History of Geology
@historyofgeology
A channel dedicated to the #History of #Earth #Sciences 🌍 run by an Alpine #Rock G(e)o(logist)at ⛰️🔨🐐 This channel depends on support to survive, so many thanks if you wish to help
I´m searching for a #job #opportunity 🔎 related to #geology or earth sciences 🌐 Background in #geology, long experience in field & applied geology, but also science journalism & communication ⚒️ 👷🏻♂️ E-mail ✉️David@bressan-geoconsult.eu /DM for contact & homepage 🔗 www.bressan-geoconsult.eu
July 15, 1799, a rock slab is discovered in a wall of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta). It will help to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs 𓂀 At first believed to be basalt it is actually a granodiorite from Aswan
Happy birthday Sir Patrick Stewart 🎂 In his role as Captain Picard in "#StarTrek - The Next Generation (or short TNG) he shows some interests in collecting rocks, crystals and even fossils 💎🖖 www.bressan-geoconsult.eu/geological-s...
July 13, 1923, the expedition led by American explorer (and real-life Indiana Jones) Roy Chapman Andrews discovers the first (unequivocally) dinosaur nests in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia 🦖🥚🥚 historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/06/roy-...
New Zealand actor Sam Neill, known for his role as grumpy-charismatic paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park films, has died aged 78 www.bbc.com/news/live/cr...
In the end Scopes was found guilty, but never paid the fee of 100$.
The judge ruled a week into the trial that scientific testimony was not needed because the question before the court was only whether Mr. Scopes had given his students a lesson on evolution, a fact he did not contest, not if evolution was true ...
In typical American way the "Monkey Trial" became a (profitable) spectacle - including a chimp in business dress as testimony before the court - and was extensively covered by the news. Yet the trial did little to settle any scientific or theological questions ...
Scopes had agreed to act as defendant in a case organized by the American Civil Liberties Union intended to test the new law prohibiting the teaching of human evolution in public schools. Residents also hoped that a trial of this type would bring much needed publicity to the tiny town of Dayton ...
July 10, 1925, the trial against geologist & high school science teacher John T. Scopes, arrested for teaching human evolution in one of Tennessee's public schools, begins 🐵🙈🙉
On one ridge opposite the slide, waves splashed up to an elevation of 1,720 feet (524 meters)—taller than New York’s Empire State Building. ...
After a 7.8 earthquake along the nearby Fairweather Fault, a rockslide sent 90 million tons of rock plunging into the bay—an amount equivalent to 8 million dump truck loads. The damage line in the forest extends to an elevation of 700 feet (200 meters) around much of the bay ...
July 9, 1958, an earthquake and rockfall into Lituya Bay, Alaska, triggers a 600 to 1,700 ft (518 meters) high wave, the tallest wave ever observed & survived by humans ...
July 9, 2015, died on this day American biologist David Raup. He applied mathematical methods to the field of paleontology, using statistics to better understand extinction events.
Located at over 2.000 meters a.s.l. they were the largest mining operations at such high elevations in Europe. Today they are an open-air museum that can be visited during the summer when the snow melts. www.bressan-geoconsult.eu/bergbau-in-s...
These mines were famous since medieval times for producing valuable silver-, lead-, copper-, and zinc-ores - concentrated in brownish bands inter-bedded in the local grey micaschist ...
On July 8, 1985, after over 800 years of documented activity, the mines of the Schneeberg (the "Snowy Mountain") n the Tyrolean Alps were officially closed ⚒️ ...
HMS Beagle with on board amateur geologist Charles Darwin arrived at the volcanic island of St Helena on July 8, 1836, where it stayed until afternoon of July 14, afterwards proceeding its journey back to Great Britain 🌋
Spitz published a first paper in 1914, but died in 1918 aged just 35 years. In WWI he was stationed in the Tyrolean Alps. During breaks between battles he explored the mountains to collect more evidence for his nappe theory. He never returned from his last trip and remains missing to this day.
Spitz recognized that the "folds" visible in the Engadin Dolomites were small-scale, localized tectonic features formed by rocks that had been dragged, deformed, and broken apart along shear zones as thick sheets of rock were pushed and stacked over one another ...
Here the Cambrian metamorphic basement was pushed over Mesozoic sediments during the closing of the Tethys Ocean (when Africa and Europe collided). Many geologists believed that the sediments were folded but otherwise remained intact, resulting the the Alps being a strange mega-fold mountain belt ..
July 7, 1883, birthday of Austrian geologist Albrecht Spitz. His geologic sections of the Engadin Dolomites (Switzerland-Austria-Italy) shows tectonic nappes and thrust faults - a novelty at the time when most structures in the Alps were interpreted as folded layers ⛰️ ...
Today we know that diamonds are found only in a specific type of volcanic rock known as kimberlites - dikes of igneous rock that forms deep within the Earth's mantle & is violently transported to the surface. The kimberlites in Russia are almost 2 billion years, not linked to modern mountain ranges
Humboldt knew of extinct volcanoes in the Tianshan, Altai and other mountain ranges in Asia and suggested that diamonds could be found in the adjacent plains or basins filled by sediments ...
Thanks to his experience in mining and his geological research in the Andes, Humboldt knew that diamonds were associated with volcanic rocks. So where outcrops of volcanic rocks exist or sediments derived from weathering of such rocks were deposited, likely also diamonds would be found ...
July 5, 1829, first Russian diamonds discovered near Promysla in the District of Perm Krai 💎 Alexander von Humboldt predicted this discovery based on his research on mineral lagerstätten 💎 ...