SEASON GREETINGS - Geological Society of Africa and Zalasiewicz added that microscopic analysis of the shale layers using a specially designed ‘Petroscope’, obtained with funding

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www.geologicalsocietyofafrica.org SSoouutthheerrnn RReeggiioonn

Edited by Lopo Vasconcelos Vice-President of GSAf for Southern Africa [email protected]

SEASON GREETINGS

(Photo by L.Vasconcelos, sunrise on Maputo Bay)


CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

- Editorial - GSAf Matters - News of/on Africa - News of/on the Rest of the World - News of/on Space /Astronomy - Interesting Links & Educational Materials - Books, Journals, Reviews, Newsletters, Maps - Southern African higher education

institutions teaching Earth Science subjects - Papers on Africa - Other interesting papers - Events - Professional Courses/Scholarships - Joke - Interesting pictures of the World - Landscapes & Geology - Geology of Southern African

Countries/Territories

2 2 5 9 172627

2727282934373840

41

Dear Colleagues and Geoscientists from Southern Africa (and from the other regions too), We are coming to the end of the year and this is the 12th issue of our Regional Bulletin. We hope we may continue as this during the coming year. As you all know, the GSAf has been trying to become implemented everywhere in our continent, and I believe we are reaching it, step by step, slowly but with determination. GSAf is an affiliate of the IUGS and the GSA, and process in under way to get affiliation with AAPG and SEG. The website has been refreshed and made more dynamic. The GSAf has been active in the UNESCO Initiative on Earth Sciences Education in Africa, in partnership with IUGS, CIFEG, AAWG, IYPE and the Royal Museum of Central Africa, and we participated in the 5 regional workshops organized. We also participate in several programs/projects: (i) AEGOS, (ii) Seismotectonic map of Africa, (iii) the IGCP 557 Diamonds, xenoliths and kimberlites, a window into the Earth’s interior, and the Africa Geoparks Network (with AAWG). We nominated 13 well known geoscientists from outside Africa to become Goodwill Ambassadors of GSAf in their countries (Portugal, USA, France, Belgium, Austria, Argentina, Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Brazil, Australia, Italy and United Kingdom). GSAf council members have also participated in several international events, representing the Society. But a special word has to be given to our General Secretary, Dr. Hassina Mouri, who is also the Chair person of the CAG23 Local Organising

Committee, and all LOC staff members for the tremendous work they are doing for a superb CAG23 in 2011. On behalf of all GSAf Council Members, and also on my personal behalf, I would like to deeply congratulate Hassina and all LOC members for the excellent job they are doing and I am sure that CAG23 will be a great success and that we all, Africans, will be proud of their achievements which will also be our achievement as Africans. Let me take the chance to wish you all great festivities and a Happy New Year. See some of you in Johannesburg next January. Lopo Vasconcelos Vice-President of GSAf for the Southern African Region.

GSAf MATTERS

1. CAG23 – 23rd Colloquium of African Geology

WELCOME TO CAG23

Colloquium of African Geology

For the 1st time in South Africa

Do not forget! Apply! Attend! Go! Enjoy! Be Pro-active! Be there!

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2010

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AAuugguusstt SSeepptteemmbbeerr OOccttoobbeerr NNoovveemmbbeerr DDeecceemmbbeerr

22001111 JJaannuuaarryy CCAAGG2233

2. YES meeting at the CAG23 From Elyvin Nkhonjera, Chair of YES, we rfeceived the following message: “I am glad to inform you that the YES Africa symposium will also be broadcasted online, that is we will use webnar which will enable online participants to participate in the whole symposium from all over the world. This information has been posted on our website www.networkyes.org and we have also opened up for registration. It is totally for free, anyone interested can register. So if you know of any scientists that would like to take part as a virtual participant you can share with them this information.”


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NEWS OF/ON AFRICA

3. Ancient wind held secret of life and death

Reconstruction of eurypterid (sea scorpion) chasing a condont (early vertebrate). Artist credit: Alan Male.

The mystery of how an abundance of fossils have been marvellously preserved for nearly half a billion years in a remote region of Africa has been solved by a team of geologists from the University of Leicester’s Department of Geology. They have established that an ancient wind brought life to the region – and was then instrumental in the preservation of the dead. Sarah Gabbott, Jan Zalasiewicz and colleagues investigated a site near the Table Mountains in South Africa. Their findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Geology. Sarah Gabbott said: “Near Table Mountain in South Africa lies one of the world’s most mysterious rock layers. Just a few metres thick, and almost half a billion years old, it contains the petrified remains of bizarre early life-forms, complete with eyes

A Eurypterid (sea scorpion) from the Soom Shale, South Africa. This fossil is approximately 440 million years old. It is so well-preserved that you can see its muscle blocks, gills and paddles that it used for swimming.

and guts and muscles. “We investigated why these animals are so marvellously preserved, when most fossils are just fragments of bone and shell? The answer seems to lie in a bitter wind, blowing off a landscape left devastated by a massive ice-cap.” Gabbott and Zalasiewicz added that microscopic analysis of the shale layers using a specially designed ‘Petroscope’, obtained with funding from the Royal Society, revealed remarkable and so far unique structures – myriads of silt grains, neatly wrapped in the remains of marine algae. The authors state: “The silt grains are sedimentary aliens - much bigger than the marine mud flakes in which they are embedded. They could only have been blown by fierce glacial winds on to the sea surface from that distant landscape. Arriving thick and fast, they carried nutrients into the surface waters, fuelling its prolific life. The deep waters, though, were overwhelmed by rotting, sinking vegetation, becoming stagnant and lifeless – ideal conditions to preserve the animal remains, down to their finest details. A cold wind, here, was key to both life and death.” More information: Gabbott, S.E., Zalasiewicz, J., Aldridge, R.J. & Theron, H. 2010. Geology 38, 1103-1106. Provided by University of Leicester. November 29, 2010. In http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-ancient-held-secret-life-death.html

4. Joint Venture for Tete minerals Maputo, 22 Nov (AIM) – The London-based companies North River Resources and Baobab Resources have formed a joint venture under which Baobab will develop North River’s exploration licenses at Mount Muande in the western Mozambican province of Tete. The project is looking for magnetite, phosphorus, uranium and gold. Baobab will earn a 60 per cent share in the project if it invests 625,000 US dollars in an initial exploration programme over a period of 12 months. According to a release from Baobab, further investment by the company can bring its share up to 75 per cent, and then to 90 per cent, if it finances a definitive feasibility study. If North River invests on a pro rata basis, it will retain its 40 per cent stake. Baobab says it will “assume technical management and operational responsibilities for the project. Compilation of historical exploration data has commenced, and drilling is scheduled for the second quarter of 2011”. Baobab is already developing iron, vanadium and titanium resources elsewhere in Tete. The release says that “With a view to consolidating its strategic position in the Tete area, the Company approached North River with the objective of entering into an unincorporated joint venture relationship for the purpose of undertaking exploration activities at the Muande project and, subject to exploration success, developing mining operations”. North River holds two exploration licences at Mount Muande, covering 338 square kilometres. The area is about 25 kilometres north-west of Tete city. Baobab’s immediate priority, it says, is to “evaluate the potential of the Muande magnetite/phosphorus deposit”. North River justifies the deal on the grounds that it frees its hands to concentrate on projects in Namibia. According to North River managing director David Steinepreis, “This agreement with Baobab will ensure that these Mozambican licences, which are contiguous with Baobab's Singore and Massamba Group projects, are advanced in order to create value for North River whilst enabling our team to remain focussed on the development of our highly prospective Namibian assets”. Steinepreis said he was confident that “Baobab's highly skilled team, which has considerable experience in the iron ore sector, will be able to realise the potential of this licence for the benefit of all stakeholders." (Agência de Iinformação de Moçambique)

5. New discovery of natural gas in the Rovuma Basin , Mozambique A new natural gas discovery offshore of the Rovuma Basin has been confirmed by the Company Anadarko Mozambique, after the completion of the hole "Lobster", whose opening was initiated on October 26. According to a source of the Ministry of Mineral Resources, the discovery of gas was made in sand formations with a thickness of 167.6 meters. The hole “Lobster” is projected to reach a depth of 4850 meters. So far, it has reached a depth of 4222 meters in relation to the average level of the sea. The drilling will continue for another 628 meters. Upon completion of the "Lobster" drilling work will continue, being planned to open another hole research. AIM, 30/11/10

6. Technical Advisory support to Madagascar, the Co moros and Malawi In the framework of the European Commission - Humanitarian Aid & Civil Protection (ECHO), UN-SPIDER is contributing to the project "Providing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technical support for Disaster Risk Reduction programmes implemented by DIPECHO partners in the South East African and South West Indian Ocean region (Malawi, Madagascar, Comoros, and Mozambique)". This project is lead by the Italian NGO Cooperazione Internazionale, headquartered in Milano, and in partnership with the Centre for GeoInformatics (Z_GIS), University Salzburg, and UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER. The meetings were held in Antananarivo, Madagascar, bringing together delegations from Madagascar and the Comoros, and in Lilongwe, Malawi respectively. Meeting goals were to provide an overview and general introduction to GIS and space-based information for risk and disaster management and emergency response, to describe existing international mechanisms such as the International Charter Space and Major Disasters and the Services and Applications For Emergency Response (SAFER) in the framework of the European Initiative: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), and finally to explain the role of UN-SPIDER and its cooperation and coordination with these mechanisms. For further information >> http://www.un-spider.org/tam-en/3903/madagascar-comoros-and-malawi In 2010 11 UN-SPIDER UPDATES


7. Four degree rise 'would scupper African farming' A widespread farming catastrophe could hit Africa if global temperatures rose by four degrees Celsius or more, according to a study that calls for urgent planning for a much warmer future and investment in technology to avert disaster. In most of southern Africa the growing season could shrink by as much as a fifth, according to scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya, who carried out simulation studies based on existing climate change models. The 'four degrees plus' scenario is increasingly being contemplated as negotiations, which began again in Cancún, Mexico, today (29 November–10 December), have stalled on measures aimed at limiting the global temperature rise to two degrees. Drastic changes to farming will be needed under such a scenario, said Carlos Seré, director-general of ILRI. "The general feeling is that the world is not going to move quickly enough on [confining global warming to] two degrees," he told SciDev.Net: "We are not getting traction. "The common thinking has been that there will be enough variability in farming today to allow us to cope, but the reality is that in a four degree world the range of options is very narrow." According to the models, the growing season may increase modestly in eastern Africa. But cropping seasons are likely to decline more quickly everywhere in the region except central Africa. Much of southern Africa's rain-fed agriculture could fail every other season by the 2090s, says the study. "It is not difficult to envisage a situation where the adaptive capacity and resilience of hundreds of millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa could simply be overwhelmed by events." Simply making crops more drought-tolerant or flood-resistant is just tinkering about the edges, said Seré.

Average growing period for crops may reduce (grey and black areas) by 20 per cent (black) in Africa over the next 80 years. Thornton et al. (2010)/The Royal Society 2010

"The changes which will be required in the farming system are quite drastic, pushing farmers beyond the limits of their knowledge and experience. They will be overwhelmed by extreme climate events," he told SciDev.Net. "We are talking about farmers abandoning cropping and migrating out of those regions. But where are farmers who cannot cope with this level of stress in the system to go? "Where is the alternative livelihood for 60 per cent of the continent where farming is still a very key part of coping with food security? You cannot escape the fact that for decades many people are going to be in the rural sector. It is a moral imperative to give those people a livelihood. "We need to understand and find much smarter ways to get knowledge out there. Extension services in Africa have largely collapsed in many countries". The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 assumed that regional shortfalls in food production in Sub-Saharan Africa could be plugged with imports from global markets, says the paper, but it adds that the experience of the 2008 food crisis highlighted the difficulties of such an 'adaptation' strategy. Instead ILRI scientists are calling for better monitoring, in particular 'back to basics', land-based observation and data collection in Africa, which have been in decline for decades. Information on weather, land use, markets and crop and livestock distribution is critical for an effective response to climate change, they said. "Africa's data-collection systems could be improved with relatively modest additional effort," the study says. Link to full in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/117.full.pdf+htmlrticle Yojana Sharma, 29 November 2010. http://www.scidev.net/en/sub-suharan-africa/news/four-degree-rise-would-scupper-african-farming-.html

8. UN-SPIDER attended the RCMRD 7 th Conference of Ministers UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER was invited to attend the RCMRD 7th Conference of Ministers in Cape Town, South Africa, from 22nd to 23rd November 2010. The Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) is an intergovernmental organization with 15 contracting Member States from the Eastern and Southern African region. The conference of ministers reviewed annual reports, the recent 2007-2010 Strategic Plan as well as approved a new Strategic Plan (2011-2014). Development partners and stakeholders were invited to attend the meeting and discuss on issues and future plans to strengthen partnership with the Centre. A UN-SPIDER senior expert presented the activities of the office with specific focus on Africa to the attending group of ministers and delegates from 15 countries. The solid collaboration between RCMRD and UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER is already evident from a number of successful joint activities such as the response to the flood in Kenya in May 2010 in frame of the activation of the International Charter Space and Major Disasters. Additionally, an official cooperation agreement was signed on the occasion of the Regional Workshop – “Building Upon Regional Space-based Solutions for Disaster Management and Emergency Response for Africa” in Addis Ababa on Wednesday, 7 July 2010. For further information http://www.un-spider.org/news-en/3904/2010-12-02t144700/un-spider-attended-rcmrd-7th-conference-ministers In 2010 11 UN-SPIDER UPDATES

9. Survey on spatial data sharing in Rwanda The Centre for Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing of the National University of Rwanda conducted a spatial data sharing survey in June 2010. The objectives were to assess the preparedness of organizations to share spatial data in Rwanda. Organizations dealing with spatial data production, management and use were targeted. It assessed the sharing culture and identified the needs and gaps in existing data sharing capability. The resulting summary is attached below. The three datasets most sought after are fundamental datasets. These are administrative boundaries data accounting for 25% of all spatial datasets used, topographic map series (15%) and ortho-photos (14%). Free access to spatial data in Rwanda is the most supported option among organisations using geospatial technology (60%). The major barrier to spatial data sharing identified is the lack of a national spatial data policy especially, and the need for a spatial data sharing UN-SPIDER on Facebook UN-SPIDER on Twitter policy in organizations was identified. The survey was funded by the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI) through a small grant award (2009/2010) and the Rwanda Development Gateway Group grant at the CGIS-NUR. For further information http://www.un-spider.org/news-en/3893/2010-11-26t170400/survey-spatial-data-sharing-rwanda In 2010 11 UN-SPIDER UPDATES

10. GMES & Africa side event at the 3rd Africa-EU S ummit The GMES & Africa initiative event took place from 8 to 9 November 2010, in Hammamet, Tunisia. The aim was to review the progress achieved so far on the GMES and Africa process, to agree on a strategy for the future and to pave the way for specific actions included in the framework of the 2010-13 Action Plan of the 8th Partnership on Science, Information Society and Space to be adopted at the third Africa-EU Summit. GMES and Africa is a coordination umbrella for cooperation in the use of space to monitor the Earth for environment and security applications impacting on development policies and the African citizen. Monitoring of natural resources, water and desertification, informing decision makers ahead to counter effects of climate change, support to peace keeping operations, conflict prevention and response to natural and human made disasters are areas where GMES & Africa can bring added value. For further information http://www.africa-eu-partnership.org/news/gmes-africa-side-event-3rd-africa-eu-summit In 2010 11 UN-SPIDER UPDATES

11. Energy in Africa: Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme launched At the High Level Meeting of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP) in Vienna, EU Commissioner for Development Andris Piebalgs and EU Commissioner for Energy, Gunther Oettinger will launch the Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) together with the African Union and announced a planned contribution of €5 million to start the programme. This programme of cooperation is due to contribute to the African renewable energy targets for 2020. It aims at bringing relevant renewable energy technologies to the market in Africa. During the conference, both Commissioners will present the road map developed under the Partnership and the targets for Africa in the fields of energy access, energy security and renewable energy by 2020. 14/09/10 http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=1410&obj_id=11520&dt_code=NWS&lang=en


12. South Africa unveils space agency

South Africa's minister for science and technology GNM Pandor unveils the national space agency in Johannesburg, December 9. South Africa unveiled its national space agency on Thursday, aiming to become a leader in earth observation technology across the continent in 10 years, the minister of science and technology said.

South Africa unveiled its national space agency on Thursday, aiming to become a leader in earth observation technology across the continent in 10 years, the minister of science and technology said. "Our combined efforts at enhancing South Africa’s space capabilities will be of immense value to the scientific community in the Southern African region," Naledi Pandor said. "We believe (the launch of SANSA) will stimulate investment and the local scientific research sector," she added.

The agency, which already has two micro-satellites, will produce timely data imagery to help detect natural disasters and monitor water resources around South Africa and the continent, Pandor said at the launch. The new agency, which aims to bring together previously un-allied experts in the field, will also seek to revive several space facilities that were mothballed in the 1990's during apartheid rule, said a government official. However, the establishment of the agency's new structures will mean full operations will only resume in April 2012. The agency's interim chief executive Sandile Malinga estimated that it would cost South Africa approximately 600 million rands (86.7 million dollars) a year to run the agency. "These are conservative figures. Our satellites will be built here at home using local expertise. We are hoping that will help reduce cost," said Malinga. South Africa joins Nigeria, Algeria and Egypt among African countries which already have active space agencies.

According to the ministry, South Africa had primarily been a consumer and a net importer of space technologies. "There is a need to develop systems and sub-systems to support our requirements and to grow the local industry," the ministry said in a statement. (c) 2010 AFP. December 9, 2010. In: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-south-africa-unveils-space-agency.html

13. Other stories (mainly mining) − African Eagle says Zanzui could be significant nickel deposit. By Loni Prinsloo, 25th November 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Aim-

and AltX-listed African Eagle Resources said on Thursday that the latest modelling at its Zanzui project, in Tanzania, demonstrated the potential for a significant nickel-oxide deposit. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/african-eagle-says-zanzui-could-be-significant-nickel-deposit-2010-11-25

− Gem Diamonds sells two Letšeng stones for $22,7m. By: Chanel de Bruyn, 25th November 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – LSE-listed Gem Diamonds has earned $22,7-million from the sale of two large diamonds discovered at its Letšeng mine, in Lesotho. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/gem-diamonds-sells-two-leteng-stones-for-227m-2010-11-25

− Zimbabwe produced 2,7m ct diamonds in 2010. By: Reuters, 25th November 2010. HARARE – Zimbabwe produced 2,7-million carats of diamond this year and conducted three diamond sales, Finance Minister Tendai Biti said on Thursday. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/zimbabwe-produced-27m-ct-diamonds-in-2010-2010-11-25

− SA needs to regulate local coal supply – Eskom. By: Reuters, 25th November 2010. JOHANNESBURG - South Africa needs to regulate the supply of coal to its power plants to ensure exports of the material do not jeopardise electricity generation in Africa's biggest economy, power utility Eskom said on Wednesday. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/sa-needs-to-regulate-local-coal-supply-eskom-2010-11-25

− Gryphon and Tawana form Liberia exploration alliance. By Esmarie Swanepoel, 1st December 2010. PERTH (miningweekly.com) – West-Africa-focused Gryphon Minerals has formed a strategic alliance with Tawana Resources to assist that company with exploration permits in Liberia. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/gryphon-and-tawana-form-liberia-exploration-alliance-2010-12-01

− Firestone holds diamond tender in Botswana. By: Petronel Smit. 1st December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Junior mining company Firestone Diamonds aims to sell about 12 000 ct of diamonds from the Liqhobong mine in Lesotho, operated by a 75%-owned subsidiary, at its first independent international diamond tender this week. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/firestone-holds-diamond-tender-in-botswana-2010-12-01

− Bannerman looking for Namibia uranium project partner. By Esmarie Swanepoel, 1st December 2010. PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Uranium hopeful Bannerman Resources has started the search for a project partner to assist in the development of its Etango uranium project, in Namibia. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/bannerman-looking-for-namibia-uranium-project-partner-2010-12-01

− African Barrick studies underground mine at North Mara. By: Mariaan Webb, 2nd December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Tanzania-focused African Barrick Gold could potentially develop a “substantial” underground operation at its North Mara mine, CEO Greg Hawkins announced on Thursday. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/african-barrick-studies-underground-mine-at-north-mara-2010-12-02

− SA energy plan needs more private power – Anglo. By: Reuters, 2nd December 2010. JOHANNESBURG – Anglo American said on Thursday South Africa's new proposed 20-year energy resource plan needed to make more allowance for private power producers to help plug a dire power shortage in the country. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/sa-energy-plan-needs-more-private-power-anglo-2010-12-02

− Coal of Africa in talks to develop Chapudi project. By: Reuters, 2nd December 2010. LONDON – Coal of Africa said it is talks with partners to help develop the Chapudi coal project and other neighbouring assets in South Africa acquired from Rio Tinto. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/coal-of-africa-in-talks-to-develop-chapudi-project-2010-12-02

− Botswana agrees to Boseto plant capacity upgrade – Discovery. By: Loni Prinsloo. 2nd December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – ASX- and Aim-listed Discovery Metals on Thursday announced that it had received approval from the Botswana government to upgrade the capacity of its Boseto plant to three-million tons a year. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/botswana-agrees-to-boseto-plant-capacity-upgrade-discovery-2010-12-02

− Firestone Diamonds aims to raise £13m for Lesotho project. By: Petronel Smit. 3rd December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Junior mining company Firestone Diamonds announced on Friday that it aimed to raise £13-million before expenses by placing 52-million shares at 25p each. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/firestone-diamonds-aims-to-raise-13m-for-lesotho-project-2010-12-03

− Mozambique eyes economy boost from mining. By: Reuters, 3rd December 2010. LONDON – Mozambique expects its mining sector to increase as a share of GDP starting next year on the back of more ilmenite output and a planned production ramp-up of coal, its mining minister said. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/mozambique-eyes-economy-boost-from-mining-2010-12-03

− Namibia’s mining growth to boost demand for electricity. By: Petronel Smit, 3rd December 2010. Namibia’s electricity demand is expected to increase rapidly on the back of an expansion in the country’s mining industry, particularly in the uranium sector. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/namibias-mining-growth-to-boost-demand-for-electricity-2010-12-03

− India's Tata Steel says Riversdale stake strategic. By Reuters, 6th December 2010. MUMBAI – India's Tata Steel said on Monday it viewed its stake in Africa-focused Riversdale Mining as a strategic investment and will take appropriate action as per the situation. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/indias-tata-steel-says-rivesdale-stake-strategic-2010-12-06

− India Sterlite Industries buys zinc mine in Namibia. By Reuters, 6th December 2010. MUMBAI - India's Sterlite Industries has acquired a zinc mine in Namibia from Anglo American Plc for a cash consideration of about $707-million, the Indian firm said in a statement. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/india-sterlite-industries-buys-zinc-mine-in-namibia-2010-12-06


− Rio Tinto in talks over A$3,5bn Riversdale Mining takeover. By Esmarie Swanepoel, 6th December 2010. PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Africa-focused Riversdale Mining surged nearly 16% on the ASX on Monday, after the miner confirmed that it was in discussions with Rio Tinto regarding a possible A$3,5-billion takeover transaction. Riversdale, which owns coking coal projects in Mozambique, received a A$15-a-share approach from Rio Tinto, chairperson Michael O’Keeffe said in a statement. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/corporate-activity-rio-tinto-in-talks-to-buy-riversdale-mining-2010-12-06

