In the past, we learned from people we respected how to do refraction surveys. Now we have committees to tell us what to do.

Peer review comes in for a lot of criticism, and University College London is trialling a different system. But historical precedents, going back to the early days of the Royal Society, suggest that it is unlikely to work.

A recent paper by Brandon Shuck and colleagues has presented detailed information from seismic reflection lines in the vicinity of the northernmost segment of the Macquarie Ridge Complex. For the regional picture, gravity maps are hard to beat, but they must be used with care.

Historically, women have always had a hard time breaking into science but two women, both sisters of astronomers but separated in time by 150 years, did manage it.

In 2020 the Geological Survey of Australia’s Northern Territory had published a full-colour magnetic map of the whole of their area, with accompanying grids. For me, a trip into the days of my youth, because in mid-1964 I was party chief of a team flying part of a feature centred on Tennant Creek that had come to be known as the ‘Aeromagnetic Ridge’.

The Kaverina diagram used to display different tectonic regimes as defined by different styles of faulting has been modified by the addition of focal mechanism ‘beach-balls’. How helpful is that?

The last twelve months have not been kind to Croatia, thanks to the jostling of crustal blocks for space as the northern edge of Africa advances relentlessly towards Europe.

In May 2018, something very curious happened. The marine area immediately to the east of Mayotte, the easternmost major island in the Comoros chain, became seismically active.

The leading article in the November 19 issue of Eos was entitled “By Land or Sea: How Did Mammals Get to the Caribbean Islands?” Could gravity maps have anything to tell us about the possibilities?

In an ideal world, there would be a continuous dialogue between geologists and geophysicists. Sadly, there seems to have been little progress in that direction in the last fifty years.