The Afar Triangle

In 1912, Alfred Wegener published his proposal that continents had moved. He presented various lines of evidence, of which the best remembered is the fact that the opposite shores of the Atlantic ocean fit together as pieces of a puzzle. There was much more, including the fact that earthquakes were focussed on the Pacific ring…

The Messinian Salinity Crisis: Salt of the Earth

Two pillars sit at the end of the world. To the ancients, the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea was the end of the known (civilized) world. Mythology tells us that Hercules smashed the mountains to create an opening, flanked by two pillars. We don’t quite know which mountain was the southern pillar, but the northern…

Sapphire!

Henrik taught us about what he called gemmology – the knowledge of gemstones, which he said was considered to be part of the geosciences and specifically a branch of mineralogy. It is also a subject closely related to volcanology. Many gemstones form deep underground, and rely on volcanoes to bring them to the surface and…

And the sea was no more: the story of the Tethys marbles

The Elgin marbles International controversies can seem intractable. This particular one is about history set in stone. The Elgin marbles were the decorating sculptures of the Parthenon of ancient Athens. The Earl of Elgin (Thomas Bruce), ambassador to the Ottoman empire, acquired them in the early 1800’s. The acquisition had doubtful legality, although opinions differ…

The secret lives of volcanic islands

Land is precious. The saying goes ‘Buy land – they don’t make it anymore’. We need the land to live on, to grow our crops, to socialise, work, educate, and all other things that makes human life worth living. Even our touch phones won’t work under water. With a growing population, the pressure on the…

The East Anatolian Fault

The southern shores of Europe have seen their share of geological conflict. Africa is moving north, and Europe is in the way. There have been many skirmishes, which have left scars in southern Europe. Africa is an irresistible force and Europe an immovable object. The next phase of this battle will be at Cyprus where…

The 2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquake

A guest post by our very own media master, Nick Small: A historic earthquake in Anatolia As you will all know, an M7.8 earthquake caused massive devastation across Southern Turkiye and Northern Syria on Monday 6/2/23. It ruptured about 100km of the East Anatolian fault at a critically shallow depth of 17.9 km. It was…

The living Earth: Rocks, plumes and hot spots. Part I

The Earth is alive. Well, not really. At least it is not life as we know it. Appropriately, the origin of this expression – slightly rephrased from the original Star Trek series – is from the second-most-famous non-human in existence, Spock, referring to a living rock. It is only a small step for humankind to…