− Namakwa raises $55m for Lesotho project, to repay loan. By Petronel Smit, 7th December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Africa-focused Namakwa Diamonds on Tuesday announced a $55-million capital raising to fund the development of a project in Lesotho and to repay a loan. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/namakwa-raises-55m-for-lesotho-project-to-reduce-debt-2010-12-07

− Sheba gets exploration rights in Ethiopia. By Loni Prinsloo, 8th December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Sheba Exploration on Wednesday announced that it was granted an exclusive exploration license (EEL) for gold and base metals in northern Ethiopia. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/sheba-gets-exploration-rights-in-ethiopia-2010-12-08

− Zimbabwe govt to own 51% in all mines. By Reuters, 9th December 2010. HARARE – Zimbabwe's cabinet has agreed that the government will takeover all alluvial diamond mining in the country and own a 51% share in the mines extracting all other minerals, state media reported on Thursday. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/zimbabwe-govt-to-own-51-in-all-mines-paper-2010-12-09

− State mining company in coal offtake talks with Eskom. By Martin Creamer. 9th December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa’s State mining company, which the Cabinet has freed-up as an autonomous enterprise, is negotiating a coal offtake agreement with State-owned electricity utility Eskom, and studying rare earths opportunities in neighbouring Zimbabwe and Mozambique. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/freed-up-state-mining-company-in-eskom-coal-talks-eyeing-zimbabwe-mozambique-2010-12-09

− Liberia gold project has ‘strong economics’ – African Aura. By: Mariaan Webb. 14th December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – West Africa-focused African Aura is studying the feasibility of building Liberia’s first operating gold mine, producing at least 100 000 oz/y in the first five years. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/liberia-gold-project-has-strong-economics-african-aura-2010-12-14

− Impact to explore for platinum, nickel and copper in Botswana. By: Mariaan Webb. 14th December 2010. JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – ASX-listed explorer Impact Minerals will explore for deposits of platinum-group elements (PGEs), nickel and copper in Botswana in a joint venture (JV) with Manica Minerals. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/impact-to-explore-for-platinum-nickel-and-copper-in-botswana-2010-12-14

NEWS OF/ON THE REST OF THE WORLD 14. End to cheap coal closer than we thought? A report entitled "The End of Cheap Coal," published in the journal Nature by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley, suggests we may reach peak coal in the next two decades. The report assumes oil prices will remain high in the next two decades, that the rate of oil consumption will level for a few years before dropping, and that governments will make progress towards reaching carbon emissions goals. Even without these assumptions the authors suggest we may soon hit peak coal because inexpensive sources of coal are rapidly being used up. Their conclusion is that “energy policies relying on cheap coal have no future.” Most estimates of coal reserves suggest there is plenty to last at least a couple of hundred years, and the authors, who are both Fellows with the Post-Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, California, do not dispute this, but say using it will become progressively more expensive. They point to the fact that over the last twenty years or so the projected global coal supply has been falling faster than coal is consumed, suggesting the projections are inaccurate. For example, Germany and South Africa have reduced estimates of their recoverable reserves by a third over the last five years, since they have found some reserves previously thought to be economically recoverable are not. The US, with around 25 percent of global coal reserves, last updated its estimates in 1974. The authors point to the history of getting forecasts wrong, saying that official estimates of oil prices for 2010 issued in the late 1990s were less a third of the current oil price. With both oil and coal the problem is not that we are running out of supplies, but that prices rise and become volatile as we approach peak levels. Heinberg and Fridley suggest another factor at play is the mismatch between the locations of coal supply and demand. Global demand for cheap coal is fairly steady, but China’s demand is growing so rapidly it is unable to extract its own massive coal reserves fast enough and is increasingly sourcing supplies from Australia, the US, and elsewhere. The export and import of coal increases the prices at both ends. The authors want the prospect of an end to cheap coal to be considered seriously, especially as many energy decisions are based on the assumption that coal will remain cheap. Their first proposal is that the US coal reserves estimate be updated, along with the estimated costs of extracting the coal. They also urge countries to plan for higher coal prices, and consider the effect higher prices would have on the viability of clean coal technologies. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which is generally considered a conservative body aligned to the fossil fuel industries, also suggests that if global warming is to be limited to 2°C the demand for coal will need to peak by 2020 and drop to 2003 levels by 2035. More information: The end of cheap coal, Richard Heinberg and David Fridley, Nature 468, 367-369 (18 November 2010) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/468367a; Published online 17 November 2010 November 22, 2010 by Lin Edwards. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-cheap-coal-closer-thought.html

15. The Amazon: from wetland to river How do you turn a mega wetland into the world's largest river? By continental tilting, suggests an international team led by a University of Sydney group. PhD candidate Grace Shephard, Professor Dietmar Müller and a team of international colleagues have reported their discovery in the journal Nature Geoscience. The world's largest river, the Amazon, used to be a large wetland connected to the Caribbean until 14 million years ago, when the Amazon River as we know it today formed, flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. The uplift of the Andes mountains was assumed to be the main culprit causing this enormous change in continental drainage, blocking westward flow. In contrast, Shephard and her colleagues suggest that progressive continental tilting established a gently inclined drainage surface that forced water from a giant catchment to flow to the east, starting at about 14 million years ago. "We had a hunch that the ultimate forces leading to this fundamental shift in continental topography had

Satellite image of the mouth of the Amazon River.


something to do with the westward motion of South America over dense, sinking mantle rocks while the Atlantic Ocean opened up," she said. "We used a high-performance computer model to simulate the workings of this giant tectonic conveyor belt, with South America progressively being translated westward over an ancient subduction zone along the continent's west coast." Professor Müller said here, along the edge of the Pacific, ocean crust had plunged into the sticky rocks of the Earth's mantle for eons. "This process created a massive crustal graveyard deep inside the Earth, where huge masses of old, cold tectonic slabs are sinking, drawing the surface down," he said. "As South America made its way westward over this 'slab burial ground', the continent's northeast was progressively drawn down by several hundred meters, creating something akin to the world's largest water slide." Their work is significant in that it shows that the interplay between shifting continents and the slow convection of mantle rocks underneath, akin to croutons floating on a thick pumpkin soup, can fundamentally change the Earth's surface topography, river systems, and ultimately ecosystems through geological time. Could this happen in Australia? It's happened many times in the past. Eastern Australia is known to have swung up and down like a giant wobble board in response to moving over slab graveyards in the Earth's deep mantle, creating and later destroying large river systems like the one that's arguably formed Sydney's foundation: the Hawkesbury sandstone. More information: Paper online: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo1017.html Provided by University of Sydney. November 22, 2010. At: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-amazon-wetland-river.html

16. Study could mean greater anticipated global war ming

This is the type of marine stratus clouds off the South American coast that was studied in the model simulations. Credit: Image courtesy Cameron McNaughton

Global climate models disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect with increasing carbon dioxide. This is mainly because the models represent clouds differently. A new modeling approach successfully simulates the observed cloud fields in a key region for climate. The study finds a greater tendency for clouds to thin with global warming than in any of the current climate models. This means the expected warming may be greater than currently anticipated. Current state-of-the-art global climate models predict substantial warming in response to increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The models, though, disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect. The disagreement among models is mainly due to the different representation of clouds. Some models predict that global mean cloud cover will increase in a warmer climate and the increased reflection of solar radiation will limit the predicted global warming. Other models predict reduced cloudiness and magnified warming. In a paper that has just appeared in the Journal of Climate, researchers from the University of Hawaii Manoa (UHM) have assessed the performance of current global models in simulating clouds and have presented a new approach to determining the expected cloud feedbacks in a warmer climate.

Lead author Axel Lauer at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at UHM notes, "All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate. It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming." To study the clouds, the researchers applied a model representing only a limited region of the atmosphere over the eastern Pacific Ocean and adjacent land areas. The clouds in this region are known to greatly influence present climate, yet current global models do poorly in representing them. The regional model, developed at the IPRC, successfully simulates key features of the region's present-day cloud fields, including the observed response of clouds to El Nino. Having evaluated the model's simulation of present-day conditions, the researchers examined the response of simulated clouds in a warmer climate such as it might be in 100 years from now. The tendency for clouds to thin and cloud cover to reduce was more pronounced in this model than in any of the current global models. Co-author Kevin Hamilton concludes, "If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see." More information: Lauer, A., K. Hamilton, Y. Wang, V. T. Phillips, and R. Bennartz (2010), The Impact of Global Warming on Marine Boundary Layer Clouds over the Eastern Pacific - A Regional Model Study, Journal of Climate, Vol. 23, No. 21, 5844 Provided by University of Hawaii at Manoa. November 22, 2010. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-greater-global.html

17. Extending the life of oil reserves A research team led by the University of Bristol has used STFC's ISIS Neutron Source to come up with a new way to treat carbon dioxide (CO2), so that it can be used in efficient and environmentally friendly methods for extracting oil. These new CO2 soluble additives can also be used to reduce the environmental damage caused by every day industrial processes such as food processing and the manufacture of electronics. The results of this work are published in the journal Langmuir. The researchers have developed a soap-like additive for CO2 that turns it into a viable solvent for commercial-scale enhanced oil recovery to increase the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from oil fields. "Carbon dioxide is useful in enhanced oil recovery as it is able to flow through the pores in the rock much more easily than water," said Professor Julian Eastoe from the University of Bristol. "The additive, a surfactant, will help thicken the carbon dioxide, which is vital for this process, allowing it to flow through the rock more efficiently. There is also a useful side effect of our ability to use CO2 in this way, as in the future the process will take carbon dioxide generated by industrial activity from the atmosphere and lock it deep underground. Getting longer life out of existing oil reserves will also give more time for research into replacements into non-carbon energy sources such as solar or hydrogen." Minister for Science and Universities David Willetts said: "This shows what science can do for the environment. It's why the Government has protected the science budget. In particular it shows how financing core science facilities can lead to many different projects with valuable applications." Liquid CO2 is increasingly being used industrially to replace common petrochemical solvents because it requires less processing and it can be easily recycled. The difficulty has been that in order to operate effectively as a solvent, carbon dioxide needs additives, many of which are in themselves, damaging to the environment. This new development by an international team including scientists from Bristol University led by Professor Julian Eastoe, from the University of Pittsburgh led by Professor Bob Enick and ISIS scientists Dr Sarah Rogers and Dr Richard Heenan provides a solution. The project has been funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the US Department of Energy to explore using high pressure CO2 to extract residual oil retained in the pores of rock. November 23, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-life-oil-reserves.html


18. 'M8' earthquake simulation breaks computational records, promises better quake models A multi-disciplinary team of researchers has presented the world's most advanced earthquake shaking simulation at the Supercomputing 2010 (SC10) conference held this week in New Orleans. The research was selected as a finalist for the Gordon Bell prize, awarded at the annual conference for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications. The "M8" simulation represents how a magnitude 8.0 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault will shake a larger area, in greater detail, than previously possible. Perhaps most importantly, the development of the M8 simulation advances the state-of-the-art in terms of the speed and efficiency at which such calculations can be performed. The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) at the University of Southern California (USC) was the lead coordinator in the project. San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) researchers provided the high-performance computing and scientific visualization expertise for the simulation. Scientific details of the earthquake were developed by scientists at San Diego State University (SDSU). Ohio State University (OSU) researchers were also

This image shows detail from the M8 simulation. To view a video simulation go to http://www.scivee.tv/node/21179. Credit: Southern California Earthquake Center.

part of the collaborative effort to improve the efficiency of the software involved. While this specific earthquake has a low probability of occurrence, the improvements in technology required to produce this simulation will now allow scientists to simulate other more likely earthquakes scenarios in much less time than previously required. Because such simulations are the most important and widespread applications of high performance computing for seismic hazard estimation currently in use, the SCEC team has been focused on optimizing the technologies and codes needed to create them.

November 22, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-m8-earthquake-simulation-quake.html

19. Size of mammals exploded after dinosaur extinct ion

The largest land mammals that ever lived, Indricotherium and Deinotherium, would have towered over the living African elephant. The tallest on diagram, Indricotherium, an extinct rhino relative, lived during the Eocene to the Oligocene Epoch (37 to 23 million years ago) and reached a mass of 15,000 kg, while Deinotherium (an extinct proboscidean, related to modern elephants) was around from the late-Miocene until the early Pleistocene (8.5 to 2.7 million years ago) and weighed as much as 17,000 kg. Credit: Alison Boyer/Yale University

Researchers demonstrate that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago made way for mammals to get bigger - about a thousand times bigger than they had been. The study, which is published in the prestigious journal Science, is the first to show this new pattern of increased body size of mammals after the exit of the dinosaurs. "Basically, the dinosaurs disappear and all of a sudden there is nobody else eating the vegetation. That's an open food source and mammals start going for it, and it's more efficient to be an herbivore when you're big," says paper co-author Dr. Jessica Theodor, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. Theodor says as well as confirming the dramatic growth in mammalian size after the dinosaurs, the study shows that the ecosystem is able to reset itself relatively quickly. "You lose dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and within 25 million years the system is reset to a new maximum for the animals that are there in terms of body size. That's actually a pretty short time frame, geologically speaking," she says. "That's really rapid evolution." Theodor says mammals grew from a maximum of about 10 kilograms when they were sharing the earth with dinosaurs to a maximum of 17 tonnes afterwards. "Nobody has ever demonstrated that this pattern is really there. People have talked about it but nobody has ever gone back and done the math," says Theodor one of the 20 researchers from around the world who worked on the study. "We went through every time period and said OK, for this group of mammals what's the biggest one? And then we estimated its body mass."

In order to document how big mammals grew after the 'competitive release' caused by the extinction of dinosaurs, researchers collected data on the maximum size for major groups of land mammals on each continent, including Perissodactyla, odd-toed ungulates such as horses and rhinos; Proboscidea, which includes elephants, mammoth and mastodon; Xenarthra, the anteaters, tree sloths, and armadillos; as well as a number of other extinct groups. The results give clues as to what sets the limits on mammal size on land; the amount of space available to each animal and the climate they live in. The colder the climate, the bigger the mammals seem to get, as bigger animals conserve heat better. It also shows that no one group of mammals dominates the largest size class – the absolute largest mammal belongs to different groups over time and space.

Provided by University of Calgary. November 25, 2010. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-size-mammals-dinosaur-extinction.html

20. Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate is sue In this Oct. 23, 2010 photo, Russian scientist Sergey Zimov walks on a Siberian lake near the town of Chersky, Russia, where methane bubbles are trapped under the ice. Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the last few decades, as the Earth has gradually warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane _ a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide _ at a perilous rate. (AP Photo/Arthur Max)

The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame. Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - at a perilous rate. Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere. "Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together," says the scientist, Sergey Zimov - "here" being

the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia's gray horizon, as seen from Zimov's research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.

November 21, 2010 By ARTHUR MAX , Associated Press . More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-leaking-siberian-ice-tricky-climate.html


21. Horse-dragon and colossal iguana: Scientists id entify new beaked herbivorous dinosaurs Paleontologists from the University of Pennsylvania and the Utah Geological Survey have described two skeletons representing two new species of beaked herbivorous dinosaurs, known as iguanodonts, from Utah. The new dinosaurs were preserved in rocks dating to the Early Cretaceous Epoch, ~145.5 – 99.6 million years ago. The new specimens help illuminate the natural history of North American iguanodonts. One of the new dinosaurs has been named Hippodraco scutodens. The first part of the name is a combination of Greek and Latin words meaning “horse-dragon,” in reference to the long, low shape of the animal’s skull, overall resembling that of a horse. The second part of the name is from the Latin meaning “shield-tooth,” in reference to the oblong, shield-shaped tooth crowns in the animal’s jaws, said Andrew McDonald, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. Hippodraco is known from a nearly complete, though crushed, skull and bones of the vertebral column and limbs; this skeleton comes from an animal about 15 feet long, though it was probably not fully grown, McDonald said. A unique shelf of bone

Skull of Hippodraco (Andrew McDonald)

extending along the lower jaw parallel to the tooth row sets Hippodraco apart from other iguanodonts. Hippodraco lived approximately 125 million years ago, at the same time as the predator Utahraptor. The other new iguanodont has been named Iguanacolossus fortis. When the namesake of the iguanodonts, Iguanodon itself, was named in 1825, its teeth were compared to those of the living iguana lizard. Thus, the name Iguanacolossus combines “iguana” with the Latin colossus. November 23, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-horse-dragon-colossal-iguana-scientists-beaked.html

22. Satellites reveal differences in sea level rise s

Relative sea-level change rates in millimeters per year. Credit: GRACE

Glaciers are retreating and parts of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are melting into the ocean. This must result in a rise in sea level, but by how much? A new measurement of the gravity everywhere around the globe with a pair of orbiting satellites provides the first ever map detailing the rises across different parts of the globe. According to the new results, the annual world average sea level rise is about 1 millimeter, or about 0.04 of an inch. In some areas, such as the Pacific Ocean near the equator and the waters offshore from India and north of the Amazon River, the rise is larger. In some areas, such as the east coast of the United States, the sea level has actually dropped a bit over the past decade. The surface of the sea is a constantly shifting fabric. To achieve a truer sense of how much the sea is changing in any one place, scientists measure the strength of gravity in that place. Measuring gravity over a patch of ocean or dry land provides an estimate of how much mass lies in that region. The measured mass depends on the presence of such things as mountains, glaciers, mineral deposits, and oceans. If the gravity measurement for a place is changing, this could mean that the place is losing mass because of a retreating glacier or gaining mass if, as in the ocean surrounding Antarctica, new melt water is streaming in.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE for short, consists of a pair of satellites moving in an orbit that takes them over the South and North Poles. The two craft, nicknamed Tom and Jerry after the television cartoon characters, send constant signals to each other to determine their relative spacing to about 10 microns -- one-tenth the width of a human hair -- over a distance of 130 miles. If the first craft flies above a slightly more weighty area of the Earths' surface -- like a mountain range -- it will be tugged a bit out of place, an effect picked up by a change in the relative spacing of the craft.

In these way monthly gravity maps of pieces of land or ocean about 180 miles wide can be made with high precision. The new report for the years of 2003-09 looks at how much mass has been lost from land areas and how much mass has been gained by ocean areas. One of the authors of the report, Riccardo Riva from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said that average annual rise in sea level rise due to meltwater entering the ocean is about 1 millimeter, but that an additional rise will come from that fact that as the average temperature rises so does the ocean temperature, which in turn causes the volume of the ocean to increase. November 24, 2010 By Phillip F. Schewe. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-satellites-reveal-differences-sea.html

23. Soil microbes define dangerous rates of climate change The rate of global warming could lead to a rapid release of carbon from peatlands that would further accelerate global warming.

Two recent studies published by the Mathematics Research Institute at the University of Exeter highlight the risk that this 'compost bomb' instability could pose, and calculate the conditions under which it could occur. The same Exeter team is now exploring a possible link between the theories described in the studies and last summer's devastating peatland fires in Russia. The first paper is published in the European Journal of Social Science and the second in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. The first paper by Catherine Luke and Professor Peter Cox describes the basic phenomenon. When soil microbes decompose organic matter they release heat – this is why compost heaps are often warmer than the air around them. The compost bomb instability is a runaway feedback that occurs when the heat is generated by microbes more quickly than it can escape to the atmosphere. This in turn requires that the active decomposing soil layer is thermally-insulated from the atmosphere. Catherine Luke explains: "The compost bomb instability is most likely to occur in drying organic soils covered by an insulating lichen or moss layer". The second paper led by Dr Sebastian Wieczorek and Professor Peter Ashwin, also of the University of Exeter, proves there is a dangerous rate of global warming beyond which the compost bomb instability occurs. This is in contrast to the general belief that tipping points correspond to dangerous levels of global warming. Sebastian Wieczorek explains: "The compost bomb instability is a novel type of rate-dependent climate tipping point". The Exeter team is now modelling the potential impact of the compost bomb instability on future climate change, including the potential link to the Russian peatland fires.It is also working to identify other rate-dependent tipping points. More information: -- Soil carbon and climate change: from the Jenkinson effect to the compost-bomb instability http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2389.2010.01312.x/abstract -- Excitability in ramped systems: the compost-bomb instability http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11/24/rspa.2010.0485.full.pdf+html Provided by University of Exeter. November 29, 2010. At: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-soil-microbes-dangerous-climate.html


24. The oldest salt mine known to date located in A zerbaijan

Duzdagi - Entrance to the modern mine. Credit: Séverine Sanz / CNRS

French archeologists have recently provided proof that the Duzdagi salt deposits, situated in the Araxes Valley in Azerbaijan, were already being exploited from the second half of the 5th millennium BC. It is therefore the most ancient exploitation of rock salt attested to date. And, to the researchers' surprise, intensive salt production was carried out in this mine at least as early as 3500 BC. This work, conducted in collaboration with the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and published on 1st December 2010 in the journal TUBA-AR, should help to elucidate how the first complex civilizations, which emerged between 4500 BC and 3500 BC in the Caucasus, were organized. The economic and symbolic importance of salt in ancient and medieval times is well known. Recent discoveries have shown that salt most probably played a predominant role in protohistoric societies, in other words those that preceded the appearance of writing. How is salt obtained? The two most widely used techniques are based on the extraction of rock salt, in other words a sedimentary deposit containing a high concentration of edible salt, and the collection of sun-dried salt in salt marshes, for example. Knowledge of the techniques used in former times to exploit raw materials such as salt, obsidian or copper enables archeologists to deduce

essential information on the needs and the level of complexity of ancient societies. In the Caucasus, the first traces of intensive exploitation of rock salt appeared at the very moment when these protohistoric societies were undergoing profound economic and technological changes, particularly with regard to the development, for the first time, of copper metallurgy. November 29, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-oldest-salt-date-azerbaijan.html

25. Researchers reveal way in which possible earthq uakes can be predicted Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who have been examining what happens in a "model earthquake" in their laboratory have discovered that basic assumptions about friction that have been accepted for hundreds of years are just wrong. Their findings provide a new means for replicating how earth ruptures develop and possibly enabling prediction of coming severe earthquakes. "The findings have a wide variety of implications for materials science and engineering and could help researchers understand how earthquakes occur and how severely they may develop along a fault line," said Jay Fineberg, the Max Born Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University. The work by Fineberg, his graduate student Oded Ben-David and fellow researcher Gil Cohen, has been published in an article in Science magazine. An article based on their work also has been published online in Wired magazine. For centuries, physicists have thought that the amount of force needed to push an object in order to make it slide across a surface is determined by a number called the coefficient of friction, which is the ratio between the forces pushing sideways and pushing down (basically, how much the object weighs). First described by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century and redefined a few hundred years later, these laws are so widely accepted that consistently appear in introductory physics textbooks. But, when Ben-David tried to check whether these "laws" work at different points along a block's contact surface, the laws fell apart. In carefully controlled lab experiments, Ben-David found that points along the contact surface could sustain up to five times as much sideways force as the coefficient of friction predicted, and the object still wouldn't budge. The experiments actually studied two contacting blocks as they just start to slide apart. Although the blocks look like they are smoothly touching, in reality they are only connected by numerous, discrete, tiny contact points, whose total area is hundreds of times less than the blocks' apparent contact area. Performing sensitive measurement of the stresses at contacting points, the researchers noted that the strength at each point along the contact surface could be much larger than the coefficient of friction allows before the contacts ruptured and the block began to slide. Furthermore, the contacts don't all break at the same time. They, instead rupture one after another in a cadence that sets the rupture speed. These rapidly moving ruptures are close cousins of earthquakes, Fineberg said. The blocks in effect represent two tectonic plates pushing one against each other, and when the force between them is enough to disengage the plates, the resulting contact surface rupture sends shock waves through the blocks, exactly as in an earthquake. November 30, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-reveal-earthquakes.html

26. How to soften a diamond After hundreds of years, German researchers at the Fraunhofer IWM in Freiburg have managed to decode the atomic mechanism behind diamond grinding.

