A volcano slides into the sea causing an 800 foot wave to crash onto into an adjacent island. As that wave crashes onto land it picks up 700-ton boulders and throws them uphill leaving them stranded far above their source. It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood movie but this is real. It happened in the Cape Verde Islands off of the west coast of Africa long ago.
Evidence of the antiquity of the Earth is everywhere we look if we have our eyes open and are pondering what we see. One such place is central Utah on a typical rocky mountainside above 8000 feet just southwest of Fish Lake. This is where you will find Pando. Pando is the name given to a... Continue Reading →
Do places on Earth exist where annual records have been stored for tens of thousands of years and can be accessed today? Ice-cores and tree rings can preserve long records of yearly events but some of the best records come from layers of sediment underlying some lakes which, if formed under the right conditions, can be read like the annual rings of... Continue Reading →
There is much interest in determining the likelihood of future asteroid and meteorite impacts on Earth. It is very difficult to estimate the probabilities of such events but we can learn something by looking to one of our solar system neighbors - Mars. Because the surface of Mars changes so slowly new impacts there can... Continue Reading →
In our tour of African stone artifact collections, we now travel to a remote portion of the Sahara Desert in southern Egypt. Stone artifacts are probably abundant in nearly all parts of northern Africa, but they are not easily found everywhere. The shifting sands of this forbidding desert have buried most of the evidence of... Continue Reading →
How different is the surface of Mars today compared to one thousand, a hundred thousand or a million years ago? The photo below was snapped by the Curiosity Rover which has spent several years trekking across an ancient lake-bed inside a large crater on Mars. It is a barren, forbidding but strangely familiar and beautiful... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 