The seafloors of the abyssal plains form one of the largest habitats on Earth, covering vast areas of the ocean floor at depths of between 3000 and 6000 m. This environment is fairly uniform, with permanent darkness, temperatures of less than 4° C, very high pressures and limited nutrients. This environment is home to a sparse, but diverse fauna, though this fauna is, due to its location, poorly understood by scientists.

READ MORE

Enhanced gravity map of the Chicxulub crater (credit: Wikipedia)

READ MORE

Here's a cool fold pair that rolled through my Twitter feed today:

READ MORE

Happy Friday, all! To celebrate an end to this week, I bring you something that's been giving me great joy - a Fish Goth cover band, Koi Division!

READ MORE

Essay Review of GeoBritannica: Geological Landscapes and the British Peoples, by Mike Leeder and Joy Lawlor, Dunedin Press, 281 pages, 2017.With the widespread recognition of the Anthropocene, the 'Age of Man', the role of human systems in the sh...

READ MORE

One of the reasons SETI is hard is that we don't know exactly what we are looking for, and part of that difficulty is that we still aren't sure of who we are. An astronomer and an anthropologist team up to explore how cultural myopia shape what w...

READ MORE

Our purpose was to assess a steep shoreline bluff slope along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Getting to the base of the slope meant taking a mile walk along the shore from an access point. This particular shoreline bluff is and has been a challenge to assess. The overall driver of landslides is erosion at the base of the slope. However, the shore bluff failures along this reach vary a lot due to the variability of the geologic units along the shoreline bluff. This shore reach is sort of a landslide lab. For my work, visiting and exploring a new landslide is a great way to learn and sometimes be humbled. 

READ MORE

Witnesses across southwest have reported seeing a bright fireball meteor, slightly after 8.00 pm on Wednesday 4 October 2017. The object was detected by NASA's Fireball Detection Network, which estimates that the object was travelling at about 14.6 kilometres per second and exploded in an airburst (an explosion caused by superheating from friction with the Earth's atmosphere, which is greater than that caused by simply falling, due to the orbital momentum of the asteroid) with an energy equivalent to 540 tons of TNT, roughly 164 km to the northwest of the city of Lijiang in Yunnan Province. This would imply an object 17-18 m across exploding at an altitude of about 25 km. 

READ MORE

Dense seismograph network shows subsurface geyser plumbing structures By Paul Gabrielsen Old Faithful is Yellowstone National Park's most famous landmark. Millions of visitors come to the park every year to see the geyser erupt every 44-125 minutes...

READ MORE

<!--[if gte mso...<p class="link-button">READ MORE

An outbreak of Plague has killed at least 30 people in Madagascar since late August this year, according to the World Health Organisation, with many more having contracted the disease. Plague outbreaks are common in the Malagasy dry season (from May to October), with about 400 cases of the disease reported each year, however the rapidity with which this outbreak has spread, combined with the high mortality rate, has concerned medical authorities on the island. This is largely due to the fact that the majority of the cases reported, including 21 of the fatalities, have been of the Pneumonic variety of the disease, which infects the lungs and is spread through coughing, rather than the more usual Bubonic variety, which infects the lymph-nodes and is typically spread via the exchange of bodily fluids via a parasite vector such as a Flea. The majority of those who have died are thought to have been Malagasy citizens, though one is reported to have come from the Seychelles.

READ MORE

The Draconids are one of the most notable annual meteor showers, in some years producing several thousand meteors per hour (like most meteor showers the number of Draconids varies from year to year). The shower is expected to peak on Saturday 7-Sunday 8 October 2017, with best viewing in the evenings on these dates this will b the same wherever you are on Earth), though visibility will be hampered somewhat by a bright Moon, with peak meteor activity coming directly after the Full Moon on Friday 6 October. The Draconids take their name from the constellation of Draconis, with the meteors appearing to radiate from the mouth of the Dragon, between the stars Eltanin and Rastaban. Since this constellation is very high in the northern sky, the Draconids are an almost exclusively Northern Hemisphere phenomenon, which sightings from south of the equator being quite rare.

READ MORE

We have recently contributed to a new open access article included in a special volume coordinated by the International Association for Promoting Geoethics (IAPG). This article, synthesises the role of geoscientists in the delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and discusses ways in which we can increase our engagement in the promotion, implementation and monitoring of these key global frameworks.

