The Capricorn expedition of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1951-52 was notable for many things, among them the presence on board of Ron Mason, later the discoverer of the oceanic magnetic stripes, and Helen Raitt, the first woman to take part in an extended US oceanographic cruise. After it was over, Helen wrote a book about the cruise, and sent Ron a copy.

One way of looking at the history of plate tectonics is to identify people without whose intervention general acceptance of the theory might have been delayed by years. Some names emerge that are now almost forgotten. One name in particular springs to mind.

Every so often I trawl the internet in search of gravity information on East and Central Europe, with a particular focus on Croatia and the northern end of the Adriatic. Good maps of those areas have only recently become readily available.

In 2003 the historian Naomi Oreskes published Plate Tectonics: an Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. But what of those who were not insiders? How did it seem to them?

On 12 May 2025 the Earth Science historian Naomi Oreskes delivered a Royal Institution lecture with the title ‘Rethinking the origins of plate tectonics’. The advance publicity suggested that she was about to overturn the whole history of that theory. Was that true?

Posts by one of the major scientific publishers appearing recently on LinkedIn make the claim that it publishes papers Open Access without demanding Article Processing Fees. Is this really true?

In 1964, low level aeromagnetic surveys at Renison posed challenges not encountered in previous such surveys by the Bureau of Mineral Resources. Magnetic anomalies of hundreds and even thousands of nanotesla were much larger than any previously measured, and none of the topography previously flown was as extreme as that typical of western Tasmania.

Ways of measuring magnetic field developed during the 1930s were considered early in the Second World War as possible means of detecting submerged submarines. In the end they did rather more than that.

Volcanoes that look like volcanoes fascinate. Almost all appear in the catalogue of the Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program, but one at least does not.

In November the Geological Society of London published Volume 60 in its Memoir series, with the title “The Emergence of Geophysics: A Journey into the Twentieth Century”. In his Introduction the author stipulates that he is considering developments as far as the end of the 20th century but will not venture into the 21st.