As a young kid, I was blessed with six great-aunts, who lived together in two groups of three, one group in Nottingham and the other in the East End of London. Visiting either somewhat eccentric group was always a treat...
Geology doesn't exactly run in my family. My parents weren't geologists, I married someone to whom dip and strike will eternally remain an arcane concept, and neither of my kids are geologists. Geology has, however, touched, so to speak, them...
A virtual conversation with David Williams, author of Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology Since Through the Sandglass is one of David’s last stops on his whirlwind virtual book tour, Michael decided that it would make a change to...
The previous post, instalment one of this saga, looked at what a geologist must do, faced with rock exposures in, say, a cliff face, to read the ledgers of our planet's past. How the sequence of layers records different and...
Nature abhors a vacuum, continuity and the status quo. Variety is the spice of life and change is the order of the day. Such things make life complex for a geologist, but also exciting and lead to puzzles, multiple working...
[Just incredible. If you have a spare hour or so, go to http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ and browse - and then browse some more. Each of the thumbnail images on the site is actually from a satellite pass, and clicking the "RGB color...
Contrary to the benign atmosphere of the old print, above - kids having fun on a day out - the occupation of mudlarking on the Thames in London during the 18th and 19th centuries was anything but fun - it...
I've just finished reading David Williams' recently published book, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, a title following on from David's eponymous blog and website. It's a great read that satisfies the two primary criteria for non-fiction: informative and...
The US Geological Survey newsroom has just put out an advisory on the importance of washing your hands after playing in the sand on the beach: By washing your hands after digging in beach sand, you could greatly reduce your...
Amazon sales rankings are somewhat like Fermat's Last Theorem - what they're saying makes apparent sense, but discerning how they work is seemingly impossible. Nevertheless, the fact is that they are routinely (obsessively?) scrutinised by writers - and that includes...
One of the thorny issues that I grappled with in writing the book was how to review the staggering number of ways in which sand is important in our lives - in the end, the diversity was so overwhelming that...
Times of Sand Richard Bready In science one tries to say something that no one knew before in a way that everyone can understand. Whereas in poetry . . . - Dirac (1) I The foam along the beach stands...
Thanks to a fortuitous correspondence with Suvrat on the issues of dams, I discovered that comments to this blog over the last ten days or so may have encountered problems and never appeared (I received no notifications - possibly as...
What a headline - how could I resist? It's from the UK newspaper, The Telegraph, earlier this year - it's not the paper I read, so I only just came across it on the web. Torbay is on England's southwest...
This map shows the change in runoff inferred from streamflow records worldwide between 1948 and 2004, with bluish colors indicating more streamflow and reddish colors less. In many heavily populated regions in the tropics and midlatitudes, rivers are discharging reduced...
Just as literature students develop the craft of analyzing the structure of a story, so do geologists analyze the structures of sediments and the stories that they tell. The internal architecture of sand bodies is endlessly varied, fascinatingly complex, and,...
Clustered around a small television screen in the middle of the night in Cambridge forty years ago. One of the most memorable experiences of my life. I can't add anything to that extraordinary achievement, but I do want to pay...
My aspiration for the book and this blog, beyond the hope that they would be read at all, has always been that readers would be surprised. This arose simply because of the extent to which I surprised myself - clearly,...
Carrying a handful of sand is never easy. But imagine a change of scale - I have a pile of river pebbles and cobbles (garden, ornamentation, for the purpose of) that I need to move, and fortunately, I have a...
Look closely, and even Hawaii's famed black sand beaches, while stark and dramatic, display their own spectrum of hues. But the diversity of origins and composition of beaches around the world leads to a more overtly dazzling palette. I recently...
