classic is the Geysers geothermal field in Northern California, where there is a lot of hot-spring activity but no fault activity. Maybe this is a new hot-spring area (one still asks why). We will be able to find the answer, but because of the location and the depth of water, it won't be cheap or fast. National Geographic News

  • April 16, 2008. Another new record high for oil prices: over $114 a barrel. BBC News OnLine

  • April 16, 2008. Eruption of Mount Egon, on the Indonesian island of Flores.

  • April 15, 2008. Eruption of Nevado de Huila, in southern Colombia. Thousands of people have been advised to evacuate. BBC News OnLine

  • April 14, 2008. Update on probabilities for major California earthquakes. The expectation is for at least one in the next 30 years. Of course, it could be zero, or four: but the likeliest case is one, and a slightly higher probability that it will hit Southern California rather than Northern California.

  • April 14, 2008. The (man-made) subsidence of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. AFP story on Terra Daily

  • April 14, 2008. Wonderful image of Lonar Crater, in India. NASA Earth Observatory
  • April 11, 2008. Ice-dammed lakes are unstable. This example is from southern Chile. National Geographic News

  • April 11, 2007. A new small explosion at Halema'uma'u crater. Hawaii Volcano Observatory press release

  • April 10, 2009. Volcanoes National Park remains closed because of volcanic fog (vog) with high-sulfur fumes. AP story on National Geographic News

  • April 10, 2008. Some precursors to the Grand Canyon may date back to 50 Ma. National Geographic News

  • April 9, 2008. Another new record high for oil prices. AP

  • April 9, 2008. Remember the Indonesian mud volcano? Now it's emitting methane... AFP

  • April 7, 2008. Water, volcanoes and ecology in the Canary Islands. Chesapeake Bay Journal

  • April 1, 2008. Kilauea's sulfur plume. Image from NASA satellite sensors

  • March 31, 2008. 1.2 billion year old meteorite impact identified in Scotland. National Geographic News

  • March 27, 2008. Concerns about health hazards from the gas-rich eruption of Halema'uma'u. The satellite image from NASA was taken earlier this week, when the trade winds were blowing the vog out to the southwest, as usual. The concern is what happens when the trade winds slacken. This happens occasionally, and at those times the city of Hilo gets "vog" or volcanic fog. Vog is part of the local TV weather forecasts.

  • March 25, 2008. The Three Gorges Dam: an environmental disaster. Scientific American

  • March 25, 2008. The gas vent in Halema'uma'u crater is now blowing out ash and little gobs of lava. This is the first lava erupted from Halema'uma'a since 1982.

  • March 21, 2008. Who swindled the Ethiopian government out of $17 million in fake gold? Workers from the Ethiopian Geological Survey! Really, who can you trust? Reuters Previous story: Ethiopia's national bank has been swindled: someone sold them gold-plated steel rather than gold bars. It doesn't take rocket science to weigh one and find it's fake!!! This was an inside job. BBC News, March 13, 2008.

  • March 21, 2008. Revised estimates for earthquake damage on the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area. $1.5 trillion, probably. US Geological Survey

  • March 21, 2008. Venice turns to really bad ideas to solve its problems. Ask an engineer why this latest idea not only won't work, but can't. Terra Daily

  • March 21, 2008. Update on Kilauea's volcanic activity.

  • March 19, 2008. Small explosion at Halema'uma'u Crater: usually there are NONE.

  • March 19, 2008. A huge volcanic eruption in AD 536 is detected in ice cores. It had been suspected from ancient chronicles. National Geographic News

  • March 18, 2008. Meteorite crater discovered on Google Earth. Science Alert Australia

  • March 15, 2008. Halema'uma'u crater is emitting sulfur dioxide at record rates from a new gas vent. It's not clear what it means, but it's not good for tourist lungs. Previous story: March 11, 2008. Honolulu Advertiser.

  • March 14, 2008. First reports are positive on the Grand Canyon flood. National Geographic News. For previous stories, scroll down to March 6, 2008.

  • March 13, 2008. Oil prices close at another new record, over $110 a barrel. AFP on Google

  • March 13, 2008. The price of gold reaches an all-time high of $1000 an ounce. Don't forget that the dollar is dropping against other currencies. At this rate we'll see more "record" prices that simply reflect our lousy economic situation rather than a "real" price. Side story: Ethiopia's national bank has been swindled: someone sold them gold-plated steel rather than gold bars. It doesn't take rocket science to weigh one and find it's fake!!! This was an inside job. BBC News, March 13, 2008.

