Tag: island
Standing of the Stones: Island Volcanoes Abounding Edition
Hello and welcome to a new, semi-weekly feature in which I’ll share snippets of earth science news, cool things I’ve stumbled across, pretty pictures, status reports on upcoming articles, and whatever else seems interesting.
La Palma: Still on Fire
This has been one of the longest eruptions in La Palma’s recorded history, and is posed to be the longest, if it keeps going. Some of the recent lava fountains have exceeded 1,600 feet (500m) in height. The person who runs the GeologyHub channel has discovered a pattern in the data that suggests something interesting (and ominous to the locals) about the relationship between deep earthquakes and eruption activity on the island.
Can you believe where some of that ash ended up?!
It looks like the eruption may break some records. Interesting times indeed.
Why Is La Palma Like This?
Ghostly Geology
Halloween is here! This is my favorite part of fall: costumes, spooky stuff, decorating in black not only allowed but encouraged…. This is the holiday I was born for.
And I have some geology made for the holiday! This year, the theme is ghosts, and we’re going to visit some very ghostly geology and paleontology indeed.
1. Ghost Shrimp Haunts Ichnologist
This is a different kind of ghost shrimp than the ones under discussion, but it is metal enough for Halloween, so we’re rolling with it. Credit:
Freddie Alequin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Paleontology isn’t just about bones and preserved bodies: a branch of it, ichnology*, also looks at the things those bodies left behind, like fossilized trails, tracks, nests, burrows, borings, excavations, and even the divots left by pee. In this post, my favorite ichnologist, Tony Martin, talks about a very unusual trace he found that would be even more exciting to find in the fossil record.
Life Traces of the Georgia Coast: Ghost Shrimp Whisperer
Geologists love ghost shrimp, too, because of how their burrows are so numerous, fossilize easily, and are sensitive shoreline indicators. I wrote about this before with regard to how geologists in the 1960s were able to map ancient barrier islands of the Georgia coastal plain by looking for trace fossils of these burrows. Since then, geologists and paleontologists have identified and applied these sorts of trace fossils worldwide, and in rocks from the Permian Period to the Pleistocene Epoch.
I could prattle on about ghost shrimp and their ichnological incredibleness for the rest of the year, but will spare you of that, gentle reader, and instead will get to the point of this post. Just when I thought I’d learned nearly everything I needed to know about ghost-shrimp ichnology, one shrimp decided I needed to have my eyes opened to some traces I had never seen them make before just a few months ago.
*Not to be confused with ichthyology, which has to do with fishies. It’ll help to remember that ikhnos means “track” or “trace” in Greek, while ikhthus means “fish.”
2. Ghosts of Minerals Past (more…)