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 […]
Author Archives: Karsten Eig
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 […]
The Værlandet conglomerate, Western Norway: Beautiful gift from an ancient Himalaya
Dear blog, It’s been a while. I know. Stuff has happened. That virus, luckily it has only hit my travels, or caused the lack thereof. And something small, but very […]
Møns Klint – where Denmark was born
There is something about mighty white cliffs. During World war II, the iconic White Cliffs of Dover was a symbol of freedom, of Britain as the bulwark against the nazi […]
What geology can teach us about climate change: On wine, vikings and ice skating (and big, bad volcanoes)
“The medieval warm period” was the time when English kings grew their own wine, and Vikings settled on Greenland. It lasted three centuries from around 950 to 1250, when climate […]
What geology can teach us about climate change: The Earth’s drunkard walk between warm and cold
In the previous posts, we looked at how the big theater of plate tectonics has created both ice ages and hot greenhouses on Earth. Now, we will get back to […]