  • March 12, 2008. Oil prices close at another new record, at over $109 a barrel. International Herald Tribune

  • March 11, 2008. Visitors swarm to Kalapana lava flow on the Hawaiian coast. The lava is currently reaching the sea in four diffferent places. Honolulu Advertiser. Previous story: March 7, 2008.

  • March 11, 2008. Oil prices close at another new record, at over $108 a barrel. BBC News

  • March 11, 2008. More about the meteorite that hit Peru last year. National Geographic News. Previous story: National Geographic News, September 21, 2007.

  • March 10, 2008. Oil goes over $106 a barrel, another new record. BBC News

  • March 8, 2008. Update on Montserrat, still dealing with an active volcano after eleven years. BBC News OnLine. The real story is the visit of Prince Charles to the island: BBC News

  • March 7, 2008. Lava from Pu'u O'o reached the sea yesterday. The Royal Gardens subdivision is toast.

  • March 7, 2008. Evacuation exercise for Auckland, New Zealand. The back story is the recent discovery of a potentially dangerous volcanic vent under the city. The whole city is built on recent volcanics, but there has been no eruption nearby since Anglos arrived. Stuff website

  • March 6, 2008. Crude oil reaches another new record of $105 a barrel. Voice of America

  • March 6, 2008. Sending a flood down the Grand Canyon.

  • March 5, 2008. Crude oil reaches another new record of $104 a barrel. Voice of America

  • March 5, 2008. Purple diamonds discovered in Quebec, Canada. Allheadlinenews.com

  • March 5, 2008. Remember the Java mud volcano? It's leaking methane now... Reuters

  • March 5, 2008. Russia resumes gas supplies to Ukraine, after Ukraine threatened to cut Russia's pipeline supply to Europe. More crude Soviet-style power politics, and a clever response by Ukraine designed to get Europe to help it.

  • March 3, 2008. "Water flows" on Mars were probably dry debris slides. The paper is in Geology, which does not make its papers generally accessible on the Web.

  • March 3, 2008. New record oil prices.

  • March 3, 2008. Missing the boat on Iranian gas. UPI story on Terra Daily

  • March 3, 2008. Spectacular images of a 2006 rockfall in Yosemite National Park. Geology.com site

  • March 2, 2008. Why gold mining should not be done by ignorant amateurs. Mount Diwata in the Philippines. AFP story, Terra Daily

  • March 1, 2008. Removing the Marmot Dam in Oregon. Geotimes, March 2008

  • February 29, 2008. Three abandoned homes covered by lava in the Royal Gardens subdivision on Hawaii. Honolulu Advertiser

  • February 28, 2008. A looming flood of toxic waste threatens Leadville, Colorado. MSNBC.com

  • February 27, 2008. Supercomputer models an M9 superquake on the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. Terra Daily

  • February 27, 2008. The Big Hole that used to be the great diamond mine in Kimberley, South Africa, is now a geological hazard. Story with Google image. GeoPrac site. Previous story from Geoprac, February 11, 2008: Seven Amazing Holes, three of them diamond mines.

  • February 27, 2008. A British earthquake. Mild and restrained, of course. BBC News

  • February 24, 2008. Evidence from the floor of Hudson's Bay about the draining of Lake Agassiz. The paper is in Nature Geoscience, whoch doesn't place its papers on the Web. Terra Daily

  • February 24, 2008. The human cost of uranium mining in the State of Washington. Seattle Times

  • February 21, 2008. Terraced deltas on Mars: formed in very early, very short-lived, very small floods. The paper is in Nature, which does not place its papers for general viewing on the Web. New York Times

  • February 21, 2008. The dome in Mount St. Helens' crater has stopped growing (for a while, at least). USGS press release

  • February 21, 2008. Meteor shower in the Pacific Northwest. National Geographic News

  • February 20, 2008. Oil prices reach another new all-time high, $100.74 a barrel.

