Gran Canaria: The Miniature Continent
You know the tourist drill: Charter flight. Cerveza. Hotel, all-inclusive. If on budget in Playa del Ingles, which looks like a high-rise-block working class suburb that someone dropped from the […]
Category Archives: Cenozoic
The rainbow at the end of the ash: Barranco del Medio, Gran Canaria
– Sorry, honey, we will be here for a while. Enjoy your book while I shoot the rainbow! I grabbed the camera and jumped out of the car. In front […]
Roque Nublo, Gran Canaria: The big finger to the sky
It is a grey day in the mountains. White fog is everywhere, and embraces the pine trees on the steep hills. Drizzle in the air, just enough to make me […]
Politics in stone: Svalbard’s Cenozoic coal
Today, we come full circle: Our journey on Svalbard started with coal in the Carboniferous, and it will end with coal. But with much younger coal, from the Early Paleocene, […]
When Greenland met Svalbard: A geological love story
I have teased you like a movie trailer a couple of times now: Akseløya, the tilted hard limestone island. The Festningen profile, where the rocks are tilted into a vertical […]
Hot water: Wealth from beneath
Iceland. The land of Ice and Fire. Today, more fire than usual, and we geo nerds hope for a long-lasting repetition of the Krafla fires, which played their theatre in […]
Malta: A country shaped by limestone (and a bit of very old poo)
If one word could sum up the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, it would be “limestone”. Limestone has shaped the islands’ topography, their economy and possibly black bank accounts. It […]
Eldfell – the youngster volcano
1:55 AM, January 23rd 1973: – Honey, there is a volcano in our backyard! – Yeah, right, Steingrimur, get back to sleep now! I do not know if this talk […]
Fossil treasures of Denmark, 55 million years ago
When God had finished creating the Earth, He had some sand and gravel in excess. To get rid of it, the story goes, He dumped it in the southern North […]
La Gomera: The Green Pearl of the Canary Islands
Ladies’n gangsters! For the benefit of a possible other reader outside Viking lands, this blog will occasionally publish posts in Foreignish. (Foreignish for those who are foreign for those who […]