They’re pretty much everywhere. In the harshest environments, even on highways some extremophile mosses, lichens and algae can survive. Most of them aren’t very welcome on the walls of our cities. Since they’re easier to remove than graffiti many house owners remove them first. But did you know these, so called, cryptogamic covers are huge […]
Category Archives: Earth Science
In Rough Seas
Heligoland is an island off the coast of Nothern Germany. This island has already had a turbulent history before man set foot on this island of red sandstone. But its position in the North Sea, between Germany and the UK, also has made this island subject to territorial quarrels and military interest. This interest has […]
Recording a seismic wave – What’s new?
Streamers are an essential part in the marine seismic experiment. When I first came into geophysics, I learned that streamers are fluid-filled hoses with pressure probes. This might be right in the case of our streamer at the university which isn’t quite up to par with the newest developments out in the industry. Oil-filled seismic […]
Know your scale – Why wavelengths are so important
So you thought there is just one “seismics”? In general, we might say that the seismics experiment is watching mechanical waves travel through Earth and then apply science on it to get an image of the Earth’s interior. However, this experiment and the science behind it has a high degree of uncertainty. When we conduct […]
Seismics Introduction
We send sound into the ground and listen what comes back to the surface. There are a lot of sources we can use to make this sound. A very basic but effective approach is to use a sledgehammer and bang it on a steel cap on the ground. This works well to get some acoustic […]
Beasties of fur and of feather
Our world long ago with lands joined together when first appeared beasties of fur and of feather. Artistic view on the life in the Triassic period by Richard Morden. Get it here! (All copyright belongs to him!) This artistic map shows the supercontinent Pangaea and the Tethys ocean. It’s a surprisingly accurate depiction where the […]
Dangerous cargo and magnetic prospection
This week a boat in Hamburg was carrying dangerous cargo. It was an unexploded grenade that had been found on a building site. Now it might seem weird that this kind of cargo is being transported on a boat on the largest lake in Hamburg, but a time fuse made it impossible to defuse the […]
Happy New Year! – On gravitational attraction
A new year starts and suddenly a lot of people are concerned about their gravitational attraction to the Earth. In January new subscriptions to the gym spike compared to every other month. Weight watchers and a lot of the other programs for weight reduction invest in every commercial break on TV. Gravity is a very […]
The Apocalypse – a Geoscientific View
Today is a fun day. Some New Age guys decided that an ending calendar of an ancient culture can only have one meaning: The world is going to end. Homer Simpson on the end Copyright Matt Groening Now this happens quite often and some people will always tell you that this world is going to […]
A Global Lithological Map
It’s colorful, it’s huge and it’s a hundred times more detailed than its predecessors. <span class=”removed_link” title=”http://www.vis.klimacampus.de/2270.html&amp;L=1″>http://www.vis.klimacampus.de/2270.html?&amp;L=1</span> It’s a new lithological map of the worldHartmann, J., & Moosdorf, N. (2012). The new global lithological map database GLiM: A representation of rock properties at the Earth surface Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems, 13 DOI: 10.1029/2012GC004370. The map is […]
