American Geophysical Union

A final Friday fold from Madison, Wisconsin: this one a slab of cut and polished banded iron formation from Australia: What exquisitely beautiful rock! Happy Friday!

The post Friday fold: Banded iron formation from the University of Wisconsin geology museum appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Today I stumbled across a dramatic debris flow video, shot in Grugnay in Chamoson, Switzerland in August 2018, which illustrates the mobility of such events

The post Chamoson: a dramatic debris flow video from last year in Switzerland appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Today, Curiosity finds itself parked in front of a fascinating area of martian bedrock with clearly lighter and darker colored areas next to each other as seen in this Navcam image.

The post Sol 2470-2471: A Way to Spend a Sol at Solway appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Mendenhall Glacier in Landsat images from 1984 and 2018.  Yellow arrows indicates 1984 terminus location, read arrow the Suicide Basin tributary and the purple dots the snowline. Mendenhall Glacier is the most visited and photographed terminus in the Juneau Icefield region. The glacier can be seen from the suburbs of Juneau.  Its ongoing retreat from the Visitor Center and the expansion of the lake it fills is well chronicled.  Here …

The post Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska Accumulation Zone Shrinks appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

The 2019 summer monsoon in South Asia has now fully developed. Heavy rainfall has generated multiple landslides in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh

The post The start of the 2019 South Asia monsoon appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Curiosity finished up our investigation at Harlaw Rise on the weekend, and commenced our drive to an area we are (informally) calling the 'Southern Outcrop,' another of the ridge features that are so prominent in this part of Glen Torridon.

The post Sols: 2468-2469: Rolling Southward! appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Elena Symmes is a 2019 summer intern with the Public Affairs team at AGU and a graduate student at the University of Virginia interested in American and environmental history.   On July 20th 1969, the nervous occupants of the Mission Control room responsible for orchestrating the Apollo 11 moon landing erupted into cheers. They had just received confirmation that the risky mission to send Astronauts Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and …

The post The Semicentennial of Apollo 11: A 50 Year-long Leap for Mankind appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

The boundary between Alaska and Canada is 1,538 miles long. The line is obvious in some places, such as the Yukon River valley, where crews have cut a straight line through forest on the 141st Meridian. The boundary is invisible in other areas, such as the summit of 18,008-foot Mt. St. Elias.

The post The thin line between Alaska and Canada appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

On 10th July 2019 another significant tailings dam failure occurred, this time at the Cobriza mine in Peru, releasing cyanide pollution into the Rio Mantaro

The post Cobriza, Peru: another significant tailings dam failure appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Today was our 65th anniversary at WBOC TV here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. During our anniversary special at 7 PM, I did the weather as it would have been done in 1954. No radar, no satellite, and the extended forecast? That was the day after tomorrow. Times have changed! I actually did the weather on a hand-drawn map for a couple of years at the start of my …

The post A 1954 Weathercast appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

This week, I’m sharing a picture of a lunar sampling bag. Bags such as this one were used to collect rocks during the Apollo missions to the moon. This particular bag even went to the moon’s surface in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission. How neat is that! Here’s a sign with some additional information on the bag: I took this picture on Sunday when my husband and I visited …

The post Monday Geology Picture: Lunar Sampling Bag appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Fifty years ago, humans first stepped foot on the Moon. Along with visiting our closest neighbor, the Apollo astronauts also brought back hundreds of pounds of lunar samples, from micron-scale motes of dust to small boulders weighing more than 25 pounds. Using these samples, scientists have been able to peer back in time to the early days of our solar system, making major discoveries about the formation of the Moon …

The post Centennial E8 – Guardian of the Moon Rocks appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

At the end of last week, Godre'r Graig Primary School, near Pontardawe in South Wales, was temporarily closed due to the risks of a spoil tip landslide

The post Godre’r Graig: risks to a school from a spoil tip landslide appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

The Sol 2463 drive went as planned, leaving Curiosity in position to examine what appears to be a small dome in the sedimentary rocks (visible on the left side of the scene shown here).

The post Sol 2465-2467: Finishing up at Harlaw Rise appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Throughout human history, it is estimated that over 1 billion people have succumbed to Tuberculosis. The deadly bacterial infection targets the immunocompromised population as well as those who have weakened their lungs through smoking.  It is believed that the first cases of tuberculosis appeared over 17,000 years ago in the wild by infecting bison. There is also a theory that puts the disease in humans around the same time. But, it is unclear whether humans or bison were the first carriers of Tuberculosis.

The post Tuberculosis: One of the Biggest Killers of All Time appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Here is an outcrop of folded limestone along route 430 in Newfoundland, inside Gros Morne National Park, just west of the crossroads called Wiltondale: A detailed look at the left antiformal portion of the outcrop: A zoomed-in examination of the rightmost part, where a goopy looking synform resides: Just down the way, a second outcrop shows another fold with the same sense of asymmetry, on a smaller scale: Happy Friday …

The post Friday fold: Wiltondale, Newfoundland appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Curiosity continued work on and around the gorgeous outcrop pictured above that was started on Sol 2461. The layers of the outcrop - with their different colors, textures and thicknesses - tell us a story, one we worked to decipher in this plan with our full complement of contact and targeted science instruments.

The post Sols 2463-2464: A fountain of data appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Repeatedly referenced throughout the Bible, leprosy, also known as Hansen’s Disease, may often be perceived by the general public to be an ancient disease that has ceased to endanger the modern world.  Much to the misfortune of people living in Africa, Brazil, India, and the Philippines, where the majority of outbreaks occur, nearly 700,000 people throughout the globe annually contract leprosy. 

The post Transmission of Leprosy in the US via Armadillos appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Traveling in Newfoundland, Callan visits a seaside outcrop showing a Proterozoic submarine slump complex, overprinted by tectonic cleavage and weathered by the sea.

The post A submarine slump complex at Sandy Cove, Newfoundland appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.

Geologic maps can be very visually engaging, but non-geologists may find it difficult to extract the information that a map is supposed to communicate.... Cross sections included with a map can help, but it can still be tough to pull it all together if you don’t look at this sort of material all the time.

The post Using sand models to explain the concept of geologic mapping appeared first on AGU Blogosphere.