It is the hardest material in the world, and yet it can not only be used to cut other materials, but can be machined itself. Already over 600 years ago first diamonds were cut and the same technique is still used to transform precious stones into exquisite jewelry and later into unrivaled industrial tools. Dr. Lars Pastewka's and Prof. Michael Moseler's team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg/Germany can now reveal the secret of why it is that diamonds can be machined. The team published its findings in the current online issue of Nature Materials. This work represents major progress in tribology -the research of friction and wear. Despite the great significance for industry the scientific basics of tribology are poorly understood. Diamonds have been ground by craftsmen for hundreds of years using cast iron wheels studded with fine diamond particles turning at around 30 meters per second at the outer rim. A highly tuned sense of sound and feeling enable an experienced diamond grinder to hold the rough diamond at just the right angle to achieve a smooth and polished surface. The fact that diamonds react directionally has been known for a long time, says Lars Pastewka. The physical phenomenon is known as anisotropy. The carbon atoms in the diamond lattice form lattice planes, some of which are easier to polish than others, depending on the angle at which the diamond is held. For hundreds of years, researchers have been looking for a logical way of explaining this empirical phenomenon, and have so far been unsuccessful. Equally, no one has been able to explain why it is possible that the hardest material in the world can be machined. The scientists in Freiburg have answered both these questions with the help of a newly developed calculation method. Michael Moseler explains the method in layman's terms: "The moment a diamond is ground, it is no longer a diamond." Due to the high-speed friction between the rough diamond and the diamond particles in the cast iron wheel, a completely different "glass-like carbon phase" is created on the surface of the precious stone in a mechanochemical process. The

Material removal mechanism during diamond polishing: a sharp-edged diamond particle (gray atoms in the upper left) »peels off« a dust particle from the glass-like phase (green atoms) at the surface of the diamond (gray atoms in the lower part of the figure). At the same time, oxygen from the air (red atoms) reacts with the carbon chains (brown atoms) at the surface to form carbon dioxide. Credit: Fraunhofer IWM

speed at which this material phase appears depends on the crystal orientation of the rough diamond. "This is where anisotropy comes in," explains Moseler. November 29, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-soften-diamond.html


27. Researchers find evidence of fire in Antarctic ice A team of scientists studying Antarctic ice cores have found surprising evidence of a fluctuating pattern of carbon monoxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere caused by biomass burning in the Southern Hemisphere over the past 650 years. In an article published Dec. 2 in the early online version of the journal Science, John E. Mak, Associate Professor at Stony Brook’s Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and co-authors Jerome Chappellaz, Laboratory for Glaciology and Geophysics of the Environment, CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), Grenoble, France; Zhihui Wang (formerly a Stony Brook PhD student, now a postdoctoral scientist); and, Key Hong Park (currently a PhD student at Stony Brook), found that traces of carbon monoxide isotopes in the ice samples show that the amount of biomass burning – fires fueled by plant materials such as wood, peat and grasses resulting from natural forest fires and man-made cooking and communal fires – did not gradually rise over time, but rather rose and fell across the centuries. “It was a big surprise. We certainly weren’t looking for that,” said Professor Mak. “It’s kind of a mystery.” While the biomass burning trends were similar to those found in previous studies that measured other tracers of biomass burning, this was the first study to measure variations in stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen, the first such measurements for carbon monoxide collected from ice core samples. The results indicated “that large variations in the degree of biomass burning in the Southern Hemisphere occurred during the last 650 years, with a decrease by about 50% in the 1600s, an increase of about 100% by the late 1800s, and another decrease by about 70% from the late 1800s to present day.” The evidence suggests that there was less biomass burning in the 20th century than in the century to century-and-a-half preceding it. “One might think there should clearly have been more biomass burning in the Southern Hemisphere during the Industrial and post-Industrial eras. It seems logical to conclude that,” Dr. Mak said. However, both the CO measurement study and previous studies that measured charcoal particles in sediment and methane in trapped ice in the Southern Hemisphere have pointed the other way. The research team studied two ice cores from two different locations in Antarctica. A natural follow-up to the study will be “to extend the record further back in time in Antarctica, and also we clearly want to do a similar type of study in the Northern Hemisphere from ice cores in Greenland,” Dr. Mak said.”That would be more difficult in the Northern Hemisphere because of the potential for complications in the Northern Hemisphere that we don’t have in the Southern Hemisphere. There’s more going on in the Northern Hemisphere.

Provided by Stony Brook University. December 2, 2010. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-evidence-antarctic-ice.html

28. New life form found on Earth: Deadly arsenic br eathes life into organisms (Update) Evidence that the toxic element arsenic can replace the essential nutrient phosphorus in biomolecules of a naturally occurring bacterium expands the scope of the search for life beyond Earth, according to Arizona State University scientists who are part of a NASA-funded research team reporting findings in the Dec. 2 online Science Express. It is well established that all known life requires phosphorus, usually in the form of inorganic phosphate. In recent years, however, astrobiologists, including Arizona State University professors Ariel Anbar and Paul Davies, have stepped up conversations about alternative forms of life. Anbar and Davies are coauthors of the new paper, along with ASU associate research scientist Gwyneth Gordon. The lead author is Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a former postdoctoral scientist in Anbar's research group at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"Life as we know it requires particular chemical elements and excludes others," says Anbar, a biogeochemist and astrobiologist who directs the astrobiology program at ASU. "But are those the only options? How different could life be?" Anbar and Wolfe-Simon are among a group of researchers who are testing the limits of life's chemical requirements. "One of the guiding principles in the search for life on other planets, and of our astrobiology program, is that we should 'follow the elements,'" says Anbar. "Felisa's study teaches us that we ought to think harder about which elements to follow." Wolfe-Simon adds: "We took what we do know about the 'constants' in biology, specifically that life requires the six elements CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur) in three components, namely DNA, proteins and fats, and used that as a basis to ask experimentally testable hypotheses even here on Earth."

From this viewpoint, rather than highlighting the conventional view of the "diversity" of life, all life on Earth is essentially identical, she says. However, the microbe the researchers have discovered can act differently. Davies has previously speculated that forms of life different from our own, dubbed "weird life," might even exist side-by-side with known life on Earth, in a sort of "shadow biosphere." The particular idea that arsenic, which lies directly below phosphorous on the periodic table, might substitute for phosphorus in life on Earth, was proposed by Wolfe-Simon and developed into a collaboration with Davies and Anbar. Their hypothesis was published in January 2009, in a paper titled "Did nature also choose arsenic?" in the International Journal of Astrobiology. December 2, 2010 by Kerry Sheridan, More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-nasa-discovery-element-life.html

29. New theory on the origin of water on Earth

Structure of olivine, a mineral commonly found in interstellar dust clouds, against the Earth

A new theory on the source of terrestrial water has been validated by an international team led by Professor Nora de Leeuw (University College London) using computational research. Below Professor de Leeuw describes the implications of the breakthrough. “The origin of water on our planet is not only of interest for our understanding of the evolution of our own planet and life thereon, but even more so for the increasing exploration of other planets within our solar system and the discovery of potential planetary systems in other galaxies. Having spent half a lifetime teaching his students the accepted versions of the origin of our planetary water, which increasingly did not fit the available evidence, Dr Mike Drake at the University of Arizona suggested an alternative hypothesis: that water was already present at the surfaces of interstellar dust grains when they accreted to form our planet. Although this hypothesis fitted with all available evidence, it would only be feasible if the adhesion of water to the dust grains was sufficiently strong to survive the harsh conditions in the interstellar dust clouds where planets form. Computer simulations by myself and colleagues in UCL, Arizona and Muenster on the adhesion of water to a mineral commonly found in the interstellar dust clouds, show that the kind of highly fractal surfaces found on the interstellar dust grains are indeed suitable for the strong retention of water under the extreme temperatures and pressure conditions prevalent in the accretion disk during planetary formation.

This work thus provides very strong evidence that the new hypothesis as to the delivery of water is correct: water was indeed present at the birth of our planet Earth rather than a latecomer once the planet had been formed.” More information: Paper online: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2010/CC/C0CC02312D Provided by University College London. December 3, 2010. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-theory-earth.html


30. What the Frack? Natural Gas from Subterranean S hale Promises U.S. Energy Independence - With Environmental Costs

Natural gas cracked out of shale deposits may mean the U.S. has a stable supply for a century--but at what cost to the environment and human health?

DISH, Tex.—A satellite broadcasting company bought the rights to rename this town a few years ago in exchange for a decade of free television, but it is another industry that dominates the 200 or so residents: natural gas. Five facilities perched on the north Texas town's outskirts compress the gas newly flowing to the surface from the cracked Barnett Shale more than two kilometers beneath the surface, collectively contributing a brew of toxic chemicals to the air. It is because of places like DISH (formerly known as Clark) and similar sites from Colorado to Wyoming, that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has launched a new review of the practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". From compressor stations emitting known human carcinogens such as benzene to the poor lining of wells after drilling that has led some water taps to literally spout flames, the full set of activities needed to produce natural gas gives rise to a panoply of potential problems. The EPA study may examine everything from site selection to the ultimate disposal of the fluids used in fracking. By David Biello March 30, 2010. More at ScientificAmerican, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shale-gas-and-hydraulic-fracturing&sc=emailfriend

31. Sewage water bacteria helps fill 'missing link' in early evolution A common group of bacteria found in acid bogs and sewage treatment plants has provided scientists with evidence of a ‘missing link’ in one of the most important steps in the evolution of life on earth - the emergence of cells with a nucleus containing DNA (eukaryotic cells). For billions of years, bacteria (single celled organisms without a nucleus) were the only cellular life form on earth. Then, about 1.6 – 2.1 billion years ago, eukaryotic cells emerged. These cells (with a nucleus) heralded the evolution of multi-cellular life on earth including: plants, insects, animals and humans. Until now scientists have been unable to identify an ‘ancestral cell’ linking the early prokaryotes with the later eukaryotes, so fusion theory - where two cells merge to form a new cell – is often put forward to explain the appearance of these new cell types. But new findings by scientists from University College Dublin and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, published in the journal Science (26 November 2010), have put paid to the fusion theory explanation, and suggest that an intermediate or ‘missing link’ cell did exist all those billions of years ago. “Our discovery means that the appearance of eukaryotic cells on earth can be explained by Darwinian evolution over billions of years rather than a ‘big bang’ fusion theory,” says cell biologist Dr Emmanuel Reynaud, from the UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin, one of the co-authors of the scientific paper.

A Planctomycete: a member of the PVC [Planctomycetes, Verrucomicrobiae, Chlamydiae] group of bacteria

“Our analysis shows that PVC [Planctomycetes, Verrucomicrobiae, Chlamydiae] bacteria, members of which are commonly found in today’s sewage treatment plants or acid bogs, represent an intermediate type of cell structure. They are slightly bigger than other known bacteria, and they also divide more slowly.” “The structure of PVC suggests that it is an ancestor of a ‘missing link’ cell which connected prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells along an evolutionary path all those billions of years ago,” says Dr Damien P Devos, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, the other scientist involved in the findings. More information: “Intermediate steps” – Published in Science (26 Nov 2010). Damien P Devos, European Molecular Biology Labratory, Heidelberg, Germany; and Emmanuel G Reynaud, UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin, Ireland. Provided by University College Dublin. December 7, 2010. In: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-sewage-bacteria-link-early-evolution.html

32. Bizarre fossil crocodile dispels notion that th ese reptiles are static and unchanging We all know that crocodiles are reptiles with long snouts, conical teeth, strong jaws and long tails. But according to researchers at Stony Brook University in New York, we don't know what we thought we knew. Rather, some crocodiles possessed a dazzling array of adaptations that resulted in unique and sometimes bizarre anatomy, including blunt, pug-nosed snouts, pudgy bodies and short tails. These anatomical adaptations of the incredibly diverse group of reptiles called notosuchian crocodyliforms are brilliantly illuminated in a new Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. This massive, richly illustrated volume, edited by Drs. David W. Krause and Nathan J. Kley of Stony Brook, clearly dispels the notion that crocodiles are static, unchanging "living fossils."

Skeletal reconstruction of Simosuchus clarki in side view (artwork by Lucille Betti-Nash).

The volume, which gives an account of fossil crocodyliform anatomy that is unprecedented in its thoroughness, is set for publication on December 8, 2010. The epitome of crocodyliform anomaly is represented by Simosuchus clarki, which lived in Madagascar at the end of the “Age of Dinosaurs” (about 66 million years ago). First described preliminarily in 2000 from a well-preserved skull and partial skeleton, Simosuchus shattered the crocodyliform mold with its blunt snout, leaf-shaped teeth, and short, tank-like body covered in a suit of bony armor. “Simosuchus is easily the most bizarre crocodyliform ever found,” declared Dr. Christopher Brochu, a leading expert on fossil crocodiles from the University of Iowa. Over the next decade, expeditions to Madagascar recovered more skulls and skeletons, now representing nearly every bone of Simosuchus. A reconstruction of this uncommonly complete fossil reptile and an interpretation of its place in the crocodile evolutionary tree became the subject of the new volume. December 8, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-bizarre-fossil-crocodile-dispels-notion.html

33. Tiny organisms give big warning about planet he alth San Francisco State University scientists are studying whether a hardworking microscopic organism that helps rid the planet of too much carbon dioxide will continue to work so well in the year 2100, when the Earth’s oceans are expected to be more acidic. At the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies (RTC), scientists have created large tanks of specially mixed seawater that simulates the future ocean. Added to these tanks are microscopic phytoplankton, which play a crucial role in the process that allows the oceans to remove carbon dioxide or CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere. The chalky shell that this phytoplankton forms, called a cocolithophore, absorbs CO2 and sinks to the ocean floor, where the gas remains trapped. But growing levels of acid in the ocean, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, are now compromising the quality of the shell and its ability to absorb CO2. "It's been estimated that this organism is involved in about 85 percent of the transfer of greenhouse gasses to deep water," said Professor of Biology Edward Carpenter. "If it wasn't for phytoplankton like this, we would be cooked." The research by the RTC team, which also includes Professor of Biology Jonathon Stillman and Professor of

A magnification of the cocolithophore, or shell, of microscopic phytoplankton

Chemistry Tomoko Komada, is funded by the National Science Foundation. Provided by San Francisco State University. December 8, 2010. In http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-tiny-big-planet-health.html


34. Gradients in the Earth's outermost core Evidence that the outermost portion of the Earth’s core is stratified is provided by earthquake data reported by scientists at the University of Bristol this week in Nature. The Earth's core is composed mainly of iron, but it is also known to contain a small amount of lighter elements, such as oxygen and sulphur. As the Earth’s inner core solidified, it is thought to have expelled most of these light elements, which then migrated up through the liquid outer core, perhaps becoming concentrated in the outermost portion of the core, near the core/mantle boundary. Professor George Helffrich and Satoshi Kaneshima observed seismic waves which travelled through the outermost core, from earthquakes in South America and the southwestern Pacific Ocean, recorded at arrays of seismometers in Japan and northern Europe. The speeds at which seismic waves travelled through the outer core at different depths suggest that it is not a homogenous liquid, but that the uppermost 300 kilometres or so of the core is stratified, with the portion nearest the core/mantle boundary containing up to five per cent by weight light elements.

This stratification would affect temperature gradients in the outermost core and have implications for our understanding of the thermal evolution of the core and lowermost mantle. More information: Outer-core compositional stratification from observed core wave speed profiles by George Helffrich and Satoshi Kaneshima in Nature. Provided by University of Bristol. December 8, 2010. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-gradients-earth-outermost-core.html

35. Other stories!!!! - Global CO2 emissions back on the rise in 2010: study. November 21, 2010. Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – the main contributor to global

warming – show no sign of abating and may reach record levels in 2010, according to a study led by the University of Exeter (UK). http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-global-co2-emissions.html

- Terrifying pterosaurs were fragile in flight. November 23, 2010. Pterosaurs, the largest creatures ever to take to the skies, were adept fliers in a balmy breeze but would have crashed in stormy weather, according to a study published Wednesday. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-pterosaurs-fragile-flight.html

- Secrets of evolution extracted. November 23, 2010. Massey University's newest Maori PhD, Simon Hills, has taken shell collecting to a new level. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-secrets-evolution.html

- LIDAR applications in coastal morphology and hazard assessment. November 23, 2010. Southampton scientists along with colleagues in New Zealand have used a sophisticated optical mapping technique to identify and accurately measure changes in coastal morphology following a catastrophic series of landslides. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-lidar-applications-coastal-morphology-hazard.html

- Predicting sea level rise: Understanding how icebergs form could lead to better forecasts. November 23, 2010. In an effort to understand how fast sea level could rise as the climate warms, a University of Michigan researcher has developed a new theory to describe how icebergs detach from ice sheets and glaciers. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-sea-icebergs.html

- Cloud atlas: Scientist maps the meaning of mid-level clouds. November 23, 2010. Clouds play a major role in the climate-change equation, but they are the least-understood variable in the sky, observes a Texas A&M University geoscientist, who says mid-level clouds are especially understudied. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-cloud-atlas-scientist-mid-level-clouds.html

- Quartz crystal microbalances enable new microscale analytic technique. November 24, 2010. A new chemical analysis technique developed by a research group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses the shifting ultrasonic pitch of a small quartz crystal to test the purity of only a few micrograms of material. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-quartz-crystal-microbalances-enable-microscale.html

- Giants among us: Paper explores evolution of the world's largest mammals. November 25, 2010. The largest mammal that ever walked the Earth -- Indricotherium transouralicum, a hornless rhinoceros-like herbivore that weighed approximately seventeen tons and stood about eighteen feet high at the shoulder -- lived in Eurasia almost 34 million years ago. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-giants-paper-explores-evolution-world.html

- Researchers image atomic structural changes that control properties of sapphires. November 25, 2010. Materials scientists from Case Western Reserve University and the Institute of Solid State Research in Julich, Germany have produced particularly clear changes in the atomic structure of sapphire following deformation at high temperatures. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-image-atomic-properties-sapphires.html

- Large Hadron Collider experiments bring new insight into primordial universe. November 26, 2010. After less than three weeks of heavy-ion running, the three experiments studying lead ion collisions at the LHC have already brought new insight into matter as it would have existed in the very first instants of the Universe’s life. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-large-hadron-collider-insight-primordial.html

- Rainforest collapse drove reptile evolution. November 29, 2010. Global warming devastated tropical rainforests 300 million years ago. Now scientists report the unexpected discovery that this event triggered an evolutionary burst among reptiles -- and inadvertently paved the way for the rise of dinosaurs, 100 million years later. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-rainforest-collapse-drove-reptile-evolution.html

- Wind speed declining in Pacific Northwest: study. November 30, 2010. A new study led by Simon Fraser University shows evidence of declining wind speeds in areas across the Pacific Northwest. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-declining-pacific-northwest.html

- Some UFO sightings could be explained by ball lightning and other atmospheric phenomena, claims Australian astrophysicist Stephen Hughes. 1 December 2010, By Jonathan Amos. Some UFO sightings could be explained by ball lightning and other atmospheric phenomena, claims Australian astrophysicist Stephen Hughes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11877842

- Predicting motions and sounds of the ocean. December 1, 2010 By David L. Chandler. Ocean variability -- the perpetual changing of currents, temperatures, salinity and the contours of the seafloor -- alters the way sound travels through the water. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-motions-ocean.html

- Global sea-level rise at the end of the last Ice Age. December 1, 2010. Southampton researchers have estimated that sea-level rose by an average of about 1 metre per century at the end of the last Ice Age, interrupted by rapid 'jumps' during which it rose by up to 2.5 metres per century. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-global-sea-level-ice-age.html

- Many coastal wetlands likely to disappear this century. December 1, 2010. Many coastal wetlands worldwide -- including several on the U.S. Atlantic coast -- may be more sensitive than previously thought to climate change and sea-level rise projections for the 21st century. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-coastal-wetlands-century.html

- Researchers find mathematical patterns to forecast earthquakes. December 2, 2010. Researchers from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO) and the Universidad de Sevilla (US) have found patterns of behaviour that occur before an earthquake on the Iberian peninsula. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-mathematical-patterns-earthquakes.html

- Climate: UN report highlights ocean acidification. December 2, 2010. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels may bear a greater risk for the marine environment than thought, with wide-ranging impacts on reproduction, biodiversity richness and fisheries, a report at the UN climate talks here on Friday said. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-climate-highlights-ocean-acidification.html

- Ammonites were probably eaten by fellow cephalopods. December 3, 2010 by Lin Edwards. Fossilized ammonites found with bite marks in similar places on their shells suggest they were eaten by other cephalopods such as beaked squid, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the


Yorkshire Geological Society. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-ammonites-eaten-fellow-cephalopods.html - Scientists announce discovery of first horned dinosaur from South Korea. December 6, 2010. Scientists from South Korea, the United States and

Japan analyzed fossil evidence found in South Korea and published research describing a new horned dinosaur. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-scientists-discovery-horned-dinosaur-south.html

- Measuring air-sea exchange of carbon dioxide in the open ocean. December 6, 2010. A team led by scientists at the United Kingdom's National Oceanography Centre has measured the air-sea exchange of carbon dioxide in the open ocean at higher wind speed then anyone else has ever managed. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-sea-exchange-carbon-dioxide-ocean.html

- Undersea methane could be contributor to increased ocean acidity, researchers find. December 7, 2010. A North Carolina State University researcher has found that methane from “cold seeps” – undersea areas where fluids bubble up through sediments at the bottom of the ocean – could be contributing to the oceans’ increasing acidity and stressing already delicate undersea ecosystems. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-undersea-methane-contributor-ocean-acidity.html

- Life thrives in porous rock deep beneath the seafloor, scientists say. December 7, 2010 By Tim Stephens. Researchers have found compelling evidence for an extensive biological community living in porous rock deep beneath the seafloor. The microbes in this hidden world appear to be an important source of dissolved organic matter in deep ocean water, a finding that could dramatically change ideas about the ocean carbon cycle. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-life-porous-deep-beneath-seafloor.html

- New species of Pleistocene stork found on 'hobbit' island. December 8, 2010 by Lin Edwards. Fossils of a giant Pleistocene stork found on Flores island, Indonesia, belong to a new species according to scientists. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-species-pleistocene-stork-hobbit-island.html

- Ice-age reptile extinctions provide a glimpse of likely responses to human-caused climate change. December 9, 2010. A wave of reptile extinctions on the Greek islands over the past 15,000 years may offer a preview of the way plants and animals will respond as the world rapidly warms due to human-caused climate change, according to a University of Michigan ecologist and his colleagues. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-ice-age-reptile-extinctions-glimpse-responses.html

- Study suggests that trace amounts of water created oceans on Earth, other terrestrial planets. December 8, 2010 by Morgan Bettex, MIT News. One question that has baffled planetary scientists is how oceans formed on the surface of terrestrial planets like Earth — rocky planets made of silicate and metals. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-amounts-oceans-earth-terrestrial-planets.html

- Oldest fossils found in Cordillera Betica mountain range. December 13, 2010. Spanish researchers have found fossils of Ordovician conodonts dating to between 446 and 444 million years ago for the first time in the western Mediterranean. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-oldest-fossils-cordillera-betica-mountain.html

- Earthshaking possibilities may limit underground storage of carbon dioxide. December 13, 2010. Storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide underground in an effort to combat global warming may not be easy to do because of the potential for triggering small- to moderate-sized earthquakes, according to Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-earthshaking-possibilities-limit-underground-storage.html

- Colossal fossil: Museum's new whale skeleton represents decades of research. December 16, 2010. There's a whale of a new display at the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum of Natural History, a leviathan that represents a scientific saga of equally grand proportions. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-colossal-fossil-museum-whale-skeleton.html

NEWS OF/ON THE SPACE / ASTRONOMY

36. Scientists glimpse universe before the Big Bang In general, asking what happened before the Big Bang is not really considered a science question. According to Big Bang theory, time did not even exist before this point roughly 13.7 billion years ago. But now, Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that allows them to "see through" the Big Bang into what came before. The CMB is the radiation that exists everywhere in the universe, thought to be left over from when the universe was only 300,000 years old. In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that the CMB temperature has anisotropies, meaning that the temperature fluctuates at the level of about 1 part in 100,000. These fluctuations provide one of the strongest pieces of observational evidence for the Big Bang theory, since the tiny fluctuations are thought to have grown into the large-scale structures we see today. Importantly, these fluctuations are considered to be random due to the period of inflation that is thought to have occurred in the fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which made the radiation nearly uniform. However, Penrose and Gurzadyan have now discovered concentric circles within the CMB in which the temperature variation is much lower than expected, implying that CMB anisotropies are not completely

Black hole encounters would have repeated themselves several times, with the center of each event remaining at almost exactly the same point in the CMB sky, even when occurring in different aeons. The huge amounts of energy released would appear as spherical, low-variance radiation bursts in the CMB. Image credit: Gurzadyan and Penrose.

random. The scientists think that these circles stem from the results of collisions between supermassive black holes that released huge, mostly isotropic bursts of energy. The bursts have much more energy than the normal local variations in temperature. The strange part is that the scientists calculated that some of the larger of these nearly isotropic circles must have occurred before the time of the Big Bang. The discovery doesn't suggest that there wasn't a Big Bang - rather, it supports the idea that there could have been many of them. The scientists explain that the CMB circles support the possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of one “aeon” or universe triggers another Big Bang that starts another aeon, and the process repeats indefinitely. The black hole encounters that caused the circles likely occurred within the later stages of the aeon right before ours, according to the scientists.

