Tag: sea level

geology north america

Gravel sheets in the suburbs of Washington, DC

Deborah Painter (USA) If you live in western Prince George’s County, Maryland in the USA, in the towns of Oxon Hill and Suitland and you want to dig to place a water line, plant a garden or excavate to construct a foundation for any building, chances are you will encounter sandy soil with hundreds of cobbles and boulders. Some boulders encountered could be in the form of large flattened slabs. You might be wondering why these are present, since these towns are in a coastal plain, far south and east of the rocky outcrops of the Piedmont area of Virginia … Read More

To access this post, you must purchase Annual subscription or Monthly subscription.

climate geology minerals north america

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 essentially occurred with the final advance of the Wisconsinian ice sheet, the only one which left glacial deposits visible in New York State today. Long Island is a ridge of Cretaceous bedrock with glacial deposition. The moraines there have not been ground into sandbars and spits along the western end … Read More

To access this post, you must purchase Annual subscription or Monthly subscription.

africa / middle east climate geology minerals museums, societies palaeontology

Geological transformation of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

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 was formed and subsequently transformed. In this article, I hope to explain this fascinating aspect of Sharjah. From the beginning At the beginning of the Miocene Period, 23 Ma, Arabia finally split from Africa along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden became a separate plate. This new plate … Read More

To access this post, you must purchase Annual subscription or Monthly subscription.

europe geology urban, art, anthropology

Urban geology: Gabions in the Dutch townscape

Stephen K Donovan (The Netherlands) Gabions are tools of the engineering geologist, facing elements that are used to stabilize over-steep slopes, such as sea cliffs or railway/roadway cuttings; they also have military applications. The word is derived from the French, gabion, and Italian, gabbione, and originally referred to “A wicker basket, of cylindrical form, usually open at both ends, to be filled with earth, for use in fortification and engineering” (Little et al., 1983, p. 823). A modern gabion used in engineering geology is a cage, box or cylinder, commonly infilled by rocks or concrete, and sometimes sand or soil … Read More

To access this post, you must purchase Annual subscription or Monthly subscription.

australasia climate fossils palaeontology

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 the same time as the dinosaurs. All continents except Antarctica have some record of the early, Mesozoic mammals. Of those that do, Australia has the most meagre record of all. Despite this, with this landmass that today has the most distinctive terrestrial mammals on the planet, their Mesozoic origins are … Read More

To access this post, you must purchase Annual subscription or Monthly subscription.

england fossils geology palaeontology

All change at Selsey, West Sussex, UK

David Bone (UK) Issue 26 of Deposits magazine in the Spring of 2011 included my article on fossil collecting at Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex, following in the footsteps of my guide book on Fossil hunting at Bracklesham & Selsey, published in 2009. This area has been well known for the foreshore exposures of Palaeogene and Quaternary geology since the mid-nineteenth century and is still very much an area for popular fossil collecting, as well as research. Many readers will have been to Bracklesham or Selsey to collect sharks’ teeth and may have even been lucky enough to find a … Read More

To access this post, you must purchase Annual subscription or Monthly subscription.