Free online course from Coursera – Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets – starts June 2013

Via geology.com Here is a large selection of hammers, picks, chisels, lenses…  you may wish to purchase before going on your next collecting trip!

via geology.com: A green meteorite found in Morocco is believed to have originated either from the planet Mercury or from an unknown body in the solar system.

From University of Iowa via geology.com: Recent airborne geophysical surveys near Decorah, Iowa are providing an unprecedented look at a 470- million-year-old meteorite crater concealed beneath bedrock and sediments. The aerial surveys, a collaboration of the U.S. Geological Survey with the Iowa and Minnesota Geological Surveys, were conducted in the last 60 days to map geologic structures and assess the mineral and water resources of the region. “Capturing images of an ancient meteorite impact was a huge bonus,” said Dr. Paul Bedrosian, a USGS geophysicist in Denver who is leading the effort to model the recently acquired geophysical data. “These…

Via the ESCONI Discussion Group: A new genus and species of Pliocene saber-toothed cat from Florida is described. Summary at: http://www.scienced aily.com/ releases/ 2013/03/13031414 0909.htm Article at: http://www.plosone. org/article/ info%3Adoi% 2F10.1371% 2Fjournal. pone.0056173

Called Let’s Rock Ontario! the app is the brainchild of UTSC geology professor Nick Eyles and two of his undergraduate environmental science students: Richard Gao and Shane Soohkan. It uses Google Map technology to pinpoint the exact location of significant geological and natural history sites across Ontario, while Google Street View and Navigation aids bring the sites a click away. “This has huge educational potential because it brings the outdoors and the natural wonders of Ontario into the classroom through technology,” says Eyles. Field trips to remote sites by bus are becoming prohibitively expensive for schools notes Eyles, but this…

Very interesting video and article from the NY Times about the latest asteroid that fell into Russia.

From Geology via geology.com: A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection.

From Nature Geoscience via SciNews: “While geochemical and geological evidence has long alluded to a connection between earthquakes and the deposition of gold, there has been much debate through the decades as to whether the precipitation of gold was a slow, equilibrium process or whether, as Professor Henley was proposing, it was a rapid and far from equilibrium process,” explained Dr Dion Weatherley from the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute, co-author of a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.