The questions of Solomon
A paper from an unusual source has provided new ways of seeing the subduction of the oceanic crust of the Solomon Sea.
The shrinking of Adria
Adria, or at least that bit of it positioned near the top of the crustal stack, just got a little bit smaller. At about half past eight local time in the morning of the 9th of November 2022, a Magnitude 5.6 earthquake nucleated at a nominal depth of 10 km beneath the Adriatic sea near Ancona.
What was Adria?
Despite more than two hundred years of geological investigations, there are still huge unanswered questions regarding the Alps. Given my own geographical bias towards the extreme northern Adriatic, one question in particular dominates my thought. What was Adria?
A scientific hatchet job
Scientific debate can sometimes be carried on in a most unscientific fashion, even by the most reputable of scientists. An article by Professors Alice Roberts and Mark Maslin entitled “Sorry David Attenborough, we didn’t evolve from ‘aquatic apes’ – here’s why”, first published in Scientific American, is a good example.
Apolaki and Anagolay: closely related LIPs
From the 12th to the 14th of September this year the 15th Emile Argand Conference on Alpine Geological Studies is being held in Ljubljana and on the final day of the conference I am down to give the keynote address. I shall be talking about the Philippines, and I shall be building my talk around the Tagalog mother and son deities Anagolay and Apolaki. How can that possibly be?
Shark Bay: a problem with pendulums
Louis de Freycinet elected not to use the method of coincidences when making pendulum observations on hos circumnavigation in the Uranie. There are, however, all sorts of difficulties in discovering what he actually did do.