GeologyRocks

How the Earth was Made

"How the Earth was Made" is a 13 episode series, each an hour long, that examines a number of different aspects of geology. The episodes are: "San Andreas Fault", "The Deepest Place on Earth", "Krakatoa", "Loch Ness", "New York", "Driest Place on Earth", "Great Lakes Yellowstone", "Tsunami", "Asteroids", "Iceland", "Hawaii", and "The Alps".

Elasmosaurs: Predators from Ancient Seas

Elasmosaurs had never before been found in British Columbia. Nor had any other aquatic plesiosaurs, though similar creatures had been found on the coast of California and in the centre of North America, where once a central seaway split the continent. Elasmosaurs swam the seas for over 130 million years, feeding on the plentiful fish and shellfish.

Homer's Odyssey: Fossils of Crete

The islands of the Aegean are peaks of underwater mountains that extend out from the mainland. Crete is the last of this range and boasts a diverse beauty from its high mountains of Psiloritis, Lefka Ori, Dikti, to its ocean caressed pink sand beaches.

Much of the island of Crete is Miocene and filled with fossil mollusks, bivalves, gastropods who lived 5 to 23 million years ago in warm, tropical seas. They are easily collected from their pink limestone matrix and are often eroded out, mixing with their modern relatives.
 

Haida Gwaii: Fossil Collecting at the Edge of the World

The Queen Charlotte Islands form part of Wrangellia, an exotic tectonostratiphic terrane, that includes parts of western British Columbia, Vancouver Island and Alaska. I'll be bringing my rock hammer and kayak to the mist-shrouded archipelago of Haida Gwaii next month to collect ammonites from the Middle Albian, Haida Formation.

Mythical Moroccan Ogre: Extinct Proboscidean Elephant

During the Miocene and Pliocene, 12-1.6 million years ago, a diverse group of extinct proboscideans, elephant-like animals walked the Earth. Most had four tusks and likely a trunk similar to modern elephants. They were beasts of legend, inspiring myths and stories of fanciful creatures to the first humans to encounter them.

What is A Mass-Extinction?

What Is A Mass-Extinction?

An extinction event is defined as a sharp decrease in the number of species over a short period of time. A mass extinction is further defined based on four points, pattern, duration, breadth and magnitude, and the event must:

• be confined to a short period of geological time
• Affect a wide variety of clades, that occupy a wide range of Habitats
• And eradicate a high proportion of species.