  • February 15, 2008. Pacific Gas and Electricity buys more geothermal energy. (Because it has to!). The crazy thing is that this is not NEW geothermal energy: it just means that Calpine will sell more geothermal to PG&E and less to its other customers. The Geysers geothermal field is maxed out. The only thing this new deal will do for the environment is perhaps to encourage NEW geothermal plants: certainly there are plenty of potential sites in California, Oregon, and Washington. San Francisco Chronicle

  • February 13, 2008. The water supply of the American Southwest is in deep trouble. Even Lake Mead may lose all its useful stored water, and may eventually dry up. It is almost too frightening to think about the consequences, especially for Southern California. National Geographic News

  • February 11, 2008. The structure of the iron molecules in Earth's inner core. The neat thing is that experiments and computer models now explain the puzzling fact that seismic waves travel faster north-south through the inner core than they do in any other direction. Terra Daily.
    I wrote a short review on the Earth's inner core back in May 1998, which I include here in its entirety:

    It has its own spin (gyroscopic),
    It's seismically anisotropic,
    It's one giant crystal,
    It's as hot as a pistol,
    And so is this whole research topic.

  • February 9, 2008. Tungurahua in Ecuador increases activity still further.

  • February 8, 2007. Pungualuit Crater in Quebac, Canada: a beautiful meteorite crater about a million years old. NASA

  • February 6, 2008. Volcan Llaima in Chile increases activity.

  • February 3, 2008. Moderate earthquakes in the African Rift area. BBC News

  • February 1, 2008. Exxon Mobil reports record profit for 2007. The company made over $40 billion, the largest profit ever made by an American company. In perspective, the company has not paid any of the $2.5 billion it was fined for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. BBC News

  • February 1, 2008. Alcoa and the Chinese both buy a stake in Rio Tinto. Most significantly, the Chinese now have a 10% stake.

  • January 31, 2008. Jack Thompson's house is threatened by the Hawaiian lava flows, as they reach the Royal Gardens area. KGMB TV

  • January 30, 2008. Another Chinese coal mine blows up: at least 25 illegal miners killed. Terra Daily

  • January 28, 2008. The behavior of faults off the coast of Washington and Oregon is more complex than we thought. But we don't yet know what that means. The paper is said to be coming out in Geology, which does not make its papers generally accessible. Seattle Times

  • January 24, 2008. New information and speculation on the K-T asteroid. Who knows when we'll see the actual paper.

  • January 23, 2008. Brazil strikes big offshore gas field. This follows their big strike of offshore oil last year. Energy Daily. Previous story: CNN

  • January 23, 2008. Close miss by an asteroid next week. Asteroid 2007 TU 24 will be about as close as the Moon on its nearest approach. There won't be another so close and so large until 2027.

  • January 21, 2008. Why the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area is more dangerous than we thought. Densely written, no images. But the geophysicists involved are very good scientists. San Mateo County Times

  • January 21, 2008. Officially ignoring official maps that showed landslide dangers: a case study from Oregon. (Thanks to Al Frank for this URL.) OPB News

  • January 21, 2008. Small eruptions frm Anak Krakatoa. Antara

  • January 21, 2008. Prehistoric eruption from under the Antarctic ice. National Geographic news

  • January 18, 2008. The geopolitics of oil and gas pipelines, XIII: Russia scores another victory with the South Stream pipeline. BBC News OnLine. Previous story: December 31, 2007.

  • January 18, 2007. Eruption of Galeras, in Colombia. 8,000 people evacuated. CNN

  • January 17, 2008. A little bit of action at Mount St. Helens. National Geographic News. Previous story: Seattle Times, September 27, 2007.

  • January 14, 2008. Gold reaches $900 an ounce, an all-time high. (Some of that is because the dollar is so low compared with other international currencies.) MSN

  • January 13, 2008. People are nuts, episode #4753. The State of Hawaii subsidizes an insurance prgram that encourages people to build homes in places most likely to be covered by lava. Honolulu Advertiser

  • January 9, 2008. Asteroid 2007 WD5 will miss Mars. JPL. Previous stories:

  • January 5, 2008. Small but spectacular eruption of Popocatepetl. AFP/Google

  • January 4, 2008. Indonesia's mud volcano breaks its levees and spreads further. International Herald Tribune. Previous stories:

  • January 3, 2008. Twenty-five years of eruption at Kilauea. Honolulu Advertiser

  • January 2, 2008. Oil trades briefly at $100 a barrel, a new all-time record. Happy New Year! BBC News OnLine

    For news items archived from 2007, see Geology News from 2007.

    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.

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