The Society for Industrial Archeology has a LinkedIn page, for those of you who use LinkedIn.

 A new book, Over the Coasts: An Aerial View of Geology, by Michael Collier, may be just that present for the geolgist in your life (or for yourself!)

What would you add to this geologist’s lifetime field list?

List of field camps from geology.com.

Interesting description of building materials used in Washington D.C., including descriptions of the local geology from the USGS.

Via University of Leicester: …A new study pitting academic expertise against a computer in recreating a 425 million-year old jigsaw puzzle has discovered that there is no substitute for wisdom born out of experience. The research tested the reliability of expert identification versus computer analysis in reconstructing fossils. The investigation, based on fossil teeth from extinct vertebrates, found that the most specialized experts provided the most reliable identifications…

Via Science Daily: …Using geochemical clues from rocks nearly 3 billion years old, a group of scientists including Andrey Bekker and Doug Rumble from the Carnegie Institution have made the surprising discovery that the creation of economically important nickel ore deposits was linked to sulfur in the ancient oxygen-poor atmosphere…

Amazing micro photos of pollen from National Geographic.

NYTimes on visiting the Grand Canyon. …It’s not just a trip out of the human realm, but into the deep geology of the earth. Layer upon layer of the planet’s crust is revealed, stratum by stratum: the Toroweap limestone, the Coconino sandstone, the Redwall limestone, the Tonto Group; the Vishnu schist deep down, close to two billion years old, nearly half the total age of the planet — the stuff that is under our very feet as we go about our lives is laid bare here. And in the silence and stillness, in the solitude of the canyon in winter,…

“Rocks and Minerals from the Kenosha Public Museum’s Geology Collection” is a new exhibit opening Saturday, Nov. 21, in the Abbott Labs Fund Treasures Gallery at the museum, 5500 First Ave.  The exhibit includes examples of gold, silver, copper, geodes and fossils. Specimens from the Upper Middle West are showcased, including phantom calcite from Vulcan Quarry in Racine. The exhibit also features many new additions to the collection. This is the first rocks and minerals display in more than eight years at the museum.

Via Science News: …The fossil record suggests that sauropods, some of the largest creatures ever to live on land (SN: 6/23/01, p. 397), evolved from a small bipedal dinosaur, says Matthew Bonnan, a vertebrate paleontologist at Western Illinois University in Macomb. Now, Bonnan and his colleagues describe a small sauropod ancestor with features foreshadowing those of more recent relatives. The work appears online November 10 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B…

Via MSNBC: “US 285 south subject to sinkhole 1,000 feet ahead,” motorists are warned. But there is little other evidence that in southeastern New Mexico’s oil country, a giant cavern sits beneath the earth, ready to swallow part of the highway and possibly a church, several businesses and a trailer park…. (includes video).

Via Oxford University: Archaeologists excavating the former Radcliffe Infirmary site in Oxford have uncovered evidence of a prehistoric monumental landscape stretching across the gravel terrace between the Thames and Cherwell rivers… (includes video)

Via PhysOrgNews: In a study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded.

Via R&D: The scalding-hot sea that supposedly covered the early Earth may in fact never have existed, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers who analyzed isotope ratios in 3.4 billion-year-old ocean floor rocks. Their findings suggest that the early ocean was much more temperate and that, as a result, life likely diversified and spread across the globe much sooner in Earth’s history than has been generally theorized.