November 23, 2010 by Lisa Zyga. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-scientists-glimpse-universe-big.html


37. Making stars: Studies show how cosmic dust and gas shape galaxy evolution This image from a supercomputer simulation shows galaxy formation occurring early in the history of the universe. The simulation was performed by Fermilab's Nickolay Gnedin and the University of Chicago’s Andrey Kravtsov at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign. Yellow dots are young stars. Blue fog shows the neutral gas. The red surface indicates molecular gas. The starry background has been added for aesthetic effect. Credit: Nick Gnedin

Astronomers find cosmic dust annoying when it blocks their view of the heavens, but without it the universe would be devoid of stars. Cosmic dust is the indispensable ingredient for making stars and for understanding how primordial diffuse gas clouds assemble themselves into full-blown galaxies. "Formation of galaxies is one of the biggest remaining questions in astrophysics," said Andrey Kravtsov, associate professor in astronomy & astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Astrophysicists are moving closer to answering that question, thanks to a combination of new observations and supercomputer simulations, including those conducted by Kravtsov and Nick Gnedin, a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Gnedin and Kravtsov published new results based on their simulations in the May 1, 2010 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, explaining why stars formed more slowly in the early history of the universe than they did much later. The paper quickly came to the attention of Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., director of the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy and co-discoverer of one of the key observational findings about star formation in galaxies, known as the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation. In the June 3, 2010 issue of Nature, Kennicutt noted that the recent spate of observations and theoretical simulations bodes well for the future of astrophysics. In their Astrophysical Journal paper, Kennicutt wrote, "Gnedin and Kravtsov take a significant step in unifying these observations and simulations, and provide a prime illustration of the recent progress in the subject as a whole."

November 22, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-stars-cosmic-gas-galaxy-evolution.html

38. Profiling the largest solar explosions

This aurora over Valkeakoski, Finland on September 15, 2000 resulted from the September 12 coronal mass ejection featured in the video above. Credit: Tom Eklund

Solar flares – they're big and they're fast. They can knock out a satellite or create a beautiful aurora. And the jury is still out on what causes these explosions. Flares, and the related coronal mass ejection, shoot energy, radiation, and magnetic fields out into space that can harm satellites or humans in space. Current observations aren't precise enough to determine whether the eruptions are driven by energy surging through the sun's surface, or by the sudden release of energy that has slowly accumulated in the atmosphere. Now, a new way of looking at old data has changed all that, but the results have created more mystery: There isn't enough energy passing through the surface during the eruption to drive the explosion. "In some sense, the idea that energy from below triggers the eruption is the easiest explanation – like a geyser," says Peter Schuck, a physicist who studies space weather at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But if the idea doesn't agree with what's observed, then it's wrong. End of story." November 22, 2010 By Karen C. Fox. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-profiling-largest-solar-explosions.html

39. T-dwarf stars finally reveal their mysterious s ecrets Astronomers have recently discovered an exotic star system which has shed some light on the mass and age of one of the systems rare stellar components. Using data from World’s largest optical telescope, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the team has had a new insight into the properties of the unusual T-dwarf stars. Its believed there are around 200 of these stars in our Galaxy but this is the first one to be discovered as part of a binary star system which has given astronomers an extra special insight into their properties. The system, that has been dubbed the ‘Rosetta Stone’ for T-dwarf stars, was studied by a team led by Dr Avril Day-Jones of the Universidad de Chile and included Dr David Pinfield of the University of Hertfordshire and other astronomers from the University of Montreal. They first identified the dwarf star, which has a temperature of around 1000 degrees compared to our Sun at 5500 degrees, in the UKIRT Infra-red Deep Sky Survey while searching for the coolest objects in the Galaxy. They found to their surprise, that the T-dwarf star was joined by a companion blue star, later revealed to be a cool white dwarf. The pair have now been given the ‘memorable‘ name of 1459+0857 A and B.

Artists impression of a binary star system (courtesy NASA)

The binary system is the first of its type to be discovered as, whilst both types of stars have been identified individually, they have never been found gravitationally bound to one another. The two stars are about 0.25 light years apart (compared to our nearest star at just over 4 light years away) but despite the distance and the weak gravitational interaction between the stars, they remain in orbit and will do so until the two stars slowly fizzle out to a dark and cool death.

November 23, 2010 by Mark Thompson. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-t-dwarf-stars-reveal-mysterious-secrets.html

40. Collisions of two galaxies may have formed Andr omeda New computer simulations suggest the nearest galactic neighbors to our own Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy, may have been shaped by the massive collision of two galaxies billions of years ago. The Milky Way lies in a region known to astronomers as the “Local Group,” which consists of almost 40 galaxies, including the two biggest: Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. Both are massive spiral galaxies. Astronomers have thought the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31), which is around 2.5 million light-years away from Earth, was formed by a merging of two smaller galaxies or a combination of many smaller mergers, but the ideas had never been tested or dated before. So a team of researchers in France and China decided to model how the galaxy might have evolved. November 26, 2010 by Lin Edwards. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-collisions-galaxies-andromeda-video.html

Image credit: GEPI, Observatoire de Paris / NAOC


41. Upcoming flybys could provide clues to Enceladu s interior What is going on inside Saturn’s moon Enceladus and what powers the icy geysers and jets? A pair of upcoming flybys by the Cassini spacecraft could help answer those questions. Radio instruments on board will measure the gravity field of Enceladus and focus particularly on the very intriguing south polar hot spot. November 24, 2010 by Nancy Atkinson. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-upcoming-flybys-clues-enceladus-interior.html

At least four distinct plumes of water ice spew out from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

42. Spitzer sees shrouded burst of stars

A brilliant burst of star formation is revealed in this image combining observations from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes. The collision of two spiral galaxies, has triggered this luminous starburst, the brightest ever seen taking place far away from the centers, or nuclei, of merging galaxies. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/H. Inami (SSC/Caltech)

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found a stunning burst of star formation that beams out as much infrared light as an entire galaxy. The collision of two spiral galaxies has triggered this explosion, which is cloaked by dust that renders its stars nearly invisible in other wavelengths of light. The starburst newly revealed by Spitzer stands as the most luminous ever seen taking place away from the centers, or nuclei, of merging parent galaxies. It blazes ten times brighter than the nearby Universe's previous most famous "off-nuclear starburst" that gleams in another galactic smashup known as the Antennae Galaxy. The new findings show that galaxy mergers can pack a real star-making wallop far from the respective galactic centers, where star-forming dust and gases typically pool. "This discovery proves that merging galaxies can generate powerful starbursts outside of the centers of the parent galaxies," says Hanae Inami, first author of a paper detailing the results in the July issue of The Astronomical Journal. Inami is a graduate student at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan and the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. She adds: "The infrared light emission of the starburst dominates its host galaxy and rivals that of the most luminous galaxies we see that are relatively close to our home, the Milky Way." "No matter how you slice it, this starburst is one of the most luminous objects in the local Universe," agrees Lee Armus, second author of the paper and a senior research astronomer also at the Spitzer Science Center.

November 23, 2010 By Adam Hadhazy. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-spitzer-shrouded-stars.html

43. Image: Rings around a crescent A crescent Saturn appears nestled within encircling rings in this Cassini spacecraft image. Clouds swirl through the atmosphere of the planet and a barely visible Prometheus orbits between the planet's main rings and its the thin F ring.

Saturn's moon Prometheus appears as a speck above the rings near the middle of the image.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 3 degrees below the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera on Sept. 14, 2010, and was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles, or 2.6 million kilometers, from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 100 degrees.

Provided by JPL/NASA

November 23, 2010. In http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-image-crescent.html

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

44. Early Universe was a liquid: First results from the Large Hadron Collider's ALICE experiment

Real lead-lead collision in ALICE

In an experiment to collide lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider physicists from the ALICE detector team including researchers from the University of Birmingham have discovered that the very early Universe was not only very hot and dense but behaved like a hot liquid. By accelerating and smashing together lead nuclei at the highest possible energies, the ALICE experiment has generated incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs, recreating the conditions that existed in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Scientists claim that these mini big bangs create temperatures of over ten trillion degrees. At these temperatures normal matter is expected to melt into an exotic, primordial ‘soup’ known as quark-gluon plasma.

These first results from lead collisions have already ruled out a number of theoretical physics models, including ones predicting that the quark-gluon plasma created at these energies would behave like a gas. Although previous research in the USA at lower energies, indicated that the hot fire balls produced in nuclei collisions behaved like a liquid, many expected the quark-gluon plasma to behave like a gas at these much higher energies. Scientists from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy are playing a key role in this new phase of the LHC’s programme which comes after seven months of successfully colliding protons at high energies. Dr David Evans, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy, and UK lead investigator at ALICE experiment, said: “Although it is very early days we are already learning more about the early Universe.” He continues: “These first results would seem to suggest that the Universe would have behaved like a super-hot liquid immediately after the Big Bang.” The team has also discovered that more sub-atomic particles are produced in these head-on collisions than some theoretical models previously suggested. The fireballs resulting from the collision only lasts a short time, but when the ‘soup’ cools down, the researchers are able to see thousands of particles radiating out from the fireball. It is in this debris that they are able to draw conclusions about the soup’s behaviour. November 23, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-early-universe-liquid-results-large.html


45. Astronomers probe 'sandbar' between islands of galaxies

This diagram shows an unusual galaxy with bent jets (see inset). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have caught sight of an unusual galaxy that has illuminated new details about a celestial "sandbar" connecting two massive islands of galaxies. The research was conducted in part with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These "sandbars," or filaments, are known to span vast distances between galaxy clusters and form a lattice-like structure known as the cosmic web. Though immense, these filaments are difficult to see and study in detail. Two years ago, Spitzer's infrared eyes revealed that one such intergalactic filament containing star-forming galaxies ran between the galaxy clusters called Abell 1763 and Abell 1770. Now these observations have been bolstered by the discovery, inside this same filament, of a galaxy that has a rare boomerang shape and unusual light emissions. Hot gas is sweeping the wandering galaxy into this shape as it passes through the filament, presenting a new way to gauge the filament's particle density.

Researchers hope that other such galaxies with oddly curved profiles could serve as signposts for the faint threads, which in turn signify regions ripe for forming stars. "These filaments are integral to the evolution of galaxy clusters -- among the biggest gravitationally bound objects in the universe -- as well as the creation of new generations of stars," said Louise Edwards, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of a study detailing the findings in the Dec. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Her collaborators are Dario Fadda, also at Caltech, and Dave Frayer from the National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. November 24, 2010 by Adam Hadhazy . More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-astronomers-probe-sandbar-islands-galaxies.html

46. Massive galaxies formed when universe was young Some of the universe's most massive galaxies may have formed billions of years earlier than current scientific models predict, according to surprising new research led by Tufts University. The findings appear in the Astrophysical Journal published online Nov. 24 in advance of print publication on Dec. 10, 2010. "We have found a relatively large number of very massive, highly luminous galaxies that existed almost 12 billion years ago when the universe was still very young, about 1.5 billion years old. These results appear to disagree with the latest predictions from models of galaxy formation and evolution," said Tufts astrophysicist Danilo Marchesini, lead author on the paper and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences. "Current understanding of the physical processes responsible in forming such massive galaxies has difficulty reproducing these observations." Collaborating with Marchesini were researchers from Yale University, Carnegie Observatories, Leiden University, Princeton University, the University of Kansas and the University of California-Santa Cruz. The newly identified galaxies were five to ten times more massive than our own Milky Way. They were among a sample studied at redshift 3≤z<4, when the universe was between 1.5 and 2 billion years old. Redshift refers to the phenomenon of a light wave stretching and moving toward longer wavelengths (the red end of the spectrum) as the emitting object travels away from an observer (Doppler Effect). This is similar to the pitch of a siren getting lower as the siren moves away. The redshift of distant galaxies is due to the expansion of the universe. The larger the redshift, the more distant the galaxy is, or the farther back in time we are observing. The larger the redshift, the younger the universe in which the galaxy is observed. By complementing existing data with deep images obtained through a new system of five customized near-infrared filters, the researchers were able to get a more complete view of the galaxy population at this early stage and more accurately characterize the sampled galaxies. November 24, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-massive-galaxies-universe-young.html

47. Planetary magnetic fields: The hunt for better models

Some planets in our solar system have magnetic fields. Others do not. Why? By probing the interior of our own planet, scientist hope to find answers to such questions. (NASA images).

Some three thousand kilometers below the surface of the Earth and with temperatures reaching those at the surface of the sun, the core of our home planet is no more within our physical reach today than it was back when Jules Verne undertook his fictional journey to the center of the Earth. Yet the mysteries still hidden there -- such as how the liquid core regenerates Earth's magnetic life force -- are of far greater interest to scientists today than to any science fiction writers past or present. With the help of increasingly sophisticated computer simulations, Earth scientists have created numerical models over the last decades which, in many respects, are remarkably successful at reproducing key aspects of the magnetic field. But even the best models today cannot resolve the broad spectrum of turbulence in the interior of the Earth. If these models were to improve significantly, scientists might be able to not only understand the dynamics of the core, but to also explore such far-reaching issues as the habitability of distant planets or the timing of the next polarity reversal here on Earth. “Understanding the origins of the magnetic field is an interesting scientific question. But there are other reasons for our interest in this topic – bigger issues,” says geophysics professor Bruce Buffett of UC Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science. “The magnetic field, especially on terrestrial planets, is a sensitive diagnostic of the internal dynamics of the planet. It may tell us, for instance, about whether plate tectonics exist. Plate tectonics are very good at cooling planets down. Venus probably doesn’t have plate tectonics, Earth does.” And most likely it is not a coincidence that Venus does not have a magnetic field, either. Many of us take features such as the magnetic field for granted, as an inevitable and indelible feature of our planet. This field, however, and the resulting magnetosphere that protects our home from the solar wind, are the result of a happy set

of circumstances that allowed the core to first generate and then continually regenerate the geomagnetic field of the Earth. The conditions necessary for this process to take place include the existence of a large volume of electrically conducting fluid (the liquid iron alloy at the core); the energy to drive this electrical dynamo through convection (the transfer of heat from the bottom to the top of core as the liquid cools); and the rotation that twists this fluid in Earth's core. “If you turned off the core, the dipole field would disappear in 20,000 years,” Buffett reminds us. “Planets do die. They run out of heat and wind down. So Earth has to keep regenerating.” November 25, 2010 by Monica Friedlander, [email protected]://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-planetary-magnetic-fields.html


48. The music of gravitational waves

This artist’s concept shows the proposed LISA mission, which would consist of three distinct spacecraft, each connected by laser beams. It would be the first space-based mission to attempt the detection of gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time that are emitted by exotic objects such as black holes. Image credit: ESA

A team of scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has brought the world one step closer to "hearing" gravitational waves -- ripples in space and time predicted by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. The research, performed in a lab at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., tested a system of lasers that would fly aboard the proposed space mission called Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA. The mission's goal is to detect the subtle, whisper-like signals of gravitational waves, which have yet to be directly observed. This is no easy task, and many challenges lie ahead. The new JPL tests hit one significant milestone, demonstrating for the first time that noise, or random fluctuations, in LISA's laser beams can be hushed enough to hear the sweet sounds of the elusive waves.

"In order to detect gravitational waves, we have to make extremely precise measurements," said Bill Klipstein, a physicist at JPL. "Our lasers are much noisier than what we want to measure, so we have to remove that noise carefully to get a clear signal; it's a little like listening for a feather to drop in the middle of a heavy rainstorm." Klipstein is a co-author of a paper about the lab tests that appeared in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. The JPL team is one of many groups working on LISA, a joint European Space Agency and NASA mission proposal, which, if selected, would launch in 2020 or later. In August of this year, LISA was given a high recommendation by the 2010 U.S. National Research Council decadal report on astronomy and astrophysics. November 24, 2010 By Whitney Clavin. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-music-gravitational.html

49. Jupiter gets its stripe back Astronomers using three telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii have recorded the return of a unique belt on Jupiter that periodically fades from dark brown to white. It's most recent fade-out started earlier this year, but November observations with the Keck, Gemini and Infrared Telescope Facility show the brown returning. It appears that reflected sunlight off high elevation clouds of ammonia ice have been blocking our view of the darker clouds below. One of Jupiter's dark brown stripes that faded out last spring is regaining its color, providing an unprecedented opportunity for astronomers to observe a rare and mysterious phenomenon caused by the planet's winds and cloud chemistry. Earlier this year, amateur astronomers noticed that the long-standing stripe, known as the South Equatorial Belt (SEB), just south of Jupiter's equator, had turned white. In early November, amateur astronomer Christopher Go of Cebu City in the Philippines observed a prominent bright spot in the unusually whitened belt, piquing the interest of professional and amateur astronomers around the world. After follow-up observations with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), the 10-meter Keck telescope and the 8-meter Gemini telescope, all atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere now believe the stripe is making a comeback.

This Nov. 18 Gemini North Telescope image of Jupiter combines blue, red and yellow images into a false-color composite that clearly shows the storm in the South Equatorial Belt. The belt is now turning dark after a brief fade to white. (Credit: JPL, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, Gemini Observatory, University of San Carlos, Philippines).

Astronomers announced first-glimpse images of the reappearing stripe Nov. 24.

November 25, 2010 By Robert Sanders. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-jupiter-stripe.html

50. Astronomy without a telescope - black hole evol ution

The idea that every galaxy of significant size has a supermassive black hole at its centre keeps gaining momentum. So... coincidence? Or are these SMBHs somehow fundamental to the process of galaxy formation? Credit: NASA.

While only observable by inference, the existence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centre of most – if not all – galaxies remains a compelling theory supported by a range of indirect observational methods. Within these data sources, there exists a strong correlation between the mass of the galactic bulge of a galaxy and the mass of its central SMBH – meaning that smaller galaxies have smaller SMBHs and bigger galaxies have bigger SMBHs. Linked to this finding is the notion that SMBHs may play an intrinsic role in galaxy formation and evolution – and might have even been the first step in the formation of the earliest galaxies in the universe, including the proto-Milky Way. Now, there are a number of significant assumptions built into this line of thinking, since the mass of a galactic bulge is generally inferred from the velocity dispersion of its stars – while the presence of supermassive black holes in the centre of such bulges is inferred from the very fast radial motion of inner stars – at least in closer galaxies where we can observe individual stars. For galaxies too far away to observe individual stars – the velocity dispersion and the presence of a central supermassive black hole are both inferred – drawing on the what we have learnt from closer galaxies, as well as from direct observations of broad emission lines – which are interpreted as the product of very rapid orbital movement of gas around an SMBH (where the ‘broadening’ of these lines is a result of the Doppler effect).

But despite the assumptions built on assumptions nature of this work, ongoing observations continue to support and hence strengthen the theoretical model. So, with all that said – it seems likely that, rather than depleting its galactic bulge to grow, both an SMBH and the galactic bulge of its host galaxy grow in tandem. It is speculated that the earliest galaxies, which formed in a smaller, denser universe, may have started with the rapid aggregation of gas and dust, which evolved into massive stars, which evolved into black holes – which then continued to grow rapidly in size due to the amount of surrounding gas and dust they were able to accrete. Distant quasars may be examples of such objects which have grown to a galactic scale. However, this growth becomes self-limiting as radiation pressure from an SMBH’s accretion disk and its polar jets becomes intense enough to push large amounts of gas and dust out beyond the growing SMBH’s sphere of influence. That dispersed material contains vestiges of angular momentum to keep it in an orbiting halo around the SMBH and it is in these outer regions that star formation is able to take place. Thus a dynamic balance is reached where the more material an SMBH eats, the more excess material it blows out – contributing to the growth of the galaxy that is forming around it. November 29, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-astronomy-telescope-black-hole.html


51. Image: Dark dune fields of proctor crater, Mars

The dark rippled dunes of Mars' Proctor Crater likely formed more recently than the lighter rock forms they appear to cover, and are thought to slowly shift in response to pervasive winds. The dunes arise from a complex relationship between the sandy surface and high winds on Mars. Similar dunes were first seen in Proctor Crater by Mariner 9 more than 35 years ago. This image was taken by HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, currently in orbit around Mars.

Provided by JPL/NASA. November 29, 2010. At http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-image-dark-dune-fields-proctor.html

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

52. Milky Way stars move in mysterious ways

The Sun (in yellow) is located 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. The stars whose velocities were measured by RAVE are shown in red. The arrows show the outward motion observed by the researchers at the Strasbourg Observatory and their colleagues. Credit: Gal Matijevic, Ljubljana University

Rather than moving in circles around the center of the Milky Way, all the stars in our Galaxy are travelling along different paths, moving away from the Galactic center. This has just been evidenced by Arnaud Siebert and Benoit Famaey, astronomers at the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory, and by their colleagues in other countries. This strange behavior may be due to perturbation caused by the central bar and spiral arms of our Galaxy, forcing stars to leave their normal circular course and take an outward path. Most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are spiral-shaped and stars are distributed in a thin disk rotating around the galactic center, with areas divided into spiral arms or elliptical regions such as the central bar. Due to gravity, the spiral arms move through the disk in the form of density waves. For over twenty years, scientists believed that the potential impact of these density waves on stellar velocities in the Milky Way was insignificant in comparison with the circular motion of the stars in the galactic disk. This belief has now been blatantly proved wrong by an international team including several researchers from the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory: near the Earth, stars move towards the exterior of the Galaxy at an average speed of around 10 kilometers per second, which is considerably faster than previously thought. To reach this conclusion, the team systematically analyzed the velocities of over two hundred thousand stars located within a radius of a little over six thousand light years around the Sun.

