Category Archives: ScotBlogs Contributed

Three Wooster Geologists (Dr. Karen Alley, Dr. Alex Crawford, and senior Geology major Cole Jimerson) descended on New Orleans last week to attend the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. With 20 to 25 thousand attendees each year, this … Continue reading →
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On Wednesday, September 13, 1989, I met with newly elected Physics Club officers Tom Taczak ’91, Dennis Kuhl ’90, Doug Halverson ’91, and Karen McEwen ’90 in Westminister House. I wrote in my diary, “first phys club meeting w. officers goes well”. That year … Continue reading →
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One of my favorite illustrations is the cannon thought experiment from volume three of Isaac Newton‘s Principia Mathematica. Johannes Kepler argued that planets orbit elliptically with Sol at one focus. Galileo Galilei argued that terrestrial bodies fall parabolically in space … Continue reading →
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Above is another beautiful image from Paul Taylor’s paleontological lab at the Natural History Museum, London. It is one of our fossil oysters (Pycnodonte vesicularis) from the French Type Campanian collected in the town of Archiac in southwestern France on … Continue reading →
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Small comma-shaped trace fossils this week in a Cretaceous (Upper Campanian) oyster (Pycnodonte vesicularis) from the Aubeterre Formation of southwestern France. (Locality C/W-747, Plage des Nonnes, to be exact.) These are borings produced by barnacles, which are sedentary crustaceans more … Continue reading →
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About a month ago, I wrote on this blog about an exceptionally dry late summer for Wooster.  It was dry enough to put much of northeast Ohio in a moderate drought.  But of course the moment I published that blog … Continue reading →
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Newsweek published a scary-looking headline yesterday: “NASA DISCOVERS MANTLE PLUME ALMOST AS HOT AS YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO THAT’S MELTING ANTARCTICA FROM BELOW.” It’s a scary idea, right? That heat that drives Yellowstone’s steam vents, boiling hot springs, and explosive geysers is … Continue reading →
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It’s hard to believe that we were at the 2017 GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington just last week. Once again, the Wooster Geologists had a strong showing.   Continue reading →

While preparing for this summer’s expedition to the Middle Jurassic of southwestern Utah, I found this specimen in our collection from the 1990s. You may be able to just make out the wedge-shaped outline of a mytilid-like bivalve with several … Continue reading →
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I’ve been fascinated by aperiodic tilings of the plane since Martin Gardner first wrote about them in Scientific American. In the 1960s, Robert Berger discovered a set of 20 426 prototiles or tile-types that can tile the plane but only with no … Continue reading →
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