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 […]
Category Archives: Cambrian
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, […]
Ediacarans: The fossils that should not be there
The Ediacara Hills is a hot, dry area in the middle of nowhere in South Australia. A place people go if they must, like for mining for uranium and other […]
How life makes life on Earth possible
Without life, the Earth would not be a place suitable for life. Sounds like a Catch-22? You bet. But it is true. In this blog post, we will explore how […]
One billion years in a few images
Time goes by. In geology, lots of time goes by, and it is easy to loose perspective. If we cram the whole history of the Earth into one year, the […]
Easter on sparagmite
Easter is behind us, and being Very Very NorwegianTM, I can provide the politically correct answer to the question «what did you do for the Easter vacation?»: Together with
A nice fault on the way to work
All my faults are normal, but I can reverse them…is an old joke among us structural geology nerds. But there is no reason to reverse this prettier-than-normal fault, which actually […]