Using data from the major star survey RAVE (RAdial Velocity Experiment) collected since 2003 by the Australian Astronomical Observatory's Schmidt telescope, they were able to measure for the first time the radial velocities of hundreds of thousands of stars and determine whether they were moving towards or away from us. The researchers were thus able to ascertain that the average speed of stars towards the exterior of the Galaxy increases with their distance from the Sun in the direction of the Galactic center, reaching 10 kilometers per second at a distance of 6,000 light years from us (in other words, 19,000 light years from the Galactic center). This result was completely unexpected and all the more surprising as it appeared to mainly affect old stars, several billion years old. Until now, it was thought that the spiral arms mostly affected the dynamics of young stars (only a few tens-of-million-years old). However, theoretical study of the combined effect of the spiral arms and the central bar, both within and outside the plane of the Galaxy, could explain the strange distortions of stellar motion observed by the astronomers in the RAVE team. Watch this space! More information: “Detection of a radial velocity gradient in the extended local disc with RAVE,” Arnaud Siebert, et al., to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society. The RAVE experiment: http://rave-survey.org/ November 30, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-milky-stars-mysterious-ways.html

53. Study predicts distribution of gravitational wa ve sources A pair of neutron stars spiraling toward each other until they merge in a violent explosion should produce detectable gravitational waves. A new study led by an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, predicts for the first time where such mergers are likely to occur in the local galactic neighborhood.

According to Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, the results provide valuable information for researchers at gravitational-wave detectors, such as the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington. "This is a very important result, as it is likely to significantly alter how gravitational-wave observatories currently operate," Ramirez-Ruiz said. Luke Zoltan Kelley, a UCSC undergraduate working with Ramirez-Ruiz, is first author of a paper describing the new findings, to be published in the December 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters and currently available online. A key prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by the motions of massive objects. Scientists have yet to detect gravitational waves

The merger of two neutron stars, shown in this snapshot from a computer simulation, creates gravitational waves that could be detected by sensitive instruments. Credit: Stephan Rosswog and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz.

directly because they are so weak and decay rapidly, but a planned upgrade for LIGO (called Advanced LIGO) is expected to greatly increase its sensitivity. Compact binaries--which can consist of two neutron stars, two black holes, or one of each--are among the best candidates for emitting gravitational waves that could be detected by LIGO or other current experiments. Kelley investigated the implications of a key observation about compact binaries: The two objects are not only moving in orbit around each other, they are also typically speeding through space together, their center of mass moving with a velocity that can be well above 200 kilometers per second. "By the time the two objects merge, they are likely to be located far away from the galaxy where they were born," Kelley said. This has implications for efforts to observe mergers that emit gravitational waves. Scientists hope to match a detection at a gravitational-wave observatory with telescope observations of the corresponding merger event. The new study suggests that astronomers might not want to look in the nearest galaxies for these "optical counterparts" of gravitational waves. December 2, 2010 By Tim Stephens. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-gravitational-sources.html


54. Super-Earth has an atmosphere, but is it steamy or gassy? The extrasolar planet GJ 1214b, shown here in an artist's conception with two hypothetical moons, orbits a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. GJ 1214b has a radius of about 2.7 times that of the Earth and is about 6.5 times as massive, putting it squarely into the class of exoplanets known as super-Earths. Astronomers have confirmed that this alien world has a thick atmosphere, but can't yet determine whether the atmosphere is primarily hydrogen or a steamy soup of water vapor. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

In December 2009, astronomers announced the discovery of a super-Earth known as GJ 1214b. At the time, they reported signs that the newfound world likely had a thick, gaseous atmosphere. Now, a team led by Jacob Bean (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has made the first measurements of GJ 1214b's atmosphere. However, the measurements raise as many questions about the planet's atmospheric composition as they answer. "This is the first super-Earth known to have an atmosphere," said Bean. "But even with these new measurements we can't say yet what that atmosphere is made of. This world is being very shy and veiling its true nature from us." A super-Earth is a planet up to three times the size of Earth and weighing one to ten times as much. (GJ 1214b is 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.5 times as massive.) They are likely to be mostly solid (some combination of rock or ices), unlike the hundreds of Jupiter-sized gas giants found to date around distant stars.

December 1, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-super-earth-atmosphere-steamy-gassy.html

55. Discovery triples number of stars in universe

Filtering out the light from brighter stars, astronomers detected the faint signature of small, dim red dwarf stars in nearby elliptical galaxies (right), and found these are much more numerous than in our own Milky Way (left). This finding suggests that the total number of stars in the universe could be up to three times higher than previously thought. Credit: Illustration by Yale University

Astronomers have discovered that small, dim stars known as red dwarfs are much more prolific than previously thought—so much so that the total number of stars in the universe is likely three times bigger than realized. Because red dwarfs are relatively small and dim compared to stars like our Sun, astronomers hadn't been able to detect them in galaxies other than our own Milky Way and its nearest neighbors before now. As such, they did not know how much of the total stellar population of the universe is made up of red dwarfs. Now astronomers have used powerful instruments on the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to detect the faint signature of red dwarfs in eight massive, relatively nearby galaxies called elliptical galaxies, which are located between about 50 million and 300 million light years away. They discovered that the red dwarfs, which are only between 10 and 20 percent as massive as the Sun, were much more bountiful than expected. "No one knew how many of these stars there were," said Pieter van Dokkum, a Yale University astronomer who led the research, which is described in Nature's Dec.1 Advanced Online Publication. "Different theoretical models predicted a wide range of possibilities, so this answers a longstanding question about just how abundant these stars are." The team discovered that there are about 20 times more red dwarfs in elliptical galaxies than in the Milky Way, said Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was also involved in the research. "We usually assume other galaxies look like our own. But this suggests other conditions are possible in other galaxies," Conroy said. "So this discovery could have a major impact on our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution." December 1, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-discovery-triples-stars-universe.html

56. Cassini returns images of bright jets at Encela dus

NASA's Cassini spacecraft obtained this raw image of the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Nov. 30, 2010. The spacecraft was about 89,000 kilometers (55,000 miles) away from the moon's surface. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI

NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully dipped near the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Nov. 30. NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully dipped near the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Nov. 30. Though Cassini's closest approach took it to within about 48 kilometers (30 miles) of the moon's northern hemisphere, the spacecraft also captured shadowy images of the tortured south polar terrain and the brilliant jets that spray out from it. Many of the raw images feature darkened terrain because winter has descended upon the southern hemisphere of Enceladus. But sunlight behind the moon backlights the jets of water vapor and icy particles. In some images, the jets line up in rows, forming curtains of spray. December 2, 2010 By Jia-Rui Cook. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-cassini-images-bright-jets-enceladus.html

57. Spacial Ring

The Hubble Space Telescope took this wonderful photo to a giant ring that continues to grow in the Large Magellan Cloud.

The ring / gas bubble is the result of a supernova explosion 400 years ago.

The ring is 23 light years in diameter, and incresases 18 million kms per hour!

This bubble called SNR B0509-67.5 (0509 or SNR) is about 160 thousand light-years away.

In AstroPT (in Portuguese) http://astropt.org/blog/2010/12/16/anel-espacial/


58. First carbon-rich exoplanet discovered A team led by a former postdoctoral researcher in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, recently measured the first-ever planetary atmosphere that is substantially enriched in carbon. The researchers found that the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of WASP-12b, an exoplanet about 1.4 times the mass of Jupiter and located about 1,200 light years away, is greater than one. As they report in a paper to be published on Dec. 8 in Nature, this carbon-rich atmosphere supports the possibility that rocky exoplanets could be composed of pure carbon rocks like diamond or graphite rather than the silica-based rock found in Earth. "This is new territory and will motivate researchers to study what the interiors of carbon-rich planets could be made of," says lead author Nikku Madhusudhan, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. Although WASP-12b is a "hot Jupiter," or a Jupiter-sized, extremely hot exoplanet, that is largely made of gas and has no surface to host life, the first-ever finding of a carbon-rich exoplanet is significant because it introduces an entirely new class of exotic exoplanets to explore. It's also possible that rockier,

Artist concept of the extremely hot exoplanet WASP-12b and the host star. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)

Earth-sized exoplanets may have formed around the same star as WASP-12b billions of years ago. If detected, these smaller planets could also have carbon-rich atmospheres and interiors, meaning that for life to exist on these planets, it might have to survive with very little water and oxygen, and plenty of methane, says Madhusudhan. That might not be so far-fetched given last week's announcement by NASA of the discovery on Earth of bacteria that can survive in arsenic, a poison to humans. Astronomers can figure out a planet's atmospheric composition by observing its flux, or the light emitted by the planet, at different wavelengths. The team, coordinated by Joe Harrington, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the flux from WASP-12b, at four wavelengths, right before it passed behind the star, an event known as secondary eclipse. Those observations were then combined with previously published observations, at three other wavelengths, obtained from Earth using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. The planet was discovered in 2009 by researchers at the United Kingdom-based consortium for Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), who are also coauthors of the study. December 8, 2010 by Morgan Bettex. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-carbon-rich-exoplanet.html

59. An Intergalactic Weather Map

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/S.Randall et al., Optical: SDSS

This composite image shows an intergalactic "weather map" around the elliptical galaxy NGC 5813, the dominant central galaxy in a galaxy group located about 105 million light years away from Earth. Just like a weather map for a local forecast on Earth, the colored circle depicts variations in temperature across a region. This particular map presents the range of temperature in a region of space as observed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, with the hotter temperatures shown in red and decreasingly cooler temperatures shown in orange, yellow, green, and blue. The numbers displayed when rolling your mouse over the image give the gas temperature in millions of degrees. A notable feature of this image is the relatively small variation in temperature across the weather map, with a range of only about 30% across several hundred thousand light years. Without any sources of heat, the densest gas near the center of the map should cool to much lower temperatures as energy is lost because of radiation. However, regular outbursts generated by the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 5813 provide heat, preventing the gas near the center of the galaxy from cooling to such low temperatures. This decreases the amount of cool gas available to form new stars. This process is analogous to the Sun providing heat for Earth's atmosphere and preventing water and water vapor from cooling and freezing.

How do outbursts generated by the black hole provide heat? Powerful jets produced as gas swirls toward the black hole push cavities into the hot gas and drive shock waves -- like sonic booms -- outwards, heating the gas. The shocks from the most recent outburst, which occurred about 3 million years ago in Earth's time frame, show up as a "figure eight" structure at the center of the image. This is the first system where the observed heating from shocks alone is sufficient to keep the gas from cooling indefinitely. These shocks allow the relatively tiny black hole to heat the huge area surrounding it, as shown here. December 8, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-intergalactic-weather.html

60. The end of planet formation, as told by trace e lements from the mantles of Earth, the moon and Mars

New research reveals that the abundance of so-called highly siderophile, or metal-loving, elements like gold and platinum found in the mantles of Earth, the Moon and Mars were delivered by massive impactors during the final phase of planet formation over 4.5 billion years ago. The predicted sizes of the projectiles, which hit within tens of millions of years of the giant impact that produced our Moon, are consistent with current planet formation models as well as physical evidence such as the size distributions of asteroids and ancient Martian impact scars. They predict that the largest of the late impactors on Earth, at 1,500-2,000 miles in diameter, potentially modified Earth's obliquity by approximately 10 degrees, while those for the Moon, at approximately 150-200 miles, may have delivered water to its mantle. December 9, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-planet-formation-told-elements-mantles.html

61. Demise of large satellite may have led to the f ormation of Saturn's rings and inner moons Simulations performed at Southwest Research Institute may explain how Saturn's majestic rings and icy inner moons formed following the collision of a Titan-sized satellite with the planet, according to a paper published in Nature magazine's Dec. 12 Advance Online Publication. Saturn's rings are at present 90 to 95 percent water ice. Because dust and debris from rocky meteoroids have polluted the rings, the rings are believed to have consisted of pure ice when they formed. This composition is unusual compared to the approximately half-ice and half-rock mixture expected for materials in the outer Solar System. Similarly, the low densities of Saturn's inner moons show that they too are, as a group, unusually rich in ice. The previous leading ring origin theory suggests the rings formed when a small satellite was disrupted by an impacting comet. "This scenario would have likely resulted in rings that were a mixture of rock and ice, rather than the ice-rich rings we see today," says the paper's author, Dr. Robin M. Canup, associate vice president of the SwRI Planetary Science Directorate in Boulder. The new theory links the formation of the rings to the formation of Saturn's satellites. While Jupiter has four large satellites, Saturn has only one, Titan. Previous work suggests that multiple Titan-sized satellites originally formed at Saturn, but that those orbiting interior to Titan were lost as their orbits spiraled into the planet. As the final lost satellite neared Saturn, heating caused by the flexing of its shape by the planet's gravity would cause its ice to melt and its rock to sink to its center. Canup uses numerical simulations to show that as such a satellite crosses the region of the current B ring, planetary tidal forces strip material from its


outer icy layers, while its rocky core remains intact and eventually collides with the planet. This produces an initial ice ring that is much more massive than Saturn's current rings. Over time, collisions in the ring cause it to spread radially and decrease in mass. Inwardly spreading ring material is lost, while material spreading past the ring's outer edge accumulates into icy moons with estimated masses consistent with the inner moons seen today. "The new model proposes that the rings are primordial, formed from the same events that left Titan as Saturn's sole large satellite, " says Canup. "The implication is that the rings and the Saturnian moons interior to and including Tethys share a coupled origin, and are the last remnants of a lost companion satellite to Titan." During its extended mission, the Cassini spacecraft will measure the rings' current mass and will indirectly measure the pollution rate of the rings. This should provide an improved estimate of the rings' age and a test of the new ring origin model. More information: The paper, "Origin of Saturn's Rings and Inner Moons by Mass Removal from a Lost Titan-Sized Satellite," by Dr. R.M. Canup, was published in Nature magazine's Dec. 12 Advance Online Publication. Provided by Southwest Research Institute. December 12, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-demise-large-satellite-formation-saturn.html

62. Evidence for ET is mounting daily, but not prov e This image, released Nov. 12, 1996, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., shows Jupiter's ice-covered moon, Europa. Every new discovery makes it seem more likely that we are not alone. The case for some kind alien life somewhere else in the universe is steadily building. In the past few days, scientists have revealed there are three times as many stars as they previously thought and that a bacteria can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest and strangest environments. Those came on the heels of the first discovery of a potentially habitable planet. (AP Photo/Jet Propulsion Lab)

Lately, a handful of new discoveries make it seem more likely that we are not alone - that there is life somewhere else in the universe. In the past several days, scientists have reported there are three times as many stars as they previously thought. Another group of researchers discovered a microbe can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest environments. And earlier this year, astronomers for the first time said they'd found a potentially habitable planet. "The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger," said Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, which studies the origins, evolution and possibilities of life in the universe. "I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, 'There's got to be life out there.'"

A caveat: Since much of this research is new, scientists are still debating how solid the conclusions are. Some scientists this week have publicly criticized how NASA's arsenic-using microbe study was conducted, questioning its validity. Another reason not to get too excited is that the search for life starts small - microscopically small - and then looks to evolution for more. The first signs of life elsewhere are more likely to be closer to slime mold than to ET. It can evolve from there. Scientists have an equation that calculates the odds of civilized life on another planet. But much of it includes factors that are pure guesswork on less-than-astronomical factors, such as the likelihood of the evolution of intelligence and how long civilizations last. Stripped to its simplistic core - with the requirement for intelligence and civilization removed - the calculations hinge on two basic factors: How many places out there can support life? And how hard is it for life to take root? What last week's findings did was both increase the number of potential homes for life and broaden the definition of what life is. That means the probability for alien life is higher than ever before, agree 10 scientists interviewed by The Associated Press. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, ticks off the astronomical findings about planet abundance and Earthbound discoveries about life's hardiness. "All of these have gone in the direction of encouraging life out there and they didn't have to." December 8, 2010 By SETH BORENSTEIN , AP Science Writer http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-evidence-mounting-daily-proven.html

63. How Iapetus got its ridge

A ridge that follows the equator of Saturn's moon Iapetus gives it the appearance of a giant walnut. The ridge, photographed in 2004 by the Cassini spacecraft, is 100 kilometers (62 miles) wide and at times 20 kilometers (12 miles) high. (The peak of Mount Everest, by comparison, is 5.5 miles above sea level.) Scientists are debating how the ridge might have formed. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI

For centuries, people wondered how the leopard got its spots. The consensus is pretty solid that evolution played a major role. But it's only been five years since the arrival of high-resolution Cassini Mission images of Saturn's bizarre moon Iapetus that the international planetary community has pondered the unique walnut shape of the large (735 kilometer radius) body, considered by many to be one of the most astonishing features in the solar system. And there's no consensus as to how a mysterious large ridge that covers more than 75 percent of the moon's equator was formed. It's been a tough nut to crack. But now a team including an outer solar system specialist from Washington University in St. Louis has proposed a giant impact explains the ridge, up to 20 kilometers tall and 100 kilometers wide.

William B. McKinnon, PhD, Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and his former doctoral student, Andrew Dombard, PhD, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), propose that at one time Iapetus itself had a satellite, or moon, created by a giant impact with another big body. The sub-satellite's orbit, they say, would have decayed because of tidal interactions with Iapetus, and it would have gradually migrated towards Iapetus. At some point, the researchers say, the tidal forces would have torn the sub-satellite apart, forming a ring of debris around Iapetus that would eventually slam into the moon near its equator. "Imagine all of these particles coming down horizontally across the equatorial surface at about 400 meters per second, the speed of a rifle bullet, one after the other, like frozen baseballs," says McKinnon. "Particles would impact one by one, over and over again on the equatorial line. At first the debris would have made holes to form a groove that eventually filled up." "When you have a debris ring around a body, the collisional interactions steal energy out of the orbit," explains Dombard.

"And the lowest energy state that a body can be in is right over the rotational bulge of a planetary body — the equator. That's why the rings of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are over the equator." "We have a lot of corroborating calculations that demonstrate that this is a plausible idea," says Dombard, "but we don't yet have any rigorous simulations to show the process in action. Hopefully, that's next." December 13, 2010. More at http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-iapetus-ridge.html


64. Other stories! - Why do the ionized gas clouds stream out from galaxies? November 22, 2010. Using the Subaru Prime Focus Camera (Suprime-Cam) in their

observations of the Coma Cluster, researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Hiroshima University, the University of Tokyo, and other institutes have discovered 14 galaxies accompanied by extended, ionized hydrogen clouds. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-ionized-gas-clouds-stream-galaxies.html

- Explorer of the 'Cool Universe'. November 18, 2010. Emory astrochemist Susanna Widicus Weaver will soon begin one of the first broad spectral surveys of small organic molecules in deep space. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-explorer-cool-universe.html

- Shallow groundwater reservoirs may have been common on Mars. November 23, 2010. An international research team led by the Planetary Science Institute has found evidence for reservoirs of liquid water on Mars at shallow crustal depths of as little as tens of meters. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-shallow-groundwater-reservoirs-common-mars.html

- The sun steals comets from other stars. November 24, 2010 By Dauna Coulter. The next time you thrill at the sight of a comet blazing across the night sky, consider this: it's a stolen pleasure. You're enjoying the spectacle at the expense of a distant star. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-sun-comets-stars.html

- Pulsating star mystery solved. November 24, 2010. By discovering the first double star where a pulsating Cepheid variable and another star pass in front of one another, an international team of astronomers has solved a decades-old mystery. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-pulsating-star-mystery.html

- Young-star discovery hints magnetism common to all cosmic jets. November 25, 2010. Astronomers have found the first evidence of a magnetic field in a jet of material ejected from a young star, a discovery that points toward future breakthroughs in understanding the nature of all types of cosmic jets and of the role of magnetic fields in star formation. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-young-star-discovery-hints-magnetism-common.html

- The rate of star formation. November 26, 2010. New stars continue to appear in the night sky, as the gas and dust in giant interstellar clouds gradually coalesces under the influence of gravity until nuclear burning begins. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-star-formation.html

- Cassini finds oxygen-carbon dioxide atmosphere on Saturn's moon Rhea. November 26, 2010 by Lin Edwards. In a flyby past Rhea, Saturn's second-largest moon, NASA's spacecraft Cassini has revealed the presence of a thin atmosphere of 70 percent oxygen and 30 percent carbon dioxide, which is apparently sustained by chemical decomposition of the moon’s ice-covered surface. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-cassini-o2co2-atmosphere-saturn-moon.html

- Recent news on the debate over Pluto's planethood. November 29, 2010. Earlier this month, Eris -- the distant world first discovered by Caltech's Mike Brown and colleagues back in 2005, paving the way for the eventual demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet -- passed fortuitously in front of a faint star in the constellation Cetus. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-news-debate-pluto-planethood.html

- A world warmed by 2 or 4 degrees Celsius poses many challenges. November 29, 2010. Oxford scientists have contributed to a series of research papers about the impacts of global warming to coincide with the opening of the Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-world-degrees-celsius-poses.html

- Scientists look deeper for coal ash hazards. November 29, 2010. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency weighs whether to define coal ash as hazardous waste, a Duke University study identifies new monitoring protocols and insights that can help investigators more accurately measure and predict the ecological impacts of coal ash contaminants. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-scientists-deeper-coal-ash-hazards.html

- Venus holds warning for Earth. November 30, 2010. A mysterious high-altitude layer of sulphur dioxide discovered by ESA's Venus Express has been explained. As well as telling us more about Venus, it could be a warning against injecting our atmosphere with sulphur droplets to mitigate climate change. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-venus-earth.html

- Cassini finds warm cracks on Enceladus. December 1, 2010 By Jia-Rui C. Cook. New images and data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft give scientists a unique Saturn-lit view of active fissures through the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-cassini-enceladus.html

- Dark matter could transfer energy in the Sun. December 1, 2010. Researchers from the Institute for Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) and other European groups have studied the effects of the presence of dark matter in the Sun. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-dark-energy-sun.html

- Pits, flows, other scenes in new set of Mars images. December 2, 2010 By Guy Webster. Newly released images from 340 recent observations of Mars by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show details of a wide assortment of Martian environments. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-pits-scenes-mars-images.html\

- Fourth planet foundin giant version of our solar system. December 8, 2010 by Anne M Stark. Astronomers have discovered a fourth giant planet, joining three others that, in 2008, were the subject of the first-ever pictures of a planetary system orbiting another star other than our sun. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-fourth-planet-foundin-giant-version.html

- Stars shrouded in glittering zirconium light up the sky. December 8, 2010 By Mark Thompson. Recently, a team of scientists from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland have discovered a star that is enveloped by clouds of glittering zirconium! http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-stars-shrouded-glittering-zirconium-sky.html

- Shining new light on dark energy with galaxy clusters. December 9, 2010 By Catherine Meyers. Scientists' murky understanding of dark energy may have just gotten a little clearer, thanks to recent work by a team of researchers that includes astrophysicist Neelima Sehgal of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at SLAC. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-dark-energy-galaxy-clusters.html

- Image: The Greatest Stars. December 10, 2010. The small open star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the NGC 6357 nebula in Scorpius, about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-image-greatest-stars.html

- Fahrenheit -459: Neutron stars and string theory in a lab. December 9, 2010. Using lasers to contain some ultra-chilled atoms, a team of scientists has measured the viscosity or stickiness of a gas often considered to be the sixth state of matter. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-fahrenheit-neutron-stars-theory.html

INTERESTING LINKS & EDUCATION MATERIALS

Create Better Maps with Global Mapper. Experience the power of professional mapping. http://www.globalmapper.com/?gclid=CLOLpYivtqUCFYc_4wod5UA9ZA

Dinosaur fossils brought to life by technology exhibit. By Victoria Gill, Science and nature reporter, BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9239000/9239378.stm


BOOKS, JOURNALS, REVIEWS, NEWSLETTERS, MAPS

Marion & Prince Edward – Africa’s Southern Islands. Aleks Terauds, John Cooper, Steven I. Chown & Peter Ryan. Ed. Sun Press. Marion & Prince Edward tells the story of the two islands that are also South Africa’s southernmost territories. The book describes their fiery origins, their discovery and exploitation, the amazing animals and plants that live and grow there, and their current importance for research and conservation. Available at http://www.sun-e-shop.co.za ou [email protected].

