It sometimes seems to me that managing my thoughts (and memories) resembles trying to control a pile of sand grains as they sift through my fingers. Now, new neuroscience research suggests that the analogy is not far off the mark....
Sir Laurence Dudley Stamp (my previous post) must be turning in his grave. It's ironic that, shortly after my modest proposal on the inspirational potential of a book for young scientists, I came across a different kind of inspiration -...
The question asked for this month's Accretionary Wedge collection resonated immediately with me. A while ago I wrote a short piece for Geoscientist, the magazine of the Geological Society here in London, reflecting on my own beginnings and seeking ideas...
As I'm sure I've said before, to watch the sands of an hourglass in action is to observe all kinds of natural phenomena at work - and all kinds of questions to which we have no answers. It's not just...
My daughter has long been a devoted fan of The Simpsons, and sometimes puts her encyclopedic knowledge to the test by challenging us to find any random topic for which she can't cite an episode that includes or addresses it;...
At the end of my last post on granular segregation and placer mineral deposits, I included a photo of a sand sample from Yosemite that is reputed to contain flakes of gold, with a slightly enigmatic candidate grain. Lockwood at...
Anyone walking on the beach or through the dunes will often notice areas of dark gray smeared across the surface, often outlining ripples, as if an artist had highlighted the sand's topography with charcoal. I encountered many examples of such...
I was delighted to see this morning that Google UK had elected to celebrate the joys of paternity with the image above. I was surprised, however, on going to Google.com that no such celebration seemed to be in order. Having...
Anyone who clambers up the slip face of a dune becomes rapidly, and agonizingly, aware that locomotion in sand is a challenge. Even walking on the beach often requires a different kind of gait. Granular materials just make life difficult...
Readers will probably have sensed that I did not set up this blog as a vehicle or a forum for controversy; it's designed to be interesting (and, I hope, fun). It's not that I don't have strong opinions on many...
A couple of weeks ago, on the road in California, I did a brief post reflecting on the dramas going on beneath the waves of Monterey Bay. Given the complexity of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, and the scope of the...
The dunes at Oceano that I visited and introduced in the previous post are but the northern tip of the eighteen-mile-long Oceano-Nipomo-Guadalupe dunes complex, the largest landscape of coastal dunes in California. Further south, the dunes are punctuated by lakes,...
Let’s face it, dunes are sensual things, languidly animated, their soft and complex curves ever-changing with the light and with time, their lines and crests shifting in and out of focus, deep shadows, bright sand. They are immensely and compellingly...
I’ve done a couple of posts on tafoni, the exotic and wonderful natural sculpturing of, commonly, sandstones. As I was putting together the piece on the ways in which Gaudi was inspired by natural forms, I came across photographs of...
Late in the evening in Berkeley, after four great days of wandering up California. Many stories to tell that require greater focus than I have right now, but will be the subjects of later posts. For now, Monterey, where we...
Wow, what a day! Drove from Barstow to the Kelso Dunes and took a ramble for a couple of hours. The picture below proves I was there, but making it very far into this vast massif of dunes was, I...
I’m reporting from the Philadelphia suburbs at the moment and therefore enjoying all the news that’s fit to print in the Philadelphia Inquirer each morning. On a couple of days last week, arenaceous topics hit the front page (at least...
The image above is a geologist’s bad dream, the vehicle’s wheel churning uselessly in the sand. But this is also NASA’s bad dream, for the vehicle is Spirit, one of the tenacious and hard-working Mars Rovers that have been trundling...
Back in the old days when smoking was not only not politically incorrect but positively romantic and character-enhancing (think Bogart, think Bergman, think Bacall – and those are only the “Bs”), cigarette manufacturers came up with all kinds of interesting...
I’m in the US at the moment (outside Philadelphia to be more precise), visiting family and preparing to give a talk in a couple of weeks time at the aquarium in Long Beach. Readers of this blog can probably guess...
