After three and half years we made the journey back to China and back to the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia. We know that it was hot in the Early Cretaceous, even at high latitudes such as that of Inner Mongolia but our first stop in Beijing had us sweating and swearing in very real […]
Though mostly overlooked by sedimentologists and climatologists coal provides highly detailed information on past climates and tectonics. In a recent paper* by myself and my colleagues (available Here) we take a look at a very thick (>40 m) coal of Early Cretaceous age in Inner Mongolia, near the borders with Russia and Mongolia. Using stable […]
My father worked for the phone company all his life. Actually, that isn’t completely true. In 1943, during World War II, he joined the Marines, got married and managed not to get killed. After the war he returned to his job at the C&P Telephone Co., played around on boats in and around the Potomac […]
Thirty seconds seems like an incredibly short amount of time. But a lot of things can happen in thirty seconds. I had removed one of my gloves to turn the page in my field notebook to jot down some measurements on the coal we were sampling. It was a bad idea. In that short amount […]
I have an old fish on the wall, and I get to ponder it’s life every time I walk into my loo at home. I’ve been pondering this fish for the last 24 years. Considering its age, it is not a stinky, yucky fish. In fact it is over 48 million years old, so any […]
At 2:56 pm Brisbane time I crossed the equator for the umpteenth time – heading north on flight CZ382. The time is significant because that is the time my son, Micah, gets out of school. When I left this morning en route to Xuzhou, China, where I’ll be teaching for a few weeks, my son […]