Book review: Introducing Sea Level Change, by Alastair Dawson
Sea level change is something that probably everyone who does their best to keep up to date about climate change, thinks they know about and on which they will have an opinion.
Category: climate
Book review: Introducing Hydrogeology, by Nicolas Robins
Another issue of Deposits and another excellent addition to the “Introducing Earth and Environmental Sciences” series by Dunedin, many of which I have favourably reviewed in this magazine.
Disappearing Dunwich
Roy Bullard (UK) There are many places around the coastline of the British Isles that are quite simply majestic and, in their own unique ways, full of magic. Dunwich lies between the lovely town of Southwold and the village of Sizewell on the East Coast of England in the county … Read More
Extinction of the mammoth and the ‘Clathrate Gun’
Joanne Ballard and André Bijkerk (USA) In this article, we will argue that the extinction of megafauna on the mammoth steppes of the Northern Hemisphere may ultimately have been caused by the release of massive quantities of methane in the North Atlantic Ocean at the Amazon Fan near the Brazilian … Read More
Clarkia flora: 16-million-year-old plants offer a window into the past
Margret Steinthorsdottir and Helen K Coxall (Sweden) Near the small town of Clarkia in Shoshone County, Idaho in the USA, exists a rich and unique fossil deposit. The Clarkia fossils, or Clarkia Flora, as the deposit is mostly called due to the abundance of fossil plants, is so well preserved … Read More
Colourful bluffs in Long Island recall the most recent ice age
Deborah Painter (USA) Imagine a tremendous piece of land moving equipment that scraped up the soil and some of the surface bedrock from four states within the United States’ Eastern Seaboard, carrying and dragging it all the way, before dumping it on a ridge off the shoreline. That is what … Read More
Whitby Jet and the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event
Arthur Speed (UK) One hundred and eighty million years ago in the Toarcian Stage of the Lower Jurassic Period, the Earth was very different from the world we know today. The continents were all clumped together in a supercontinent called Pangaea, which was just beginning to split apart. Sea level … Read More
Geological transformation of Sharjah, UAE
Khursheed Dinshaw (India) In this article, I will briefly deal with the fascinating and relatively recent geological transformation of the Sharjah region of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Sharjah needs no introduction in terms of it being a popular tourist destination, especially for families. However, very few know how it … Read More
Pale white dot
Steven Wade Veatch (USA) and Vishwam Sankaran (India) A famous saying goes, “there’s nothing new under the sun”, and these words are very apt when trying to understand Earth’s climate trends. Thanks to numerous discoveries made about Earth’s ancient past, we now know that our climate has never been static. … Read More
Anthropocene: Should we designate a new epoch? A geologist’s perspective
David Wharton-Street (UK) Whatever your views, this is a subject that will not go away, and the concept of the Anthropocene is gaining more impetus and consideration as time goes by. In a nutshell, the Anthropocene has been proposed as a new third epoch of the Quaternary Period that directly … Read More
Carbon capture and storage (CCS): Using geology to fight climate change
Mark Wilkinson (UK) Practically everyone has an opinion on climate change by now, although for the vast majority of scientists, the weight of evidence is overwhelming – emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing climate change, sometimes referred to as global warming. One possible technology for fighting … Read More
Australia’s Polar Cretaceous mammals
Dr Thomas H Rich (Australia) The Cenozoic Era is commonly referred to as the ‘Age of Mammals’. That is certainly the time in the history of life when their fossils are most abundant and diverse. However, two-thirds of mammalian history was during the Mesozoic Era – and they appeared about … Read More
The other mass extinctions
Neal Monks (UK) The extinctions at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary make up what is probably the most famous geological event in popular culture. This is the point when the great reptiles that characterise the Mesozoic went extinct. Alongside the dinosaurs, the giant marine reptiles died out too, as did the … Read More
Warming medieval climate supports a revolution in agriculture
Steven Wade Veatch and Cheryl Bibeau (USA) In the light of our current worries about climate change and global warming, this is the first a series of articles for Deposits that covers significant climate changes that have occurred in the geological past and times when the earth’s climate was hugely … Read More
An alternative view on climate change
Joe Shimmin (UK) Before you start shouting at your magazine, don’t worry, you’re not going to read that I think climate change isn’t happening or that human beings aren’t contributing to it. However, I am going to try to show that the version of climate change that we are always … Read More
Geopark Shetland: A journey through the 35th European Geopark
Allen Fraser (UK) In September 2009, the Shetland Islands were awarded the accolade of becoming the thirty-fifth European Geopark. This is fantastic news for the isles. It acknowledges the importance of Shetland’s incredible geology and creates opportunities to promote it to an international market and develop partnerships with other members. … Read More
Mammoths in the freezer
Adrian Lister (UK) As palaeontologists, we are used to relying on the preserved hard parts of extinct organisms – shells, bones, teeth and so on – to reconstruct their appearance and adaptations in life. The reconstruction of soft tissue relies upon our knowledge of related living forms, plus clues such … Read More
Fossil forests in the freezer
Stephen McLoughlin (Sweden) South of the craggy limits of Patagonia, Africa and Tasmania, and beyond the piercing gales of the roaring forties and the furious fifties, lies Antarctica – the last great continent on Earth to be explored. Straddling the South Pole, it lies frozen in a winter that has … Read More
Can the end-Permian mass extinction be attributed to a single, catastrophic event?
Robert Broughton (UK) The end Permian mass extinction occurred 251mya and marked the end of the Palaeozoic era. The loss of life is currently estimated to consist of 95% of the marine fauna and around 70 to 77% of the known terrestrial fauna (where the fossil record is inevitably less … Read More
Colossal tortoises: Climate change and the evolution of Europe’s largest ‘modern’ reptiles
Benjamin Kear (Australia) and Georgios Georgalis (Greece) Most people are familiar with the famous giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands – isolated oddities evolving in the absence of predators on a remote tropical paradise. However, as little as 5mya, continental landmasses (including Europe, Africa and India) also had their own … Read More
History shows current climate change is normal
Tim Ball (Canada) Those who I refer to as ‘the new deniers’ keep trying to repair the infamous climate “hockey stick”. This is a term coined for a chart of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years, which suggests a recent sharp rise in temperature caused by human activities. The … Read More
Book review: Introducing Meteorology: A Guide to Weather, by Jon Shonk; and Introducing Oceanography, by David Thomas and David Bowers
I have had the pleasure of reviewing a large number of the “Introducing” guides from Dunedin Academic press, and I am pleased to say that here are another couple of equally good ones.
Book review: Earth in 100 Groundbreaking Discoveries, by Douglas Palmer
Nowadays, people don’t do geology – they do ‘earth sciences’ – and this book is very much in that mould. That’s not to say this is a problem.