A lava worm or rock rose? – and why basalt columns have six sides
It looks like some kind of giant, grey underground worm with teeth radiating in its mouth. A sand worm from Dune, which happened to dig its tunnel out of a […]
Author Archives: Karsten Eig
Caledonian mountain prelude: Volcanoes, rivers and big boulders in Scotland
Four hundred and twenty-something million years ago, a river flowed through the landscape that would one day become Scotland. The river flowed across a plain, green but with only low […]
Where the land shaked: The Pisia fault, Corinth Greece
Greece is restless. Africa pushing northwards has created a tectonic mess of the northeastern Mediterranean. It is a long history of one continent piece of after another clashing into Europe, […]
Stretching Greece: The Corinth rift basin
Study geology, they said. Join the oil industry, they said. Travel to exotic and spectacular places, see open landscapes, they said. See the office landscape and spend most of your […]
The priest’s half a billion year old bathtub: A sand volcano in Skåne, Sweden
Half a billion years ago, in the early Cambrian, some water, trapped in a sand bottom in a tropical sea, decided it wanted to get out. The water pushed its […]
The Cambrian Explosion, part 4: Oxygen and hard parts
After the Ediacaran and the small shellies; in the Cambrian, oxygen in the sea finally reached a level where gilled animals could breathe efficiently and grow big. This oxygen was […]
The Cambrian Explosion, part 3: Small shellies and small skeletons
The first 20-million years of the Cambrian appears to be an empty void between the Ediacarans from the previous post and the well known Cambrians. But pull out the looking […]
The Cambrian Explosion, part 2: The softies of Ediacara
For a long time, geologists logically set the dawn of the Cambrian at the first fossils, at the trilobites and their friends, which we met in the first post. But […]
The Cambrian Explosion, part 1: The burghers of Burgess
Burgher: A privileged city citizen in medieval Europe. And now, for something completely different. (Monty Python) First, there was no life. There were layers of sediment rock; sandstone, shale, limestone, […]
Sand, wind and the lighthouse that escaped from the sea: Klitter and klinter at Rubjerg Knude, Denmark
Denmark is the cosy little country, with klitter, klinter and kanelsnegler – sand ridges, sea cliffs and cinnamon buns. But det søde, bløde land – the sweet, soft country, shrinks […]