Via Geology.com: Most experts believe it’s just a matter of time before another big earthquake strikes along the New Madrid fault line, and Gov. Jay Nixon says Missouri and neighboring states need to be ready… The Washington Post has a well-done graphic on cities of the world and their earthquake risk.

Via National Geographic: Saturday’s Chile earthquake was so powerful that it likely shifted an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day, NASA announced Monday.

Via Science Daily: The origins of flowering plants from peas to oak trees are now in clearer focus thanks to the efforts of University of Florida researchers. A study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences unravels 100 million years of evolution through an extensive analysis of plant genomes. It targets one of the major moments in plant evolution, when the ancestors of most of the world’s flowering plants split into two major groups.

Interesting photographs of a visit to the Pacaya Volcano.

Two Wall Gallery shows art inspired in part by geology.

“…Thirty thousand people have been displaced, and scientific evidence is mounting that the company drilling the well caused the volcano. Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/mudvolcano#ixzz0gNjs35Bw

Via MSNBC: Furrows preserved in 565-million-year-old rocks are now the first evidence that some of Earth’s earliest and mysterious living things had muscles to move themselves — and so were truly animals. That means muscles may have evolved earlier and been part of a long evolutionary fuse that led to the so-called “Cambrian Explosion,”

Via Geology.com: Petra Diamonds plans to sell a 507-carat uncut diamond from their Cullinan mine in an auction on Friday. It could sell for about $25 million.

Photographs from the Tuscon Gem show via geology.com.

From Yahoo News/AP: Fossils of a previously undiscovered species of dinosaur have been found in slabs of Utah sandstone that were so hard that explosives had to be used to free some of the remains, scientists said Tuesday. The bones found at Dinosaur National Monument belonged to a type of sauropod — long-necked plant-eaters that were said to be the largest animal ever to roam land.

Researchers Recover a 35 Million-Year Record of Sea Level Change

The Burke Museum offers a number of online resources: podcasts, photos and videos and information about their new exhibition, Cruisin’ The Fossil Freeway. 

From Monash University: …the research explained how mitochondria — the power house of human and other cells, which provide complex eukaryotic cells with energy and ability to produce, divide and move — were thought to have evolved about 2000 million years ago from primitive bacteria.