Lothagam was too expansive, too important, and just too beautiful to be limited to a one-day visit or one blog post. As usual, the students rose with the dawn, the red rocks of Lothagam radiant with scarlet light. Quickly the nets and bedrolls were packed away, boots were laced, sunscreen applied, and we [...]
Lothagam isn’t a name that comes up very often in Physical Anthropology classes. It wasn’t a name a lot of the students on the field school knew before they came out to TBI. But over the last few weeks there was a building drumbeat: Lothagam: the lonely hill on a distant horizon. Lothagam: the oldest [...]
Geology is often viewed as the study of the past, of what happened to get the planet to this point. But many geologists are equally interested in the future, using information collected on climatic, tectonic, and biological change to figure out where the planet is headed. Dr. Bob Raynolds, research associate Denver Museum of Nature [...]
The shifting scale of geological inquiry can give you spatial and temporal whiplash. You go from scrutinizing a tiny quartz crystal to trying to sort out the arrival of a massive inland sea or go from contemplating a single layer of ash that took a few minutes to fall to an entire formation that took [...]
Geology is the foundation science. Pun intended. It is the study of how everything we can lay hands on came to be. Geology draws from every investigative discipline – physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology and a lot more ologies – to examine the wheres, whens, and whys of mountains, water, and us. But before a geologist [...]
In the middle of Lake Turkana, an experiment is taking place without a single person touching a pipette or checking their controls. The open-air lab is called Central Island, and few people have had the opportunity to watch the experiment in action.