Earth science is a big field, and I don't always catch every significant event in it. So I'm late with the news that Jack Eddy died earlier this year. His was a very unusual career that involved crossing scientific boundaries and gaining popular fame....

The Copenhagen climate talks featured a strong protest by the lowest nations of the world—mostly island countries that stand to suffer degradation, even extinction, by rising seas in the coming century. One of them, the nation of Tuvalu, offered a...

Thanks to Phil Leinart for pointing out a lovely new item from Good Nature Publishing Company: a poster displaying the fossils to be found all over Washington state. There's everything from trilobites and cycads to whales, camels, mammoths and ginkgos,...

As the Copenhagen climate meetings go on for the next few days, it's worth contemplating the risks and benefits of simplicity. When it comes to what I'll just refer to as the climate problem, public awareness relies on simplicity. And the climate...

It's an old cliché among geologists that humans will leave their mark in the rock record of the future as a layer of petrified garbage, and stratigraphers will call our age the Broken Glass Epoch. Paul Crutzen put it more formally in 1990 with the...