The 2015 Wooster Desert Geologists!
Geology in the News –
The evidence is now clear that Mars once had a very large ocean of water, and it lasted far longer than anyone had previously imagines. One of the clever ways NASA scientists have deduced this was to look at the amount of deuterium in the remaining ice. Vast amounts of water simply escaped to space, concentrating the “heavy water” (that included deuterium) that was left behind. Here’s another article on the vanished Martian seas.
Big news in the field of human evolution: a new lower jawbone of Homo habilis has been found in sediments in Ethiopia dating back 2.8 million years. This pushes back the range of this species by about 500,000 years. This is very close to the latest date known for Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”). I’ve seen these articles before that claim the human family tree will be “redrawn”, so I’ll withhold judgement until other experts have their say.
This is a fun BBC article on the diversity of flying organisms. I didn’t know that there are flying squid, nor that it is more energetically costly to fly over water than land. Who would have guessed that 20% of all the particles between 0.25 and 1 micrometer in size 8-15 km up in the air are flying bacteria?