SOUTHERN AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS TEACHING EARTH SCIENCE SUBJECTS

Country HEI Departments/Schools/Centers

South Africa

(11)

University of the Western Cape http://www.uwc.ac.za/ [email protected] Modderdam Road, Bellville, Cape Town, 7535, South Africa; Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, Republic of South Africa

Department of Earth Sciences http://www.science.uwc.ac.za/earthscience/ [email protected] Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535 Tel: +27 21 959 2223 Fax: +27 21 959 2438 / 1317 BSc Environmental and Water Sciences and in Applied Geology; Honors, MSc and PhD in Environmental and Water Sciences and in Applied Geology ; M-Phil in Integrated Water Resources Management

Department of Geography http://olduwc.uwc.ac.za/faculty_department/geography/index.htm

International Ocean Institute of Southern Africa http://www.ioisa.org.za/ [email protected] University of the Western Cape, P. Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa Tel: +27 21 959 3088 Fax: +27 21 959 1213

University of the Witwatersrand http://web.wits.ac.za/ Private Bag 32050 Wits, Johannesburg Tel: +27-(0)11-717-1000 Fax: +27-(0)11-717-1065

School of Geosciences http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Science/GeoSciences/Home.htm [email protected] Private Bag 3, 2050 Wits, Johannesburg Tel: +27-(0)11- 717 6547 fax: +27-(0)11-717 6579

School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/Science/Geography/Home.htm [email protected] Tel: (27) 11-717-6503 Fax: (27) 11-717-6529 (for GEOGRAPHY) & 717-6578 (for ARCHAEOLOGY)

School of Mining Engineering http://web.wits.ac.za/Academic/EBE/MiningEng/ [email protected] [email protected] Private Bag 3, 2050 WITS Tel: 27+11+717-7003(all day) Fax: +27+11+717-7009 B.sc.(eng.) Degree in Mining Engineering (4 years)

Hello South African colleagues. If you have any correction to this list, or any add, please inform us, in order to update our database at the GSAf., and present the correction in the next issue. Thanks!!!

PAPERS ON AFRICA

• Mark Tingay, Peter Bentham, Arnoud De Feyter, and Axel Kellner. Present-day stress-field rotations associated with evaporites in the offshore Nile Delta. Geological Society of America Bulletin. published 6 December 2010, http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/B30185.1v1?ct=ct

• Kh. A. Ramadan, M. K. Seddeek, T. Elnimr, T. Sharshar, and H. M. Badran. Spatial distribution of radioisotopes in the coast of Suez Gulf, Southwestern Sinai and the impact of hot springs. Radiat Prot Dosimetry. published 8 December 2010, 10.1093/rpd/ncq446 http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/ncq446v1?ct=ct

Journal of African Earth Sciences. Volume 58, Issue 5, Pages 721-860 (December 2010).

Active Volcanism and Continental Rifting in Africa, 1st AVCOR International Workshop, November 2007. Edited by Gerald G.J. Ernst, Nicolas d’Oreye, François Kervyn, Gezahegn Yirgu, Cindy Ebinger, Dario Tedesco, Nicolas M. Pagliuca, François Lukaya, Tim Wright and Eric Calais

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&_cdi=5991&_pubType=J&_auth=y&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8712dc3a1eb0be734bf2cf3d75cf5fa


5&jchunk=58#58

• Gerald G.J. ERNST, Nicolas d’Oreye, François Kervyn, Gezahegn Yirgu, Cindy Ebinger, Dario Tedesco, Nicolas M. Pagliuca, François Lukaya, Tim Wright, Eric Calais and On behalf of the AVCOR Guest Editor Team. Active Volcanism and Continental Rifting in Africa (AVCOR): Introduction to the Special Issue. Pages v-viii

• M. Berrocoso, J. Carmona, A. Fernández-Ros, A. Pérez-Peña, R. Ortiz, A. García. Kinematic model for Tenerife Island (Canary Islands, Spain): Geodynamic interpretation in the Nubian plate context. Pages 721-733

• Florian Neukirchen, Thomas Finkenbein, Jörg Keller. The Lava sequence of the East African Rift escarpment in the Oldoinyo Lengai – Lake Natron sector, Tanzania. Pages 734-751

• Hannes B. Mattsson, Eric Reusser. Mineralogical and geochemical characterization of ashes from an early phase of the explosive September 2007 eruption of Oldoinyo Lengai (Tanzania). Pages 752-763

• Karen Fontijn, Damien Delvaux, Gerald G.J. Ernst, Matthieu Kervyn, Evelyne Mbede, Patric Jacobs. Tectonic control over active volcanism at a range of scales: Case of the Rungwe Volcanic Province, SW Tanzania; and hazard implications. Pages 764-777

• Benoît Smets, Christelle Wauthier, Nicolas d’Oreye. A new map of the lava flow field of Nyamulagira (D.R. Congo) from satellite imagery. Pages 778-786.

• Benoît Smets, Dario Tedesco, François Kervyn, Antoine Kies, Orlando Vaselli, Mathieu Mapendano Yalire. Dry gas vents (“mazuku”) in Goma region (North-Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo): Formation and risk assessment. Pages 787-798.

• J. Albaric, J. Perrot, J. Déverchère, A. Deschamps, B. Le Gall, R.W. Ferdinand, C. Petit, C. Tiberi, C. Sue, M. Songo. Contrasted seismogenic and rheological behaviours from shallow and deep earthquake sequences in the North Tanzanian Divergence, East Africa. Pages 799-811

• Roberto Carniel, Ester Muñoz Jolis, Josh Jones. A geophysical multi-parametric analysis of hydrothermal activity at Dallol, Ethiopia. Pages 812-819

• Georges Mavonga Tuluka. Crustal structure beneath two seismic broadband stations revealed from teleseismic P-wave receiver function analysis in the Virunga volcanic area, Western Rift Valley of Africa. Pages 820-828

• Tuluka Mavonga, Sadaka K. Kavotha, Nyombo Lukaya, Osodundu Etoy, Wafula Mifundu, Rusangiza K. Bizimungu, Jacques Durieux. Some aspect of seismicity prior to the 27 November 2006 eruption of Nyamuragira volcano and its implication for volcano monitoring and risk mitigation in the Virunga area, Western Rift Valley of Africa. Pages 829-832

• S.I.N. Heleno, C. Frischknecht, N. d’Oreye, J.N.P. Lima, B. Faria, R. Wall, F. Kervyn. Seasonal tropospheric influence on SAR interferograms near the ITCZ – The case of Fogo Volcano and Mount Cameroon. Pages 833-856

•

OTHER INTERESTING PAPERS

• Antonios Garas, Panos Argyrakis, Céline Rozenblat, Marco Tomassini & Shlomo Havlin, 2010. Worldwide spreading of economic crisis. New J. Phys. 12 (2010) 113043. http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/11/113043/fulltext

• Douglas Carlson. Application of the surface azimuthal electrical resistivity survey method to determine patterns of regional joint orientation in glacial tills. Environmental Geosciences. 2010; 17(4): p. 175-192 http://eg.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/4/175?ct=ct

• Andres Moreira-Munoz. Comparative Biogeography: Discovering and Classifying Biogeographical Patterns of a Dynamic Earth. Syst Biol. 2011; 60(1): p. 110-112 http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/60/1/110?ct=ct

• M. Kusehlar, F. Tutti, H. Mirnejad, and A. E. Lalonde. Mineralogical characterization of fibrous zeolites from the Kahrizak volcanic suite, south Tehran, Iran. Clay Minerals. 2010; 45(4): p. 507-517 http://claymin.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/45/4/507?ct=ct

• Jeffrey G. Paine and Edward W. Collins. Characterizing oil field salinization using airborne, surface, and borehole geophysics: An example from the Upper Colorado River Basin, Texas. Environmental Geosciences. 2010; 17(4): p. 193-207 http://eg.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/4/193?ct=ct

• Thomas Rockwell, Eldon Gath, Tania Gonzalez, Chris Madden, Danielle, Verdugo, Caitlin Lippincott, Tim Dawson, Lewis A. Owen, Markus Fuchs, Ana Cadena, Pat Williams, Elise Weldon, and Pastora Franceschi. Neotectonics and Paleoseismology of the Limon and Pedro Miguel Faults in Panama: Earthquake Hazard to the Panama Canal. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. 2010; 100(6): p. 3097-3129 http://www.bssaonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/6/3097?ct=ct

• P. Druschke, A.D. Hanson, M.L. Wells, G.E. Gehrels, and D. Stockli. Paleogeographic isolation of the Cretaceous to Eocene Sevier hinterland, east-central Nevada: Insights from U-Pb and (U-Th)/He detrital zircon ages of hinterland strata. Geological Society of America Bulletin. published 6 December 2010, http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/B30029.1v1?ct=ct

• Yu Wang, Liyun Zhou, and Jinyi Li. Intracontinental superimposed tectonics--A case study in the Western Hills of Beijing, eastern China. Geological Society of America Bulletin. published 6 December 2010, http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/B30257.1v1?ct=ct

• Carolina Canora, Jose J. Martinez-Diaz, Pilar Villamor, Kelvin Berryman, Jose A. Alvarez-Gomez, Carlos Pullinger, and Ramon Capote. Geological and Seismological Analysis of the 13 February 2001 Mw 6.6 El Salvador Earthquake: Evidence for Surface Rupture and Implications for Seismic Hazard. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. 2010; 100(6): p. 2873-2890 http://www.bssaonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/6/2873?ct=ct

• Jeremie Lehmann, Karel Schulmann, Ondrej Lexa, Michel Corsini, AlfredKroner, Pavla Stipska, Dondov Tomurhuu, and Dorjsuren Otgonbator. Structural constraints on the evolution of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt in SW Mongolia. Am J Sci. 2010; 310(7): p. 575-628http://www.ajsonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/7/575?ct=ct

• Cindy Lee Van Dover. Mining seafloor massive sulphides and biodiversity: what is at risk? ICES J. Mar. Sci. 2011; 68(2): p. 341-348 Open Access http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/2/341?ct=ct

• Thomas Wagner, Adrian J. Boyce, and Jorg Erzinger. Fluid-rock interaction during formation of metamorphic quartz veins: A REE and stable isotope study from the Rhenish Massif, Germany. Am J Sci. 2010; 310(7): p. 645-682 http://www.ajsonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/7/645?ct=ct


EVENTS The events not announced in former Bulletins are highlighted with dates in red bold ..

Southern Africa DO NOT FORGET CAG 23!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011

.01.

08-1

4 CCCAAAGGG222333 ––– 222333 rrr ddd CCCooolll lll oooqqquuu iiiuuummm ooo fff AAAfff rrr iii cccaaannn GGGeeeooo lllooogggyyy, UJ. South Africa. hhttttpp:: ////wwwwww..ccaagg2233..ccoo..zzaa//

2011.01.14-16 4th Platreef Workshop, Mokopane, South Africa. Email [email protected]

2011.01.17-20 International Workshop "Extreme Natural Hazards and Disaster Risk in Africa". Pretoria, South Africa. http://www.technoscene.co.za/hazardsws/.

2011.01.18-23 New Horizons for International Investigations into Carbon Cycling in the Deep Crustal Biosphere – Workshop, University of Bloemfontein, South Africa. Please reply to [email protected]; website: http://www.princeton.edu/southafrica/

2011.02.07-10 Mining Indaba '11, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.miningindaba.com/

2011.02.15-17 Water In The Southern African Minerals Industry Conference. Ingwenyama Conference & Sport Resort, White River, Mphumalanga, SA, http://www.saimm.co.za/saimm-events/item/16-water-in-the-southern-african-minerals-industry-2010

2011.02.16-19 Igneous and Metamorphic Studies Group 2011 Meeting (IMSG). University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. John Clemens = [email protected] or Gary Stevens = [email protected]

2011.02.27-2011.03.03 Local Climate Solutions for Africa 2011. Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.locs4africa.iclei.org/

2011.03.06-09 Pyrometallurgy Conference 2011. Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. http://www.pyrometallurgy.co.za/Pyro2011/

2011.03.07-09 5th Africa Economic Forum 2011, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.petro21.com/events/index.cfm?id=578 2011.03.21-25 MINEFILL 2011, International Conference on Mining with Backfill, SAIMM, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.saimm.co.za/minefill2011

2011.04.10-15 The second Middle-East and Africa IAU Regional Meeting (MEARIM II), Cape Town, South Africa, http://mearim2.saao.ac.za/

2011.04.17-21 2nd Middle East-Africa IAU Regional Meeting, Cape Town, SA, http://www.iau.org/science/meetings/future/regional/982/

2011.05.16-17. Indian Ocean Oil & Gas, Port Louis, Mauritius. http://www.petro21.com/events/?id=574

2011.05.16-19 Sulphur, Sulphuric Acid and SO2 Abatement 2011. Sun City, North West Province, SA. http://www.saimm.co.za/saimm-events/item/28-sulphur-sulphuric-acid-and-so2-abatement-2011

2011.06.07-09 Watertech - Africa is the exhibition for Water Management, Treatment, Sanitation and Waste water sector. Gallagher Convention Centre, Midrand, South Africa. http://www.biztradeshows.com/trade-events/watertech-africa.html

2011.06.07-09 5th Africa Economic Forum 2011 (AEF-2011), Cape Town, South Africa http://www.petro21.com/events/?id=578

2011.06-26-29 (tentatively) SASAqS 2011 - Phongola region: Sustainable utilisation of southern African aquatic resources. Ithala Game Reserve in Northern KZN, South Africa. http://www.riv.co.za/sasaqs/NextCongresses.html

2011.07.18-20 6th Southern African Base Metals Conference 2011. http://www.saimm.co.za/saimm-events/item/26-6th-southern-african-base-metals-conference-2011

2011.07.18-21 15th Regional African Conference of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering. Maputo, Mozambique. http://www.15arcsmge-maputo2011.com

2011.08.15-18 International Mining History Congress, Johannesburg, South Africa. Contact [email protected]

2011.08.16-18 Coal processing: The key to effective coal utilization, South Africa http://www.sacoalprep.co.za/

2011.08.28-2011.09.02 Geosynthesis 2011. SAGA, GSSA and GASA will hold a combined conference in collaboration with ILP and Inkaba yeAfrica to present an Integrated Earth Science event in South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa, http://www.geosynthesis.org.za/

2011.08.31-2011.09.02 YGE 2011 Big 5 of Geotechnics, Berg en Dal, Kruger National Park, South Africa, http://www.saieg.co.za/uploads/events/YGE%20Announcement%20%282011%29.pdf

2011.09.19-21 Groundwater: Our Source of Security in an Uncertain Future. Pretoria, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.gwd.org.za 2011.10.03-07 62nd International Astronautical Congress, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.iac2011.com 2011.11.14-17 Flotation '11, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.min-eng.com/flotation11/index.html

2011.11.28-2011.12.09 17th (COP 17) Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Durban, South Africa. http://www.heritagesa.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=426%3Acop-17&catid=1%3Alatest-news&Itemid=1

2012 11th Geochemical Congress of the Portuguese Speaking Countries, Angola

2014 10th Congress of the international Council of Applied Mineralogy (ICAM), SA http://www.bgr.de/icam/home.html

2014 12th Geochemical Congress of the Portuguese Speaking Countries, Mozambique

2014 The 21st General Meeting of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA). SA. [email protected] http://www.ima2014.co.za/ima2014/index.htm

2015 67th Annual Meeting of the ICCP (International Committee for Coal & Organic Petrology), Tete, Mozambique.

2016 35th International Geological Congress (IGC), South Africa


Rest of Africa

2010.12.02-30 National Youth Climate Forum, Banjul, Gambia. http://www.earthday.org/events/national-youth-climate-forum

2010.12.13-17 Tracing the ancestry of galaxies (on the land of our ancestors). Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. http://www.iaus277.org/

2011.02.02-04 EAPCE’11 – 5th East African Petroleum Conference & Exhibition, Kampala, Uganda http://www.eac.int/energy/

2011.02.08-13 Eastern African Quaternary Research Association (EAQUA): On and Off-Shore: East Africa druing the last 100 ka. Zanzibar, Tanzania. Contact: [email protected]

2011.02.18-22 IAG/AIG Regional Conference on Geomorphology 2011: Geomorphology for Human Adaptation to Changing Tropical Environments, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, http://www.geomorph.org/mt/mtreg.html 2nd circular available

2011.02.21-23 4ème Colloque International sur les Ressources en Eau et le Développement Durable, (4th International Colloquium on Water Resources & Sustainable Development), Alger, Algérie, http://fr.ciredd4.ensh.dz/

2011.03.09-14 2nd Symposium on the Geological Resources in the Tethys Realm, Cairo, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. [email protected], [email protected]

2011.03.13-17 Cairo 12th International Conference on Energy and Environment. Theme "Advanced Technologies from Nano to Mega" The conference addresses issues related to energy, development and environment. Aswan, Egypt. http://www.EECAIRO.com

2011.03.19-22 Tethys Society, Second Symposium on the Geological Resources in the Tethys Realm, Alexandria, Egypt. Contact: [email protected]

2011.03.28-30 5th North African Mediterranean Petroleum and Geosciences Conference & Exhibition, Tripoli, Libya, http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=473

2011.05.18-22 FIG (Federation Internationale des Geometres) Working Week 2011, Marrakech, Morocco. http://www.fig.net/fig2011/

2011.07.25-29 Planetary Nebulae: an Eye to the Future. Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Canarias, Spain. Contact: Arturo Manchado Torres [email protected]

2011 October AfricaGIS™2011 Conference: "Geospatial Information Science and Technology for Adaptation of Climate Changes and Future of Africa", Cairo, Egypt. http://www.eis-africa.org/EIS-Africa/

2011.11.21-28 African - Arabian Geoparks International Conference, El Jadida, Morocco. http://www.aawg.org/AAWG/spip.php?rubrique42 2011.02.08-13 Eastern African Quaternary Research Association (EAQUA): On- and off-shore: Eastern Africa during the last 100 ka, Zanzibar, Tanzania

http://www.pages-igbp.org/calendar/2011/1st_Circular_3drEQUAmtg_Feb2011.pdf

Rest of the World

2010.12.01-03 MPES 2010 – Mine Planning and Equipment Selection, Fremantle, Australia, http://www.ausimm.com.au/MPES2010

2010.12.01-10 Mine Planning and Equipment Selection (MPES 2010). Esplanade Hotel Fremantle, WA, Australia. http://www.ausimm.com.au/mpes2010/

2010.12.02-03 1st Scarce Annual Conference. Theme "Understanding effects of global change on water quantity and quality in river basins". Girona, Spain. http://www.idaea.csic.es/scarceconsolider

2010.12.02-04 VII Congresso Suramericano de Mecánica de Rocas - ISRM South American Regional Symposium 2010, Lima, Peru, [email protected]

2010.12.05-08 30th Annual GCSSEPM Foundation Bob F. Perkins Research Conference "Seismic Imaging of Depositional and Geomorphic Systems". Houston, Texas, USA. http://www.gcssepm.org/conference/2010_conference.htm

2010.12.05-08 4th International Conference on Water Resources and Arid Environments, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, http://www.icwrae-psipw.org/

2010.12.05-08 International Oil Sands Tailings Conference. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. https://uofa-cee.gobigevent.com/prothos/onware.x/conference/web/index.p?!=public=12736744474878=4=11516796&Conference=5960

2010.12.06-08 International Conference on Challenges and New Directions in Transboundary Aquifers Management. Paris, France. http://iahs.info/conferences/2010_ISARM.pdf

2010.12.06-08 Global Dimensions of Change in River Basins: Threats, Linkages and Adaptation, Bonn, Germany, http://www.gwsp.org/66.html

2010.12.06-08 International Conference on Transboundary Aquifers (ISARM2010), Paris, France. http://www.isarm.net/publications/344.

2010.12.06-12 Conference of the Global Catchment Initiative (GCI) 2010 : The Global Dimensions of Change in River Basins - Threats, Linkages and Adaptation. University Club, Bonn, Germany. http://www.gwsp.org/66.html

2010.12.07-08 GeoPower Europe, Paris, France, http://www.geopowerseries.com/

2010.12.07-09 Second International Symposium on Arctic Research. Tokyo, Japan. http://www-arctic.nipr.ac.jp/isar2/toppage/isar2top.htm

2010.12.07-10 National Ground Water Association (NGWA) Ground Water Expo and Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, Nevada. http://www.ngwa.org/2010expo/index.aspx.