READ MORE

Earlier this week I posted about the reasoning behind the closure of Murchison Hut, the climbing and skiing refuge located above the Murchison Glacier in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park in the South Island of New Zealand.  To recap, analysis of aerial imagery and satellite images by Dr Pascal Sirguey at the University of Otago and Dr Simon Cox from GNS Science has indicated that the location of the hut has shifted 9 m laterally and 9 m vertically since November 2008, indicating that there is a large-scale rockslope failure occurring beneath the hut.  Clearly there is the potential for a major failure event onto Murchison Glacier at some point (without further monitoring this is essentially impossible to predict), such that the hut has had to be closed.

READ MORE

Yes, we've had a run of French Cretaceous fossils here. This is because we're in the midst of a major project stemming from summer fieldwork in the Type Campanian of southwestern France. The fossils are delicious, and they are before us every day in the lab.

READ MORE

Vice President Mike Pence kicked off the National Space Council's first meeting today by declaring Americans will return to the Moon. Casey Dreier and Jason Davis analyze this new direction for NASA's human spaceflight program....

READ MORE

Praying Mantises (Mantodea) are large carnivorous Insects related to Cockroaches and Termites. They are easily recognised for their large, highly modified forelegs, which are no longer used for locomotion but instead used to strike rapidly and snatch prey. Mantises are well known in popular culture for the habit, seen in the females of some species, of consuming the males during mating, although as a group they show a wide range of behavioural and physical adaptations. The oldest known fossil Mantis comes from the Late Jurassic of Mongolia, with the group diversifying during the Cretaceous and Early Tertiary. One important Mesozoic locality for Mantises is the Early Cretaceous Crato Formation of Brazil, a fossil lagerstatte known for its numerous exceptionally well preserved Insects. Two species of Mantis have been described from the Crato Formation, the rather Cockroach-like Raptoblatta waddingtonae, and the slightly more modern-appearing  Santanmantis axelrodi.

READ MORE

The United States Geological Survey recorded a Magnitude 5.4 Earthquake at a depth of 112.9 km, 37 km to the east of the city of Calama in the Chilean province of El Loa, slightly after 5.10 am local time (slightly after 8.10 am GMT) on Thursday 5 October 2017. There are no reports of any damage or injuries associated with this event, but people have reported feeling the event locally.

READ MORE

What's the message here?

READ MORE

Employees and contractors working at a cold storage facility in South Townsville, Queensland, have been evacuated from the premises after an ammonia leak was detected. The leak was detected at about 5.30 am local time on Thursday 5 October 2017, and resulted in the evacuation of the premises, but not, despite initial concerns, neighbouring properties. An investigation by Queensland Fire and Emergency Services discovered the source of the leak, and were attempting to close off the affected section of the refrigeration system. 

READ MORE

Guest blog by Aryanna "Baby-Hands" James

READ MORE

Firefighters in Grafton County, New Hampshire, are tackling a scrub fire that has burned about 100 000 square meters of vegetation on an escarpment over the Lost River Gorge in the White Mountains. The fire was first spotted at about 6.20 am local time on Tuesday 3 October 2017, and still appears to be spreading. The cause of the fire is unclear, though fire investigators are looking into a claim that the hillside was struck by a meteorite shortly before the fire was sited.

READ MORE

In July 2017, Professor Bruce Malamud and Dr Faith Taylor from King's College London travelled to Mzuzu, Malawi to work in collaboration with Mr James Kushe from Mzuzu University, Malawi. They delivered an EGU funded workshop at Mzuzu University to high school teachers on natural hazards, with major funding provided by EGU, and also supported by Urban ARK and Mzuzu University. Faith and Bruce explain more about the trip...

READ MORE

In a lecture at Columbia Law School, Gina McCarthy sharply critiqued the Trump administration's environmental policies, but offered hope that grassroots movements and other branches of government can make a difference....

READ MORE

Ancient humans migrated out of Africa to escape a drying climate, says a new study--a finding that contradicts previous suggestions that ancient people were able to leave because a then-wet climate allowed them to cross the generally arid Horn of Afr...

READ MORE