Well almost....
Research on Eucalyptus trees in Australia has shown that the trees' leaves can contain a very small trace amount of gold if there is gold in the rocks below. This isn't enough to extract useful quantities of the metal from the tree; far more usefully it can indicate the presence of gold in the rocks which may be worth investigating. This gives geologists another tool with which to find resources, particularly ones lile gold that are found in such low concentrations.
It has been known for a long time that particular plants can indicate the geology under the surface, but this is the first time that these elements have been able to be located in the living tissue of the plants.
Thanks to Rosie for spotting this story.
Meteorites are beautiful and fascinating things that can tell us a lot about the early Earth and its formation. However there is a downside to them - ask the dinosaurs! Oh wait.. you can't....
Anyway for all the doom-mongers out there; an asteroid (2013 TV-135) has been recently discovered and, after doing a bit of maths, it has been calculated that it will make a near Earth pass in 2032. However, despite some uncertainty about its orbital path, there is only a 1 in 63,000 chance that it will hit us. To put this another way there is a likelihood of 99.998% that it won't hit us in 2032.
So we can rest safe in our beds.
Probably.
Thanks to Rosie for spotting this story.
A Piggyback Thrust is a type of reverse fault created by extreme compression of the crust during a plate collision. The "piggyback" is where several thrust faults occur in succession. this is one of the key aspects of an orogeny, where mountains are built.
The far northwest of Scotland shows a superb example of this called the Moine Thrust (shown in the cross section above). This area was key for geologists to understand the process of mountian building, before plate tectonics was even discovered.
The meteorite that fell into a Russian lake has been recovered. 570 kg of material has been collected from the lake bottom and should give more clues about the origin of the rock and, perhaps, the origin of our planet. Metoerites are the left-overs from planet formation and give us our best evidence about the composition of the deep Earth and its age.
Ozocerite (or Earth Wax) is a naturally forming type of paraffin wax that is found in veins, similar to minerals. It has been found in several places around the world, including Wales. It is formed from the evaporation of petroleum and is notable for its smell (the name means "stench wax" in Greek) though this is removed when it is processed.
It has been mined comercially in a few places in the past, though the only active mine now is in Turkey. It has a number of applications including cosmetics like the lipstick shown above...
Before I receive any emails, there are different spellings for this word. I have used the spelling from the DoG.
What is the link between geology and books? In one of the most geologically remakable places on Earth it is a clearer link than you might imagine. In a place where 10% of the population will be a published author a combination of catastrophic events (both geological and financial) can inspire great works of fiction and non-fiction. Iceland's black lava fields, its steaming solfataras, with its towering
volcanoes and fairytale streams also make it the perfect setting for stories of all kinds.
This is just one of the statistics that show the unique qualities of this place; my favourite Icelandic book is an insight into the quirks that make this place special called "The Little Book of the Icelanders" by Alda Sigmundsdottir.
New research on the movement of iron through silicate rocks by Stanford Unversity has the potential to change our view about how the Earth's core formed. Professor Wendy Mao and her team have discovered that iron can percolate through silicate minerals which means that our idea of the mantle and core being distinct bodies from the earliest stage of formation of the planet may be wrong. Instead we can have a model where after our planet aggregated there was a gradual evolution of the internal structure as the materials differentiated by percolation under the influence of gravity.
The implications of this discovery may be that data we get from meteorites may not give us a good control on the bulk composition of the Earth. It seems that we have a lot more to discover about our planet.
When a viscous material (such as the mantle) is displaced by a force on the crust (such as from an ice sheet) it will deform - a process called isostatic readjustment. If that force is removed the crust will rebound as the mantle flows back underneath it. This doesn't happen at a constant rate as it will slow down the closer it is to a state of equilibrium (where it should be), this slowing down is called the retardation time.
In the week where "Gymnosperm" is our word of the week it is interesting to see a story about the evolution of a very important group of plants - the Angiosperms. These are the flowering plants which include grasses and most of the plants that we eat.
If this data is correct, putting the appearance of the Angiosperms back into the Triassic rather than the later Cretaceous as currently thought, it could change our understanding of both plant evolution but the evolution of all the aniamlls that sit above plants in the food chain.