2010.12.08-09 ACG In-Pit Waste Storage and Management Seminar, Perth, Australia. http://www.acg.uwa.edu.au/events_and_courses

2010.12.08-11 V National Congress of Portuguese Geomorphology. Porto, Portugal. http://www.apgeom.pt/

2010.12.13-17 AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, Ca., U.S.A. http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/gycal?details=1&file=2010121300320182781&li

2010.12.13-17 Conference on Arid and Semi Arid Development through Water Augmentation (ASADWA), Valparaiso, Chile, http://www.asadwa.ugent.be/, http://www.cazalac.org/asadwa.php

2011.01.05-14 Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy: Building Bridges between Cultures. Lima, Peru. Contact: Ray Norris [email protected]

2011.01.06-08 8th Everything About Water Expo 2011, Mumbai, India, http://www.eawater.com/expo

2011.01.11-13 North American Environmental Field Conferene and Exposition, San Diego, California, USA. http://www.envirofieldconference.com/index.htm

2011.01.17-19 8th Asian Regional Conference of IAEG: International Conference on Underground Space Technology. Bangalore, India. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

2011.01.18-20 Canadian Mineral Processors Conference, Ottawa, Canada. http://www.cmpsoc.ca/annual-conference.cfm

2011.01.18-21 Geospatial World Forum (formerly known as Map World Forum). New Dehli, India. http://www.geospatialworldforum.org/2011/conference/submitabstract.htm


2011.01.23-29 Arctic Frontiers 15th Annual Conference: Arctic Tipping Points. University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway. http://www.arcticfrontiers.com/

2011.01.24-27 AGU Chapman Conference: Source to Sink Systems Around the World and Through Time, Oxnard, California, USA. http://www.agu.org/meetings/chapman/2011/acall/

2011.01.26-28 Polar Worlds Conference - Environmental and Social Sciences to Understand Observed Changes. Paris, France. http://thema.univ-fcomte.fr/polarworlds-2011/accueil_en.html

2011.01.31-2011.02.04 15th Biennial Conference of the ANZGG (Australian and New Zealand Geomorphology Group), Oamaru, South Island, New Zealand, http://www.anzgg.org/oamaru_circular.pdf

2011.02.02-05 International Conference on Integrated Water Management (IWM 2011), Perth, Australia, http://www.etc.murdoch.edu.au/pages/conf1.html

2011.02.06-09 International Society of Explosives Engineers 37th Annual Conference on Explosives and Blasting Techniques, San Diego, California, USA. http://www.isee.org/

2011.02.06-11 10th International Kimberlite Conference, Bengalore, India. http://10ikcbangalore.com

2011.02.06-11 Australian X-ray Analytical Association (AXAA 2011). Sydney, NSW, Australia. http://www.axaa.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=38&Itemid=18

2011.02.07-08 ILMF 2011 - 11th International LiDAR Mapping Forum, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. http://www.hydrographicsociety.org/event_details.asp?v0=212

2011.02.17-21 AAAG’s Annual Meeting (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Washington DC, USA. http://www.aaas.org/meetings/

2011.02.21 IUGS 50th Anniversary Event, Paris, France. http://www.iugs.org/

2011.02.20-25 Beneficiation of Phosphates VI, Kunming, China. http://www.beneficiationofphosphatesvi.com/about.html

2011.02.23-28 GEOProcessing 2011: The Third International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services. Gosier, Guadeloupe, France. http://www.iaria.org/conferences2011/GEOProcessing11.html

2011.02.27-2011.03.02 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Denver, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1046

2011.02.27-2011.03.03 TMS 2011: Linking Science and Technology for Global Solutions, California, USA. http://www.tms.org/meetings/annual-11/AM11home.aspx

2011.02.27-2011.03.04 AGU Champan Conference - Relationship Between Auroral Phenomenology and Magnetospheric Processes, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA. Contacts: [email protected] or [email protected]

2011.03.01-03 Congress - Neogene Park - Vertebrate Migration in the Mediterranean and Paratethys. Scontrone, Italy. http://www.comune.scontrone.aq.it/it/conference2011.htm

2011.03.01-03 World CTL 2011-Coal and Biomass to Liquid Fuels, Methane and Chemicals, Paris, France, http://www.world-ctl.com/ 2011.03.08-09 14th Australasian Tunnelling Conference 2011, Auckland, New Zealand, http://www.atstunnellingconference2011.com

2011.03.08-13 Third Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.preventionweb.net/globalplatform/.

2011.03.13-16 Geo-Frontiers 2011 (Advances in Geotechnical Engineering). Dallas, U.S.A. http://www.geofrontiers11.com/ 2011.03.20-22 Northeastern / North-Central GSA Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA. USA. www.geosociety.org/Sections/ne/2011mtg/ 2011.03.21-23 11th AusIMM Underground Operators’ Conference 2011. Canberra, ACT, Australia, http://www.ausimm.com.au/undergroundoperators2011/

2011.03.21-24 GS11 - SIAM Conference on Mathematical and Computational Issues in Geosciences, Long Beach, California, USA. http://www.siam.org/meetings/gs11/

2011.03.21-25 AGU Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes and Civilizations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, http://www.agu.org/meetings/chapman/2010/ecall/

2011.04.01-04 14th International Seminar on Paste and Thickened Tailings. Perth, Western Australia. http://www.acg.uwa.edu.au/

2011.04.02-04 23rd German Zeolite Conference (Deutsche-Zeolith-Tagung), Erlangen, Germany. http://www.processnet.org/dzt23.html

2011.04.04-08 Asia Mining Congress 2011, Singapore; Email: [email protected]

2011.04.04-08 IV Cuban Earth Science Convention. Convention Palace, Havana, Cuba. http://www.cubacienciasdelatierra.com

2011.04.05-07 14th International Seminar on Paste and Thickened Tailings, Perth, Australia. http://www.acg.uwa.edu.au/home

2011.04.06-07 Offshore Survey 11, Southampton, UK, http://www.hydrographicsociety.org/event_details.asp?v0=191

2011.04.08-11 IV Cuban Earth Science Convention. Havana, Cuba. http://www.cubacienciasdelatierra.com

2011.04.10-13 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, Houston, Texas, USA. http://www.aapg.org/meetings/

2011.04.10-15 34th International Symposium for Remote Sensing of the Environment, Sydney, Australia. http://isrse34.org/

2011.04.11-13 Jurse 2011, IEEE GRSS and ISPRS Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event. Munich, Germany. http://www.pf.bv.tum.de/jurse2011/

2011.04.11-14 The Status and Future of the World’s Large Rivers. Vienna, Austria Contacts: Helmut Habersack [email protected] and Des Walling [email protected]

2011.04.12-14 16th European Symposium on Improved Oil Recovery, Cambridge, UK, http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=478

2011.04.13-15 EOGC 2011 – Earth Observation for Global Changes, Munich, Germany, http://www.eogc2011.tum.de/

2011.04.13-15 Seismological Society of America Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. http://www.seismosoc.org/meetings/

2011.04.14-16 On the Surface: The Heritage of Mines and Mining, Innsbruck, Austria. http://www.tourism-culture.com/conferences_and_events.html

2011.04.18-21 14th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science. Utrecht, The Netherlands. http://www.uu.nl/geo/agile2011

2011.04.18-22 Death of Massive Stars: Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts. Nikko, Japan. Contact: Pete Roming [email protected]

2011.04.25-29 US Hydro 2011 - Biennial Conference of The Hydrographic Society of America (THSoA), Tampa, Florida, USA, http://www.hydrographicsociety.org/event_details.asp?v0=200

2011.04.30-2011.05-04 International Colored Gemstone Association (ICA) Congress. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, http://www.ica-gocolor.com/congress/

2011.05.02-05 Ecosystems, Groundwater and Surface Water – Pressures and Options. 3rd International Multidisciplinary Conference on Hydrology and Ecology. Vienna, Austria. http://web.natur.cuni.cz/hydroeco2011/

2011.05.02-05 HydroEco’2011 – 3rd International Multidisciplinary Conference on Hydrology and Ecology: Ecosystems, Groundwater and Surface Water – Pressures and Options. Vienna, Austria. http://web.natur.cuni.cz/hydroeco2011/

2011.05.02-06 Coastal Sediments '11, Bringing Together Theory and Practice, Miami, Florida, USA. http://coastalsediments.cas.usf.edu/author_info.html

2011.05.03-08 Gi4DM 2011 - The Sixth International Symposium on Geo-information for Disaster Management. Antalya, Turkey. http://www.gi4dm2011.org/


2011.05.08-16 The 11th International Conference on Salt Lake Research. Cordoba, Argentina. http://www.isslr.org/ISSLR2011/Bucher%202011.pdf

2011.05.09-12 World of Coal Ash 2011. Denver, Colorado, USA. http://www.worldofcoalash.org/

2011.05.09-14 6th International Congress of the European Society for Soil Conservation; Innovative Strategies and Policies for Soil Conservation, Thessaloniki, Greece. http://www.esscthessalonikicongress.gr

2011.05.10-13 World Reconstruction Conference as part of the Global Platform. Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.wrc-2011.org and http://www.gfdrr.org/gfdrr/wrc.

2011.05.11-12 Climate Change and the Minerals Industry (CCMI '11), Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom. http://www.min-eng.com/climatechange11/

2011.05.16-18 17th TC28 International Symposium "Geotechnical Aspects of Underground Construction in Soft Ground". Rome, Italy. http://www.tc28-roma.org/

2011.05.16-21 Closing the Gap - North Carpathian loess traverse in the Eurasian loess belt. Wroclaw, Poland. http://www.pages-igbp.org/calendar/2011/Wroclaw_2011.pdf

2011.05.18-20 3rd International Conference on Geotechnical Engineering for Disaster Mitigation and Rehabilitation 2011 - GEDMAR 2011. Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. http://reliability.geoengineer.org/GEDMAR2011/

2011.05.23-26 73rd EAGE Conference & Exhibition incorporating SPE EUROPEC 2011, Vienna, Austria, http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=408

2011.05.22-27 IUMAS-V: 5th International Union of Microbeam Analysis Societies, Inchon, Korea, http://www.ksem.com/

2011.05.25-27 17th Annual Latin Oil & Gas Week 2010 Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, http://www.petro21.com/events/?id=585

2011.05.25-27 Ottawa 2011: GAC - MAC - SEG - SGA annual meeting. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. www.gacmacottawa2011.ca

2011.05.25-28 EUREF Symposium 2011 (European Terrestrial Reference System). Chisinau, Moldova. http://www.epncb.oma.be/

2011.05.26-28 Lidar and Radar Mapping: Technologies and Applications Promoted by the Commission on Mapping from Satellite Imagery, Nanjing, China, http://www.lidar2011.org/

2011.05.29-2011.06.03 The Molecular Universe. Toledo, Spain. http://cab.inta-csic.es/molecular_universe/

2011.06.02-03 V Ibero-American Symposium in Computer Graphics (SIACG 2011), Faro, Portugal. http://ise.ualg.pt/SIACG2011

2011.06.03-08 XVII International Congress for Carboniferous and Permian" Perth, Australia. http://www.iccp2011.org

2011.06.14-17 Sustainable Development Indicators in the Minerals Industry 2011, Aachen, Germany. http://www.aims.rwth-aachen.de/SDIMI2011/

2011.06.14-17 5th International Debris Flow Hazards Mitigation Conference. Padova, Italy. http://www.geoscienze.unipd.it/~5th-DFHM/index.htm

2011.06.14-18 22nd Pacific Science Congress, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, http://www.22ndpsc.net/

2011.06.19-23 IASWS 2011 - International Association for Sediment Water Science (IASWS). Dartington, UK http://helios.sese.uwa.edu.au/

2011.06.19-24 21st (2011) International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference, Maui, Hawaii, USA, http://www.isope.org/conferences/conferences.htm

2011.06.26-30 5th International Workshop on Crystal Growth Technology. Berlin, Germany. http://iwcgt5.ikz-berlin.de/

2011.06.26-2011.07.01 EuroClay, Antalya, Turkey, http://www.aipea.org/downloads/EUROCLAY-2011%20flyer.pdf

2011.06.27-30 6th International Conference: Climate Change - The Karst Record, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, http://www.kr6conference.org/

2011.06.28-2011.07.07 XXV IUGG General Assembly: Earth on the Edge: Science for a Sustainable Planet. Melbourne, Australia. http://www.iugg2011.com/

2011.07.31-2011.08.04 TSOP Annual Meeting, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. http://www.tsop.org/meetings.htm

2011.07.03-08 5th International FEZA Conference (3-7 July) & FEZA School on Zeolites (8-9 July), Valencia, Spain, http://www.feza2011.com/

2011.07.03-08 11th International Conference on the Biogeochemistry of Trace Elements, Florance, Italy, http://www.icobte2011.com/

2011.07.03-11 25th International Cartographic Conference, Paris, France, http://www.icc2011.fr/

2011.07.04-06 8th International Conference on Structural Dynamics (EURODYN2011), Leuven, Belgium. http://www.eurodyn2011.org

2011.07.04-08 Binary Paths to the Explosions of type Ia Supernovae. Padova, Italy. Contact: Marina Orio [email protected]

2011.07.05-08 Geoinformatics Forum Salzburg (GI_Forum) Salzburg, Austria. http://www.gi-forum.org/

2011.07.05-11 28th IAS Meeting of Sedimentology. Zaragoza, Spain. http://www.iasnet.org/ias2011

2011.07.10-15 Gordon Research Conference: Catchment Science: Interactions of Hydrology, Biology & Geochemistry, Lewiston, ME, USA, http://www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2011&program=catchment

2011.07.10-16 ISAES XI - 11th International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. http://www.isaes2011.org.uk/

2011.07.11-15 Esri International User Conference (Esri UC), San Diego, California, USA. http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/index.html

2011.07.12-15 Past Present and Future Change in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Bristol, United Kingdom. http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/rapid/ic2011/

2011.07.18-22 From Interacting Binaries to Exoplanets: Essential Modeling Tools. Tatranska Lomnica, Slovakia. http://www.astro.sk/IB2E/

2011.07.20-27 International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) XXVIII Congress. Bern, Switzerland. http://www.inqua.tcd.ie/congress.html

2011.07.24-29 Carbon 2011, Shanghai, China. http://www.americancarbonsociety.org/calendar.html

2011.07.26-29 11th Asia-Pacific IAU Regional Meeting. Chiang Mai, Thailand. Contact: Busaba Kramer [email protected]

2011.08.01-05 10th International Congress for Applied Mineralogy (ICAM), Trondheim, Norway. http://icam2011.org/

2011.08.01-05 NCER - National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. http://www.conference.ifas.ufl.edu/NCER2011

2011.08.01-05 10th International Congress for Applied Mineralogy (ICAM 2011). Trondheim, Norway. www.icam2011.org

2011.08.02-10 INHIGEO Conference, Theme "Visual Images and Geological Concepts. Toyohashi, Japan. http://www.inhigeo-jp.org

2011.08.07-11 EAG Workshop: Tools in Environmental Biogeochemistry - Opportunities and Limitations, Tübingen, Germany, http://www.eag.eu.com/EAG_Workshop.html

2011.08.14-19 Goldschmidt2011, Prague, Czech Republic, http://www.goldschmidt2011.org/

2011.08.22-26 25th International Applied Geochemistry Symposium (IAGS 2011). Rovaniemi, Finland. Deadline for abstracts 31 March 2011. http://www.iags2011.fi/

2011.08.22-29 International Union of Crystallography (IUCr2011), Madrid, Spain, http://www.iucr2011madrid.es/

2011.08.23-26 4th IASPEI International Symposium: Effects of Surface Geology on Seismic Motion. Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A. http://esg.eri.ucsb.edu/

2011.08.24-28 WCRP (World Climate Research Program) Open Science Conference: Climate Research in Service to Society. Denver, Colorado, USA. http://www.wcrp-climate.org/conference2011/

2011.08.28-31 CANQUA (Canadian Quaternary Association) and IAH-CNC (International Association of Hydrogeologists - Canadian Chapter) Biennial Meeting. "Water and Earth: The junction of Quaternary Geoscience and Hydrogeology". Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. http://geohydro2011.ca


2011.08.28-2011.09.01 242nd American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting & Exposition, Denver, CO, USA, http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content

2011.08.29-2011.09.02 14th Latin American Geological Congress. 13th Colombian Geological Congress. Medellin, Colombia. http://www.14clg.com and Symposium traditional and non traditional stable isotopes as new proxies in Paleoceanography, Paleoclimatology and Paleobiology

2011.08.31-2011.09.11 IS- Seoul 2011 - 5th International Symposium on Deformation Characteristics of Geomaterials, Seoul, Korea. http://www.isseoul2011.org/

2011.09.04-09 IDA World Congress on Desalination and Water Reuse, Perth, Australia, http://www.idadesal.org/t-worldcongress_start.aspx

2011.09.04-09 10th Multinational Congress on Microscopy (MCM 2011), Urbino, Italy, http://www.mcm2011urbino.it/

2011.09.05-09 The spectral energy distribution of galaxies (SED2011). Preston, United Kingdom. Contact: Cristina Popescu [email protected]

2011.09.05-09 IAMG 2011 (Intern. Ass. Mathematical Geosciences) Salzburg, Austria. http://www.iamg.org/

2011.09.10-16 63rd Annual Meeting of the ICCP (International Committee for Coal & Organic Petrology), Porto, Portugal

2011.09.11-16 22nd World Mining Congress & Expo, Istanbul, Turkey. http://wmc-expo2011.com/

2011.09.12-16 3rd International Conference on Earth System Modelling. Hamburg, Germany, http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/static/icesm/

2011.09.14-19 GOLDSCHMIDT 2011, Prague, Czech Republic, http://www.goldschmidt2011.org/

2011.09.18-21 International Symposium on Rock Slope Stability in Open Pit Mining and Civil Engineering, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. http://www.slopestability2011.ca

2011.09.18-23 3rd iLEAPS International Science Conference, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany http://www.ileaps.org/multisites/Science_Conference_2011/

2011.09.19-21 WORLD RESOURCES FORUM 2011, Davros, Switzerland. http://www.worldresourcesforum.org/

2011.09.19-22 ModelCare 2011, The 8th International Conference on Calibration and Reliability in Groundwater Modelling. Leipzig, Germany. [email protected]

2011.09.19-23 GEOITALIA 2011 The VIII Forum of the Italian Federation of Earth Sciences (FIST) in Turin, Italy. http://www.geoitalia.org

2011.09.19-23 New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy. Oxford, United Kingdom. Contact: Elizabeth Griffin [email protected]

2011.09.20-25 4th International Conference on Medical Geology (GeoMed2011), Bari, Italy, http://www.medicalgeology.org/images/geomed2011.jpg

2011.09.26-29 11th Biennial SGA Biennial Meeting, "Lets Talk Ore Deposits". Antofagasta, Chile. http://www.sga2011.ucn.cl/ or download the First Circular at:https://www.e-sga.org/fileadmin/sga/SGA_meetings/Antofagasta_2011/First-circular-SGA-2011.pdf

2011.09.27-30 11th Biennial Conference Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits (SGA), Antofagasta, Chile. https://www.e-sga.org/

2011.09.27-30 5th International Conference on Flood Management, Tsukuba, Japan, http://www.ifi-home.info/icfm-icharm/icfm5.html

2011.09.27-30 IGWC-2011 - 4th International Groundwater Conference, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. Theme: "The Impact of Climate Change on Groundwater Resources with special reference to Hard rock Terrain." For the 1st Circular Contact: [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected]

2011 Septem. 7th Iberian Congress of Geochemistry (Portuguese), Castelo Branco, Portugal, http://cigeoq2011.ipcb.pt/

2011.10.02-05 6th International Symposium on Waste Processing and Recycling in Mineral and Metallurgical Industries, Montreal, Canada. http://www.metsoc.org/

2011.10.02-05 Conference of Metallurgists - COM 2011, 50th Anniversity, featuring World Gold 2011, Montreal, Canada. http://www.metsoc.org/

2011.10.03-07 Comparative magnetic minima: characterizing quiet times in the Sun and stars. Mendoza, Argentina. Contact: Sarah Gibson [email protected]

2011.10.03-09 World Landslide Forum, 2011: “PUTTING Science into Practice”. FAO, Rome. Italy, Contact: [email protected] http://www.wlf2.org

2011.10.05-07 9th International Hydrogeological Congress of Hellas. Kalavrita, Greece. http://www.hydrogeocongress.gr/

2011.10.09-12 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: Archean to Anthropocene – the past is the key to the future. http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/2011/index.htm

2011.10.09-14 XIII Congresso Brasileiro de Geoquímica (13th GBrazilian Geochemical Congress), Gramado, RS, Brazil, http://www.ufrgs.br/13cbgq/

2011.10.16-21 ISRM 12th International Congress on Rock Mechanics, Beijing, China, http://www.isrm2011.com/

2011.10.17-21 International Solvent Extraction Conference (ISEC2011), Santiago, Chile. http://www.isec2011.com/

2011.10.19-22 SVP (Society of Vertebrate Paleontology) 71st Annual Meeting, Bally's Las Vegas, USA, http://www.vertpaleo.org/meetings/2011annualmeeting.cfm

2011.10.23-28 XXII Congresso Brasileiro De Paleontologia (22nd Brazilian Congress of Paleontology), Natal (RN), Brazil. http://www.xxiicbpnatal.com

2011.10.24-28 WCRP Open Science Conference: Climate Research in Service to Society. Denver, CO, USA, http://www.wcrp-climate.org/conference2011/

2011.11.10-14 THE MINING PRIBRAM SYMPOSIUM, Pribram, Czech Republic, http://www.bgs.ac.uk/agid

2011.11.14-18 The Regional Geographic Conference of the International Geographic Union (UGI). Santiago, Chile. Theme: "United and Integrated with the World." http://www.ugi2011.cl/03_program.html

2011.11.19-23 GEOITALIA 2011. Turin, Italy, http://www.geoitalia.org/

2011.11.21-24 Conference on Arsenic in Groundwater in Southern Asia, Hanoi, Vietnam, http://vietas.er.dtu.dk/

2011.11.27-2011.12.01 Fray International Symposium on Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment, Cancun, Mexico. http://www.flogen.com/FraySymposium

2011.12.04-07 Fray International Symposium on Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment, Cancun, Mexico. http://www.flogen.com/FraySymposium/

2011.12.04-07 31st Annual GCSSEPM Foundation Bob F. Perkins Research Conference "Attributes: New Views on Seismic Imaging". Houston, Texas, USA. http://www.gcssepm.org/conference/2011_conference.htm

2011.12.04-08 20th World Petroleum Congress 2011. Doha, Qatar, http://www.20wpc.com/

2012.02.05-09 10th Asia-Pacific Microscopy Conference (APMC-10), Perth, Australia, http://www.ifsm.uconn.edu/PDFs/apmc-10.pdf

2012.02.19-22 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Seattle, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1049

2012.02.20-24 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting. Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. http://www.tos.org/conferences.html

2012.04.22-27 International Polar Year (IPY) Conference - "From Knowledge to Action", Montreal, http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ai/mr/nr/s-d2009/23301-eng.asp

2012.05.26-30 EUROCK 2012 - ISRM European Regional Symposium - Rock Engineering and Technology. Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.isrm.net/conferencias/detalhes.php?id=2974&show=conf

2012.05.27-30 EUROCK 2012 - ISRM European Regional Symposium - Rock Engineering and Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, [email protected]

2012.06.03-08 14th International Peat Congress - Peatlands in Balance, Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.ipc2012.se/

2012.06.04-08 25th World Gas Conference, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, http://www.wgc2012.com/


2012.06.05-06 Processing of Industrial Minerals & Coal '12, Istanbul, Turkey, http://www.min-eng.com/pimc12/

2012.06.25-29 10th International Conference on Permafrost (TICOP), Tyumen, Russia, http://ipa.arcticportal.org/index.php/tenth-international-conference-on-permafrost.html

2012.07.16-19 5th SCAR Open Science Conference, Portland, Oregon, USA http://www.scar.org/conferences/Portland/2012_SCAR-COMNAP_Portland.pdf (new)

2012.08.02-10 34th International Geological Congress. Brisbane, Australia. http://www.34igc.org/ First Circular available at https://mymail.ezemsgs.com/em/mail/view.php?id=1785200344&a=8781&k=4dfcea6

2012.08.26-30 32nd International Geographical Congress, Cologne, Germany. http://www.igc2012.org/

2012.09.16-23 IAH Congress. Confronting Global Change. Niagara Falls, Canada

2012.09.27-29 Calcium and magnesium in groundwater - distribution and significance. International Seminar. Katowice, Poland. [email protected]

2012.08.23-30 IPC13 (International Palynological Congresses), Tokyo, Japan, http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/psj3/IPC2012Web/web-content/index.html

2012.12.10-14 5th Asian Regional Conference on Geosynthetics. Bangkok, Thailand. http://www.geosyntheticssociety.org/Events.aspx

2013.02.24-27 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Denver, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1052

2013.07.22-26 Joint IAHS-IAPSO-IASPEI Scientific Assembly. Göteborg, Sweden

2013.09.15-22 65th Annual Meeting of the ICCP (International Committee for Coal & Organic Petrology), Sosnowiec, Poland

2013 September IAH Congress, Alice Springs, Australia CANS) Congress, Huelva, Spain, http://rcans.usal.es/

2014.02.23-26 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Salt Lake City, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1052

2014 August 24th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography, Montreal, Canada. http://www.iucr.org/iucr/cong/iucr-xxiii

2015.02.22-25 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Denver, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1052

PROFESSIONAL COURSES/WORKSHOPS/SCHOLARSHIPS

Course on UNDERSTANDING XRF SPECTROMETRY The Department of Geological Sciences of the University of Cape Town offers a summer course for industry, research and academia

on the theory and practice of XRF Spectrometry from 10 - 21 January, 2011. Directed by Emeritus Prof James Willis, in association with PANalytical B.V., this course presents the principles and practice of XRFS analysis. The emphasis will be on the application of the technique to geological materials, but applications in the cement, metals and other industries and in environmental analysis will also be discussed. Lectures will be given by Prof Willis, Dr B Vrebos and Prof A le Roex on both wavelength and energy dispersive XRF spectrometry. There will be practical exercises that will include an introduction to modern wavelength dispersive XRF spectrometers, energy dispersive spectrometry, and a practical introduction to the various procedures necessary for successful data reduction. Participants will carry out tutorial calculations on test data sets to familiarize themselves with the procedures involved. They will receive a comprehensive set of course materials, including “Understanding XRF Spectrometry” (a two volume book by James Willis and Andrew Duncan, published in 2008 by PANalytical B.V.) together with lecture handouts, notes and other useful documentation. The contents of the course and its presentation WILL be vendor neu tral. It is NOT a course on the instrumentation or software of any particular vendor. Participants completing the course should be in a much stronger position to successfully carry out XRFS analysis . A certificate of attendance will be issued. For more information about this course, please click http://fs2.majesticinteractive.co.za/admin/uploads/53/documents/Understanding%20XRF%20Spectrometry%20Jan%202011.doc Please reply to [email protected]

ICCP TRAINING COURSES 11.. IICCCCPP OOrrggaanniicc PPeettrroollooggyy TTrraaiinniinngg PPrrooggrraamm May 9 – 13 2011, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa The International Committee for Coal and Organic Petrology (ICCP), in conjunction with the University of the Witwatersrand and the SANERI Chair in Clean Coal Technology, is pleased to announce a training program in organic petrology to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, May 2011. The course will follow the structure of the 2 previous, highly successful organic petrology training courses, with a distinct Gondwana flavour. The course will be centred on the petrology of coals with a particular emphasis on their petrography. Practical applications and technological importance will be stressed. Students may bring their own samples for discussion. While a basic geological understanding will be assumed, the course is designed for those with little or no particular knowledge of coal or coal petrology. It is therefore suitable for undergraduate or post graduate students as well as established professionals who require a more thorough understanding of coal.

