Green Gabbro

Pancake domes from Venus, blueberries from Mars, and a molasse basin from Earth… I need to go grocery shopping.

Happy Green Beer Day! I am pleased to inform you that there are famous rocks in Ireland which you are not required to kiss, including but not limited to the Giant’s Causeway. It was built by Finn MacCool in the misty dawn of time, something something Scottish rival giant something basalt flows heterosexual giant […]

NASA’s press machine is unbeatable this week. Everywhere you look (for values of “everywhere” limited to science sections of the popular press) you see the same pictures of Enceladus spewing out its watery spew - but all us cool kids have been seeing these pictures for months and we’re sick of ‘em*. No, today’s […]

I went on a Web of Science binge yesterday, sensibly followed by a filing binge today. Which means I’m set for a thinking and writing binge tomorrow, but I’d really rather be camping.
Here’s a picture of a moraine in the Sierras.

This is a replica of the world’s first seismometer, which was built in China, AD 130-ish. I haven’t been able to find a good diagram of the internal mechanism, but there’s some kind of pendulum in there, which jiggles in response to earthquakes. This moves a little lever on the dragon’s head, so that the […]

I’ve previously rockblogged about the crusty, water-soluble minerals known as evaporites. But you don’t need open pans or puddles to produce this kind of mineral precipitate - drying out shallow soil will work just as well*. When this happens, dissolved calcium carbonates (et al.) will coat all kinds of surfaces and infiltrate all kinds […]

Oooh, pretty pink halite!

This image was taken by the Huygens probe, just after it landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. Lest you think I’m somehow on top of things, let me note that it was released last January - but that old-fashioned sepia tone comes from Titan’s thick hydrocarbon soup of an atmosphere, not from age.
You can see some […]

One of these days I should find a nice petrology textbook, and turn Friday Rock Blogs into an actual structured way to study for my qualifying exams. Until that day, I’ll be getting ideas from casual conversations and asides during class, when a professor lifts an eyebrow and says “you know, this would be a […]

Les hivers de mon enfance étaient des saisons longues, longues. Nous vivions en trois lieux: l’école, l’église et la patinoire; mais la vraie vie était sur la patinoire.
The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places — the school, the church and the skating-rink — but our real life […]