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.

A book with the title ‘Geologic Life’, and the subtitle ‘Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race’ has recently given rise to a considerable amount of comment on LinkedIn. What, on Earth, is it all about?

The Rio Grande Rise Massif and the Valdivia Bank have been interpreted as the two halves of an originally continuous hot-spot-related plateau formed on the Mid Atlantic Ridge. Is Iceland an example of what that plateau might have been like, geologically at least, at the time of its formation?

If it had not been for LinkedIn, I might never have been aware of the existence of the 2024 Bouguer gravity map of Brazil, and that would have been a pity. Some things jump out almost at first sight, and one of these is the narrow and almost linear gravity high that roughly coincides with the main course of the middle Amazon.

Free-air gravity maps suggest that, rather than having been a rectilinear feature, the subducted portion of the D’Entrecasteaux ridge, which impacts the Vanuatu Trench at a high angle, was curvilinear. The entire region is reminiscent, in size and the disposition of subduction -related volcanics and collision orogens, to the Banda Sea region of eastern Indonesia.