Topics to be covered include: (i) Coal origin and formation including peat forming environments, sedimentary environments, coalification and tectonic setting; (ii) Coal classification & standards; (iii) History of organic petrology; (iv) Sample preparation; (v) The petrographic microscope; (vi) Petrographic techniques: point counting, reflectance, fluorescence; (vii) Macerals, microlithotypes, lithotypes, minerals, rank; (viii) Interpretation of petrographic results and their applications; (ix) Exploration, beneficiation; (x) Chars – combustion, gasification, coking; (xi) Practical sessions; (xii) Field trip. Presenters: (i) Dr Alan C. Cook; (ii) Prof. em. Dr Claus F.K. Diessel; (iii) Prof Rosemary Falcon Coordination: Prof Nikki Wagner Costs are being finalised, and will be kept as low as possible as support funding has been received. Bona fida students will receive a significant discount. Cost for the course excludes travel, accommodation and meals except where stated. Costs include field trip, course notes, lunches and coffee, ice breaker and farewell function. Accommodation will be suggested closer to the time. Space is limited (25 person’s maximum) and will be on a first come basis. Further information is available from Nikki Wagner email address: [email protected] Please copy all emails to ICCP Vice-President and Training Courses Working Group Coordinator, Lopo Vasconcelos at [email protected]


22.. IICCCCPP TTrraaiinniinngg PPrrooggrraamm oonn DDiissppeerrsseedd OOrrggaanniicc MMaatttteerr September 7-9, 2011, Departamento de Geociências, Ambiente e Ordenamento do Território, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto (Porto, Portugal). Prior to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the ICCP. Presenters: Prof. João Graciano Mendonça Filho (Brazil), Dr. Alan Cook (Australia) Topics: 1. Dispersed Organic Matter (DOM): Concepts and definitions (1.1. OM production, processing and sedimentation; 1.2. OM evolution and chemical composition of biomass); 2. Transmitted light microscopy techniques (white and fluorescence lights - 2.1. Sample preparation; 2.2. Classification of OM; 2.3. Maturation: SCI-Spore Colour Index; spectral fluorescence; 2.4. Applications: organic petrography, palynology and palynofacies; 2.5. Organic facies); 3. Reflected light microscopy techniques (white and fluorescence lights - 3.1. Sample preparation and Standardization; 3.2. Petrography of OM: Nomenclature and applications); 4. Case studies (2h theoretical for each instructor and 2h practical for questions); Field trip (September, 10-11, 2010) - One and half day field trip entitled “The Lower Jurassic of the west coast of Portugal: Stratigraphy, geological heritage and organic matter record”. Registration fees:

Company / Professional 750 € Government / non-profit 400 € Students 200 € Field Trip 180 €

For details contact the coordinator of the course, Prof. Lopo Vasconcelos, Vice-President of the ICCP, email [email protected] and Deolinda Flores, email [email protected] for inquiries concerning the local organization Updated information in the ICCP webpage www.iccop.org

Snowden Courses

2011

o Introduction to Geostatistics: Vancouver: 18 Feb, 14 Oct; Perth: 21 Feb, 23 May, 10 June (Uranium Specific), 22 Aug, 21 Nov; Brisbane: 21 Feb, 11 July, 5 Dec; Johannesburg: 21 Feb, 23 May, 22 Aug, 21 Nov; Belo Horizonte: 18 March.

o Successful Sampling and QAQC of Assay Data: Vancouver: 14-15 Feb, 17-18 Oct; Perth: 22-23 Feb, 24-25 May, 23-24 Aug, 22-23 Nov; Brisbane: 22-23 Feb, 12-13 July, 6-7 Dec; Johannesburg: 22-23 Feb, 24-25 May, 23-24 Aug, 23-23 Nov; Belo Horizonte: 14-15 March, 12-13 Sept; Bali: 16-17 Aug; Lima: 14-15 Nov.

o Grade Control and Practical Reconciliation: Perth: 24-25 Feb, 26-27 May, 25-26 Aug, 24-25 Nov; Brisbane: 24-25 Feb, 14-15 July, 8-9 Dec; Johannesburg: 24-25 Feb, 26-27 May, 25-26 Aug, 24-25 Nov; Bali: 18-19 Aug; Belo Horizonte: 14-15 Sept; Vancouver: 19-20 Oct; Lima: 16-17 Nov.

Please contact Diana Titren, Training Division Manager, on +61 8 9211 8670 or [email protected] for further information.

o Grade Control in Underground Gold Operations: New Zealand: 25 Aug o Resource Estimation: Vancouver: 17-21 Jan, 9-13 May, 19-23 Sept; Toronto: 28 Feb – 4 Mar; Johannesburg: 14-18 Mar, 20-24 Jun, 12-16 Sept, 28 Nov-2 Dec; Perth: 21-25 Mar, 27 Jun-1 July, 26-30 Sept; Belo Horizonte: 4-8 April, 24-28 Oct; Denver: 6-10 Jun; Bali: 8-12 Aug; Lima: 21-25 Nov.

o Resource Estimation (4-day Resource Estimation Using Surpac): Perth: 5-8 July. o Advanced Resource Estimation: Perth: 4-8 April, 17-21 Oct; Vancouver: 11-15 April; Johannesburg: 9-13 May, 24-28 Oct; Belo Horizonte: 22-26 Aug. o Reporting Resources & Reserves: Vancouver: 16 Feb, 21 Oct; Johannesburg: 18 Feb, 20 May, 19 Aug, 18 Nov; Brisbane: (Coal Specific) 11 March, 17 June, 16 Sept, 2 Dec; Belo Horizonte: 16 March, 16 Sept; Perth: 17 Mar, 23 Jun, 22 Sept, 1 Dec; Bali: 15 Aug; Lima: 18 Nov.

o Practical Variography: Perth: 20 Jan, 14 March, 20 June, 19 Sept, 28 Nov; Vancouver: 17 Feb, 13 Oct; Belo Horizonte: 17 March o Variography Using Supervisor: Perth: 21 Jan, 15 March, 21 June, 20 Sept, 29 Nov; Johannesburg: 21 Jan, 25 March, 1 July, 30 Sept o Practical Conditional Simulation: Brisbane: 16 May (Coal Specific) o Sampling High-Nugget Gold Orebodies: Ballarat: 30 June-1 July, 29-30 Sept o Assessing Confidence in Coal Resource Estimates: Brisbane: 17-18 Feb, 26-27 May, 25-26 Aug, 24-25 Nov o Mining and Sampling Theory for Mine Technicians and Exploration Field Assistants: Perth: 17 Jan, 18 April, 25 July, 31 Oct, 5 Dec; Johannesburg: 17 Jan, 8 April, 15 July, 21 Oct, 5 Dec; Vancouver: 5 Dec

o Quantitative Risk Analysis Using Monte Carlo Simulation: Perth: 11-12 April, 18-19 July, 24-25 Oct o Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering: Perth: 13 April, 20 July, 26 Oct o Rock Slope Engineering: Perth: 14-15 April, 21-22 July, 27-28 Oct o Managing Mine Contracts: Perth: 31 March-1 April, 13-14 Oct; Bali: 21-22 July o Whittle Optimisation and Strategic Planning: Perth: 9-11 March, 15-17 June, 14-16 Sept o Open Pit Mine Planning: Perth: 7-9 Feb, 9-11 May, 8-10 Aug, 7-9 Nov o Managing Risks & Realising Opportunities in the Mining Industry: Perth: 5-6 May, 1-2 Sept; Johannesburg: 10 June (1-day seminar) o Mining Finance for Non-Finance Professionals: Perth: 15 Feb, 17 May, 16 Aug, 15 Nov, 6 Dec; Johannesburg: 17 Feb, 19 May, 18 Aug, 17 Nov; Brisbane: 7 March, 13 June, 12 Sept, 28 Nov; Bali: 27 July

o Mining and the Environment for Non-Specialists: Perth: 14 Feb, 16 May, 15 Aug, 14 Nov, 5 Dec o Reading and Interpreting Reports: Perth: 14 Feb, 16 May, 15 Aug, 14 Nov, 5 Dec; Sydney: 8 April o Mining for Non-Miners: Vancouver: 28 Jan, 5 May, 9 Sept, 3 Nov; Johannesburg: 15 Feb, 17 May, 16 Aug, 15 Nov; Perth: 17 Feb, 19 May, 18 Aug, 17 Nov, 8 Dec; Brisbane: 9 March, 15 June, 14 Sept, 30 Nov; Toronto: 10 March; Belo Horizonte: 22 March, 19 Aug, 2 Dec; Bali: 26 July; Lima: 2 Dec

o Metallurgy for Non-Metallurgists: Johannesburg: 16 Feb, 18 May, 17 Aug, 16 Nov; Perth: 18 Feb, 20 May, 19 Aug, 18 Nov, 9 Dec; Sydney: 7 April; Toronto: 11 March

o Technical Report Writing: Brisbane: 10 March, 16 June, 15 Sept, 1 Dec; Perth: 16 March, 22 June, 21 Sept, 30 Nov

o Geology for Non-Geologists: Vancouver: 27 Jan, 4 May, 8 Sept, 2 Nov; Johannesburg: 14 Feb, 16 May, 15 Aug, 14 Nov; Perth: 16 Feb, 18 May, 17 Aug, 16 Nov, 7 Dec; Brisbane: 8 March, 14 June, 13 Sept, 29 Nov; Toronto: 9 March; Belo Horizonte: 21 March, 18 Aug; Sydney: 6 April; Bali: 25 July


SEAMIC Courses Southern and Eastern African Mineral Centre (SEAMIC) organizes several courses. Please refer to the website http://www.seamic.org/ for details. The courses for 2011 are:

• Gem Safari 5 – 22 Jan

• Microsoft Office Application 10 – 14 Jan

• GIS Principle and Applications 17 – 28 Jan

• Computer Networking using CISCO devices – Introduction 31 Jan – 4 Feb

• Computer Networking using CISCO devices – Intermediate 7 – 11 Feb

• Metallurgical balance and process control 7 – 11 Feb

• Principle and Application of Remote Sensing 14 – 25 Feb • Advanced Pottery / Ceramic technology 14 – 18 Feb

• Gemmology Course 21 – 25 Feb

• Microsoft Office Application 28 Feb – 4 Mar

• GIS Principle and Applications 7 Mar – 18 Mar

• Basic Pottery / Ceramic technology for beginners 21 Mar – 25 Mar

• Web Mapping 21 Mar – 1 Apr

• Microsoft Office Application 4 Apr – 8 Apr

• Gem Cutting Class 11 – 29 Apr

• Sampling and testing of Ores 11 – 15 Apr

• Basic Pottery / Ceramic technology for beginners 18 – 22 Apr

• Web Designing – Using DreamWeaver 25 Apr – 06 May

• X-Ray Diffraction, Mineralogical and Petrological Sample Preparation and Analytical Techniques 2 – 20 May

• Basic Pottery / Ceramic technology for beginners 2 – 6 May

• Information Security Management 9 – 13 May

• Microsoft Office Application 16 – 20 May

• GIS Principle and Applications 23 May – 3 Jun

• Information System Auditing 6 – 10 Jun

• Gemmology Course 13 – 17 Jun

• Web Mapping 13 – 24 Jun

• Advanced Pottery / Ceramic technology 13 – 17 Jun

REGIONAL CENTRE FOR TRAINING IN AEROSPACE SURVEYS ( RECTAS) Under the Auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA)

MASTERS DEGREE PROGRAMS (1) Masters in Geoinformation Technology (MGIT) (offered in collaboration with Federal University of Technology, Akure,Nigeria. Duration is 18 months; and students are domiciled at RECTAS) (2) Masters in Geoinformation Science (MSc) (offered in collaboration with University of Abomey-Calavi, Republic of Benin. Duration is 18 months; and students are domiciled at RECTAS)

Detail\s at the RECTAS website at http://www.rectas.org/masters_mgit_msc.htm

APPLICATIONS TO THE RESEARCH, EDUCATION AND INVESTM ENT FUND OF THE GSSA (REI)

(PREVIOUSLY KNOWN AS THE GSSA TRUST FUND)

!! DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: 31 JANUARY 2011 !!

The GSSA Research, Education and Investment Fund (REI Fund – formerly known as the GSSA Trust Fund) is inviting applications from all its paid up-members (including post-graduate student members) for grants from the Fund, to be submitted not later than 31 January 2011. Applications can be made using the prescribed application form available on the GSSA web site (www.gssa.org.za) or by letter outlining all relevant details, and should be sent to any of the following addresses:

GSSA Secretariat P O Box 61809 Marshalltown 2107

to be received no later than 31 January 2011 Fax:+ 27 (0)11 492 3371 E-mail: [email protected]

Grants can be applied for to support a variety of Earth Science applications, e.g. to offset analytical and/or publication expenses with regard to research projects, to promote Earth Science awareness through geotourism, geoheritage and geo-education, for the attendance of local and international conferences relevant to particular research projects, and to present research results, for travel grants, or for other worthwhile purposes related to the Earth Sciences. These grants are normally only considered for MSc or higher degree or for specific research or other projects related to the earth Sciences or to the Society. In particular we welcome applications from post graduate student members and would appreciate it if Heads of Departments at Higher Education Institutions and their staff would inform their students of this opportunity. Grants are usually limited to R10 000 per applicati on but applications for larger amounts are also welcome. All applications will be judged on merit and/or the importance to the Society in promoting its image. Note that grants are only awarded to members /student members in good standing. Applications are screened by the REI Fund Committee during mid-February with input and ratification by the GSSA Management Committee and Council respectively. In evaluating the applications and recommendations, the Committee considers the merit of each application, and depending on the amount of money available for that year, makes a final decision on the allocation of grants for that year. The decision of the Committee is final and no further correspondence on the matter will be entertained. By following this procedure it is anticipated that applicants will be informed by early to mid-March 2011 whether or not their applications were successful. The current members of the REI Fund Committee are: Reinie Meyer (Chairman), Rob Ingram (Treasurer), Frank Gregory, Craig Smith, Richard Viljoen, Mike Wilson, Derek Kyle and two office bearers of the Society who have ex officio status, namely the President (Paul Nex) and the Executive Manager (Craig Smith).


GEOLOGY OF GOLD SHORT COURSE Earth Sciences, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

10-11th February 2011 Presented by Neil Phillips

The course is designed for geologists working in the mineral industry including those in gold or considering transferring to gold. Those researching gold are also welcome, and non-geologists in the gold industry would manage for much of the course. COURSE OUTLINE: there are four main components • Principles and processes relating to the formation of gold deposits • Late processes affecting the character and tenor of gold deposits • Gold provinces around the globe • Exploration for gold with a focus on the characteristics of discovery. Please reply to [email protected] www.phillipsgold.com.au for more details on the course as they become available.

DRILLING METHODS & TECHNIQUES IN EXPLORATION AND MI NING A PRACTICAL OVERVIEW OF ALL METHODS OF DRILLING FOR

PRACTICING GEOLOGISTS AND RELATED PROFESSIONALS

A TWO-DAY COURSE

24th & 25th February 2011

Glen Hove Conferencing, 52 Glenhove Road, Melrose, Johannesburg The need for a course on drilling methods and techniques for geologists and related professionals was recognised by the Geological Society of South Africa several years ago. Since then a number of very successful courses under the expert guidance of Colin Rice have been organised as a service to our members and other technical professionals.

Drilling techniques and methodology are continually evolving to the extent that drilling is now becoming more of an exact science of fundamental importance in all geological evaluation programmes. The courses are continually being updated to reflect these changes as well as the changing needs of geologists, to this end a second course, Advanced Diamond Drilling, was added to the program in 2005. Please reply to [email protected]

KIMBERLITE COURSE RHODES UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY

31st January - 3rd February 2011 This course is primarily designed for practising earth scientists. Delegates should regard it as either an introductory or refresher workshop in this topic designed to bring industry geologists up-to-date with recent advances in economic geology in particular kimberlite petrography and indicator mineral geochemistry. Delegates are accepted on a first-come-first-served basis. For further information and bookings, please contact: The Secretary : Exploration Geology (Mrs Ashley Goddard) Address : Geology Department, Rhodes University P O Box 94, Grahamstown, 6140, South Africa Telephone : 046 - 6038310 (Local) or + 27-46-6038310 (International) Fax : 046 - 6229715 (Local) or + 27-46-6229715 (International) E-mail : [email protected] URL : http://www.ru.ac.za/academic/departments/geology/

JOKE

Laughter is fun for English "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility." As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c".. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f".. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas... If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl...


INTERESTING PICTURES OF THE WORLD – BIG HOLES


INTERESTING PICTURES OF THE WORLD – GREENLAND


LANDSCAPES & GEOLOGY – FUNNY LANDSCAPES

1. Antarctica – McMurdo Dry Valleys (77°28′S / 162°31′E) 2. Canada - Spotted Lake (50°22'44"N / 86°50'25"W)

3. Nevada, USA – The Black Rock Desert (40°52′59″N / 119°03′50″W) 4. Alaska, USA - Crater of Mt Redoubt (60°29'7.00"N / 152°44'35.00"W)

5. Cappadocia, Turkey (38°39′30″N / 34°51′13″E) 6. Dominica - The Boiling Lake (15°19'6.00"N / 61°17'39.23"W)

7. Brazil - Valley of the Moon (14° 0'20.52"S / 47°41'4.56"W) 8. Unknown location


GEOLOGY OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN COUNTRIES/TERRITORIES

The Scattered Islands in the Indian OceanScattered Islands in the Indian OceanScattered Islands in the Indian OceanScattered Islands in the Indian Ocean (French: Îles Éparses or Îles éparses de l'océan indien) consist of four small coral islands, an atoll, and a reef in the Indian Ocean, and constitute the 5th district of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (TAAF) since February, 2007. They have no permanent population. Three of the islands, the Glorioso Islands, Juan de Nova, and Europa, as well as the Bassas da India atoll, lie in the Mozambique Channel west of Madagascar, while the fourth island, Tromelin, lies about 220 miles east of Madagascar. Also in the Mozambique Channel is the Banc du Geyser, a reef which was annexed by Madagascar in 1976. France continues to view the Banc du Geyser as part of the Îles Éparses. The islands have been classified as nature reserves. Except for Bassas da India, they all support meteorological stations. The meteorological stations on the Glorioso Islands, Juan de Nova, and Europa Island are automated. The station on Tromelin Island, in particular, provides warning of cyclones threatening Madagascar, Réunion, or Mauritius. Each of the islands, except Bassas da India and Banc du Geyser, has an airstrip of more than 1,000 metres. Mauritius, the Comoros, Seychelles, and Madagascar dispute France's sovereignty over the islands. Mauritius claims Tromelin; the Comoros and Seychelles claim the Glorioso Islands; the Comoros and Madagascar claim Banc du Geyser; and Madagascar claims the remaining islands. (In: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattered_islands_in_the_Indian_Ocean)

1. ÎLE EUROPA

(in: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europa_Island_simplified_land_cover_map-fr.svg)

See satellite image next page


Europa Island (French: Île Europa) is a 28 km² low-lying tropical island in the Mozambique Channel, about a third of the way from southern Madagascar to southern Mozambique. It has 22.2 kilometres of coastline, but no ports or harbours. Anchorage is possible offshore. The airstrip is 1,500 metres long.

The island is surrounded by coral beaches and a fringing reef and encloses a mangrove lagoon of around 9 km². Its vegetation also consists of dry forest, scrub, euphorbia and the remains of a sisal plantation.

Europa Island is a nature reserve and host to migratory seabirds. It is one of the world's largest nesting sites for green turtles (Chelonia mydas). It is also home to goats introduced by settlers in the late 18th century.

The island takes its name from the British ship Europa, which visited it in 1774. It has been a possession of France since 1897, but is also claimed by Madagascar. Ruins and graves on Europa island attest to several attempts at settlement from the 1860s to the 1920s.

Its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), contiguous with that of Bassas da India, is 127,300 km². The island, garrisoned by a detachment from Réunion, has a meteorological station and is visited by scientists. Europa, though uninhabited, is formally part of the "Îles Eparses" district ("Scattered Islands") of the TAAF ("Terres Australes et Antarctiques Françaises") administrative region, which comprises islands such as Kerguelen and the French Antarctic possessions.

In: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Island

In: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Europa_Island_space_view.jpg

Latitude 22°21'23.67"S Longitude: 40°21'35.61"E

Documents

SEASON GREETINGS - Geological Society of Africa and Zalasiewicz added that microscopic analysis of the shale layers using a specially designed ‘Petroscope’, obtained with funding