Monthly Archives: October 2014

Pope Francis and the Magic Wand

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Pope Francis has been in the news for the past few days. The pontiff has a habit of saying what he’s thinking and he sometimes does this at surprising venues. This time he was speaking at the unveiling of a … Continue reading →

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Shutting Down the Plumes?

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Near an Indian Ocean island that regularly exhausts smoke and lava, a group of scientists are trying to unravel one of the great mysteries of the Earth. Their riddle involves the planet’s largest basalt field, dinosaur extinction, and the birth … Continue reading →

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Bad Russian Science

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Ron Miksha

My daily Geo-calendar reminds me to consider events in the evolving history of Earth Sciences. Yesterday’s little blurb on that calendar commemorated the birth of Vladimir Belousov (1907-1990), the Soviet-era geologist who stopped plate tectonics, at least in his country. … Continue reading →

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David Suzuki and Popular Geology

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Ron Miksha

David Suzuki makes some people cringe. These days, he is outspoken and sounds irritated, if not angry, about issues that matter to him – particularly the environment and Native rights. Dr Suzuki, a geneticist and entomologist, was arguably the world’s … Continue reading →

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Light on the Dark Side of the Moon

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Did you see the blood red lunar eclipse? Wish I had, but here in Calgary we mostly had the undersides of clouds at 5 a.m. Pity. Poor us. But there are other eclipti coming. April and September 2015 should look … Continue reading →

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The Geophysics Nobel Prize

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Well, they did it again. That committee in Sweden announced all sorts of science prizes (and a lot of money, too) to pioneers in medicine, physics, chemistry, and even peace. OK, that last one isn’t a science prize, I think. … Continue reading →

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A Fast Trip through the Center of the Earth

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Ron Miksha

When I was a child growing up in North American, I was told that if I dug a hole through the center of the Earth, I would emerge in downtown Beijing. (Or Peking, as it was known in English in … Continue reading →

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The Bad Luck of Extinction

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Bad genes or bad luck? That’s the subtitle of Extinction,  David Raup’s romp through Earth history from his viewpoint as a preeminent palaeontologist. Raup (along with colleague Jack Sepkoski) became somewhat well known for their theory that extinctions occur in … Continue reading →

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When Tectonics Started

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Ron Miksha

The Earth is the only planet known to have continents adrift. Scientists are rather certain that the drifting began about a billion years into Earth’s history. This means that for a thousand million years, the continents just sat there. Idle. … Continue reading →

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