PUBLIC MARKS from misskitty4280 with tag geology

The job market for people with scientific training is large these days. And it's a big opportunity for women, because the need for smart people is erasing the old barriers that once kept women out of many fields, even supposedly objective science. Once women get into Earth science, they do good science. And there are organizations helping them along.

Earth has many ways to kill us. We keep on the lookout, and rightly so, for volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, flooding, cosmic impacts, climate change and falling rocks on the highway. Should we still worry about radon?

The U.S. Geological Survey unveiled a nifty new "virtual helicopter tour" of the Hayward fault, which as you know runs down the side of San Francisco Bay on its east side. (It also is where I live.) What you may not know is that hundreds of thousands of homes and people are endangered there. A magnitude-7 event there would be an instant Katrina. The USGS page also has more useful tools, like a zoomable printable annotated photomap of the whole fault. Get your hands on it—and tell everyone you know who lives in the East Bay.

Earth's history has been punctuated by mass extinctions that have rapidly wiped out nearly all life forms on the planet. To determine what caused these events, British geologists are challenging the currently held theory that meteorite impacts are to blame for wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and other mass extinctions.

Sometimes almost everything you know is wrong. People familiar with the dinosaur-killing impact of 65 million years ago may think such things are common, even predominant in the fossil record. But in fact nearly all mass extinctions are due to other things—tectonic changes or volcanism. Even the biggest extinction of them all, the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, appears to be due to extreme volcanism. A story from the Environment News Service tells about a crucial detail of that problem: the Siberian Traps.

Florida may be flat and sandy, but it's full of geologic interest just the same.

A new assessment of the rocks of Afghanistan documents much larger petroleum resources than previously thought. The U.S. Geological Survey looked strictly at the geology, without doing any drilling, to estimate that the Afghan-Tajik Basin holds 18 times the amount of oil (over 1.5 billion barrels) and the Amu Darya Basin has several times as much gas (almost 16 trillion cubic feet) as older estimates. This could be a shot in the arm for that precarious country if oil companies can be tempted to drill there.

Under the placid, wooded surface of Connecticut is an ancient Los Angeles and a more recent Manitoba. If you know where to look and what to look for, those long-gone scenes can be visible again in your local hills and landforms. Introducing the deep history of the Constitution State.

See how we study the core and what we've learned.

In the 25 July 1997 issue of Science, a team of prestigious researchers led by Joseph Kirschvink asserted that about 550 million years ago, the whole Earth slewed halfway around, putting its polar lands down at the equator, over a rather brief period—15 million years.