Finals are about to eat my brain. I had no idea school was just so exhausting. But this cheers my day – and hopefully will cheer yours too! HiRISE High resolution images of the surface of Mars, some in color, some in grayscale. The files are enormous, and worth it. You end up with a ...

Remember: scientists love it when the impossible happens. (At least when the impossible happens in an observable, empirical fashion.) It’s time for us to rethink our understanding of the process of fossilization. As we understand it now, this would have been impossible – but it happened! So now we need to work out the how ...

Yep, the space shuttle. And yet, it must be geology related – I’m writing about it, aren’t I? There’s a nifty piece over at the Planetary Society blog about the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Basically, they got near-global topographical maps of the Earth out of this – more detailed than ever before! Topography is very ...

Ready for some geology humor? Of course you are! While doing my mineralogy homework today, I discovered that there’s a fun mineral, called Realgar. It’s very pretty, which deep red, prismatic crystals. (Prismatic means that it forms with very flat surfaces.) Realgar is Arsenic Sulfide. Which, if you know your periodic table, you’ll be way ...

Just a short one – I’m still alive, I swear. School just started, which is very exciting. I’m taking Mineralogy, which thus far has been a very exciting class. We’re doing “Adopt a mineral” where we pick out a mineral at the start of class, and write a paper about it at the end. Mine ...

No, it’s not about poor explorers wandering across a featurless plain of snow, searching for the South Pole so they can have bragging rights to go with their frostbite when they get home. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, just because it’s so cool! It starts out very simply. There’s a ...

Wow, things are busy busy! This is what I get for deciding to take both Chem I and Calculus I in the summer. Oh well, if I manage to survive the next two months, I’ll be in good shape. I wanted to share this, though, because the picture is just so cool! Ash Plume from ...

Giant things that explode! It doesn’t get better than this. The Discovery Channel has a great article about the magma plume under the Yellowstone Caldera. This is some way, way cool stuff for several reasons, but let’s start with the basics. I love volcanoes. So far, they are my number one favorite thing in geology. ...