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Geology News
Geology for Kids Current Events

NASA has released an impressive collection of galaxy images, each showing galaxies in collision, interacting or about to collide. They have been released to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope launch.

A collection of images representing some of the most impressive views in our universe. Included are the Orion Nebula, a dying star, spiral galaxy, birth of a star, the Eagle Nebula, extrasolar planet, a galaxy pair and the Cartwheel Galaxy.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has an educational website for children. “FEMA for Kids” has educational materials and activities for children, parents and teachers to help children better understand hazards, disasters, mitigation and more.

Here’s a site where you can download and print free graph papers in a variety of formats. Square grid paper, polar coordinate paper, isometric paper and axis graph paper.

On Wednesday night there will be a total lunar eclipse. If you live in North America, South America or Western Europe you should have a good view of the eclipse if weather permits. This article has more information and a viewer’s guide.

Spectacular events determined the highest and lowest elevation points on Mars. This article includes topographic maps of Mars and explains the events that produced the topographic extremes of the Red Planet.

BLM Image

There has been recent news about a mummified dinosaur - one with soft tissues preserved. This article gives some details about Tyler Lyson, the student who discovered the fossil, and tells the story from his initial sighting of it in 1999 at age 16 through the story being released through the media.

Here is a quick tutorial to learn how to find the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, Betelgeuse, Jupiter, Polaris and the north direction in the night sky.

Here is an interesting site by the University of Texas at Austin. It features four locations in Texas and provides interesting content about them suitable for teachers and students. Featured are Franklin Mountains, Dinosaur Footprints, Central Texas and Galveston Island.

An article on Bizarre Stuff explains what micrometeorites are and how you can collect them yourself with a magnet. The article explains how to collect them from rain water or melted snow. They are very tiny and you will need to view them with a microscope. You can find a second article on this same topic at Solarviews.

What can you learn about a mammoth if you have one of its molars to examine? Do you think that you can determine its age? Or, determine its gender, or diet, or climate that it lived in, or how long ago it walked the earth? This article explores mammoth dentistry in detail.

Google recently added a layer to their Google Maps product called “Terrain”. This is a shaded relief layer that you can toggle on and off using the button in the upper right corner of the map window. These maps are quite nice and I can’t think of an earth scientist who will not like them. Here’s a small one below to give you a quick peek. Please click the navigation buttons and grab/drag the image… this is a live map. The link below the map window will click to full screen viewing.

How can a rock weighing several pounds be propelled across a dry lake bed, leaving a distinct furrow behind it? Nobody knows for sure but there are a few interesting stories to explain it. Seven photos of these interesting rocks taken at Death Valley National Park and the story behind what might cause their trails. Image © iStockphoto / Stephan Hoerold

Pictographs are a form of “rock art” in which people paint an image on the rock. Explore a worldwide collection of ancient pictograph images from Arizona, Aruba, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Namibia, Nevada and Utah.

Andrew Alden shares some photos of sedimentary structures, dinosaur tracks, burrows, trackmarks, dinosaur bones and outcrops at his about.com Geology site.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh was one of the first public exhibits of dinosaur paleontology. Now, they are just four days away from reopening with a fully redone exhibit. Many of their specimens were completely remounted in ways that incorporate the most up-to-date understanding of dinosaur science.

A new satellite image at Earth Observatory shows a brilliant blue and green phytoplankton bloom off the coast of the Namibian Desert. This plume is hundreds of kilometers across. Phytoplankton blooms are common in this area where cold, nutrient-rich waters from Antarctica interact with rising waters from the ocean floor.

Lots of people are curious about meteorites or find an interesting rock that they suspect might be a meteorite. Here are links to some of the best-on-the web resources that you can use to get a preliminary answer. They can help you decide if your specimen might be a meteorite that is worth more detailed investigation.

Aerolite Meteorites
Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory
Meteorite Market
University of New Mexico

A Google map and article by David Lynch that detail Earth’s ten deepest basins with land below sea level. Did you know that 33 countries have land below sea level and seven depressions have dry land that is lower in elevation than Death Valley? Zoom in with the satellite image view to get a good look at these low elevation places!

University of Kansas researchers have found what is believed to be the oldest jellyfish fossil. This 500 million-year-old specimen was found in Utah. It is very rare to find fossils of this type of soft-bodied organism.

November 18th is the night to see the popular Leonid Meteor shower. Between 30 and 80 meteors per hour are expected. In addition, the Southern and Northern Taurid showers can be seen on November 4th and 10th respectively. The planets Mars, Venus and Saturn are also easy to locate and observe in the November sky.

National Geographic has published what they feel are the top ten images from the Hubble Space Telescope. These show supernovas, deaths of massive stars, deep field, extra solar planets and more. The images are from telescope data collection and some are done by artists.

A slab covered with hundreds of fossil retile tracks has been discovered in New Brunswick, Canada. The tracks have five fingers and scales, which is good evidence that they were made by a reptile. They were probably made by Hylonomus lyelli.

The U.S. Drought Monitor website has a lot of information on drought conditions throughout the United States. There you can find drought maps, statistics, historical data, photos and more. They also have change maps and animated maps that allow you to visualize the change in drought conditions over time.

A new species of giant dinosaur has been discovered in 80 million-year-old, rocks of northern Patagonia. Futalognkosaurus dukei was a herbivorous dinosaur that reached lengths of up to 112 feet and is one of the three largest dinosaurs known. The specimen found is one of the most complete giant dinosaurs found to date.