On the Permian-Triassic mass-extinction
2024-08-12 12:53 At the end of the Permian Pangaea was born.  Africa, Antarctica, Australia, South America and South Asia had long held together.  It is probably rather obvious how Africa and South America were stuck together.
Life before the dinosaurs
2024-08-07 16:56 Many imagine the early Earth as covered in molten rock.  Fact is the Earth’s crust solidified within a hundred million year after the birth of the Moon.  200 million years later the Earth was almost completely covered by seas.
Plate tectonics and the origin of the continents
2024-06-28 12:53 Most know about continental drift.  What not as many know about, is the greater plate tectonics.  The Earth’s crust is divided in 8 – 10 pieces at least the size of continents.  (Two of the pieces are on the way to split in two each.)
The basics of geology
2024-06-23 17:03 Uniformitarianism is based on the idea of geology being explainable in terms of directly observable processes.  Certainly, processes can take place at different paces.  But this is still the same processes at different orders of magnitude.
The primeval myth
2024-06-13 13:53 I state points in prehistoric times for a good reason.  There is a myth of a vague “primeval time” when everything one knows about lived at the same time.  Then I mean different animals, larger than current ones and more or less strange.
Has the world ever frozen over?
2024-06-05 13:16 There is a hypothesis that the Earth at one or several points would have been entirely covered by ice.  This is called Snowball Earth and is a controversial idea.  All the suggested points have their own problems.
Icehouse Earth and ice ages
2024-05-31 13:02 The climate during the last 550 million years is rather well-documented.  There have been several periods of tens of millions of years without any ice sheets.  The greenhouse effect was then considerably stronger than it is today.
On varying clouds
2024-05-28 13:37 Clouds can look rather differently, which too many grow up without any awareness of.  I have read about people suddenly discovering there is more than one kind of cloud.
What global warming means
2024-05-22 13:19 Climate change means a shifting in statistical averages.  In the case of global warming this means a shift to the warmer.  Mostly this affects areas situated closer to the poles.
Climate and seasons
2024-05-17 12:46 Climate is the average weather pattern for a place or an area.  Usually, it is the average for a period of 30 years.  Far too many mistake this for how the weather is for the moment.