ScotBlogs

A geoheritage site is a location where the geological features are worth preserving for scientific and cultural reasons. It is a relatively new term dating back to the 1990s. The purpose of designating a geoheritage site is to mark it … Continue reading →

The delightful students above are shown on the last day of the Spring 2024 semester edition of the Sedimentology & Stratigraphy course. I’m retiring from the College of Wooster in August of 2024, so they are my final students. Thank … Continue reading →

I still retain the personal, anecdotal memory of my first encounter with the spelling of people. I was learning to read, and I got cat, mat, pat. I got lot, pot, dot. But I did not get people. Why the o, and why the le instead of el? I had discovered the Latin alphabet’s … Continue reading →

I’ve spent much of my career investigating marine sclerobionts through time. A sclerobiont is an organism that lives on or within a hard substrate. Among marine sclerobionts are oysters that encrust cephalopod shells, barnacles attached to boat hulls, and clams … Continue reading →

I had a blast this weekend traveling with three Wooster students to the spring meeting of the Eastern Great Lakes section of the American Physical Society, at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan.  Two students (Junior Tali Lansing and Senior Kelsey … Continue reading →

On Wednesday Dr. Matecha’s Geochemistry class took a trip out to Killbuck Marsh to collect water samples for a research project. This week saw Ohio and Wooster especially inundated with heavy rain, which led to some very interesting conditions for … Continue reading →

Thousands of years ago, ancient astronomers like Eratosthenes and Aristarchus combined careful observations with simple mathematics to measure the solar system, especially the diameters D of Earth, Luna (Earth’s moon), Sol (Earth’s star, the sun), and the radii r of … Continue reading →

Saturday, March 8, 2008. A heavy snow, one of the heaviest I remember, shuts down the city of Wooster. Streets are undriveable, so I walk to Taylor Hall, getting snow in my boots. Taylor is deserted, as the College has … Continue reading →

In the summer of 2018 I traveled to Wales for a conference in Cardiff. Immediately afterwards I visited my dear fiends Caroline and Tim Palmer in Aberystwyth, and they gave me a tour of Welsh sites they found particularly interesting. … Continue reading →

The pressure and temperature near the surface of Venus is so high that its carbon dioxide atmosphere is a supercritical fluid, a global ocean of a remarkable state of matter, which fills any container like a gas but is as … Continue reading →