Highly Allochthonous

This is not going to go well. After 15 years of discussion and exploration…Twelve members of the International Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted against the proposal to creat...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2024/03/golden-spike-or-no-golden-spike-we-are-living-in-the-anthropocene/

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic introduced us to the idea of ‘bending the curve’: that acting early to reduce infection rates made a huge difference in whether the peak in infection...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2024/01/we-are-late-bending-the-climate-change-curve-but-bending-it-still-matters/

It’s now been almost a year since NASA’s InSight lander – home of the first seismograph ever deployed on Mars – was declared dead. But the picture of the Red Planet’s interior being ded...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/10/the-changing-picture-of-the-martian-core/

Here’s a new study that, if true, this would have some big implications for the nature of the sedimentary record for a lot of Earth History. Research from 1.2 billion year-old sediments in Scot...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/08/rivers-might-not-need-plants-to-meander/

This seems to be the latest round in the eternal battle between the geophysics data which strongly suggests whole mantle convection (and for quite some time, if ideas about the origin of all the ...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/07/has-earths-mantle-always-worked-like-it-does-today/

Today I learnt something very interesting that I didn’t know before – that intraplate earthquakes in the UK mostly occur in western England and Scotland, not Ireland, eastern Scotland or sout...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/07/how-the-uks-tectonic-past-is-key-to-its-seismic-present/

Here’s a new paper that proposes the biggest of big ideas: a 240 million year causal chain that runs from the Earth’s surface, to the core mantle boundary, and back again! Here’s how it sup...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/05/a-new-recipe-for-large-igneous-provinces-just-add-bif-then-wait-a-couple-of-hundred-million-years/

Exciting news that there was a volcanic eruption on Venus in the early 1990s, shown by changes in the size of crater between two passes of the Magellan probe‘s radar over the same area. There h...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/03/a-volcano-erupted-on-venus-in-the-1990s/

We all know that the Earth’s mostly iron core is divided into a molten outer core and solid inner core. But that may not be the whole story: some just-published seismic data suggests that the E...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2023/02/earths-inner-core-has-an-inner-core/

This is a good write-up of the latest step in the long and somewhat contentious process of making the Anthropocene “official”: In the same week as the world’s population ticked over to 8 b...

https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2022/12/obsessing-over-the-anthropocenes-golden-spike-misses-the-point-of-the-anthropocene/