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Getting There and Getting Around Cairo

Egypt’s main gateway is Cairo International Airport (CAI), which has nonstop flights to most major Middle Eastern and European cities. EgyptAir offers direct flights to Cairo from New York City and Toronto. From other North American locations, it’s usually most convenient to fly through Dubai, Abu Dhabi or a European hub. British Airways, Emirates, Etihad, Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines are among the carriers offering connecting service.

16 Aug 2018

Travels in Geology: The pyramids of Giza: Wonders of an ancient world

At the edge of Cairo, three massive pyramids rise from the Giza Plateau’s Mokattam Formation, which comprises of layers of middle Eocene limestones and dolomites. These rocks, which display fossil evidence of their origins at the bottom of the Tethys Sea some 50 million years ago, provided the millions of multiton blocks used to construct the pyramids.
16 Aug 2018

Place-based education: Teaching geoscience in the context of location and culture

Place-based geoscience education integrates scientific and cultural knowledge of local landscapes, environments and communities with an awareness of the different meanings that place can hold for people of various cultural backgrounds. It’s a “new old” method of teaching that is experiencing a resurgence.
06 Aug 2018

Diamonds and the Eocene climate of the Bell River Basin

Diamonds mined from the kimberlite pipes of the Lac de Gras diamond field in Northwest Territories, Canada, are among the world’s youngest known diamonds, dating from 75 million to 45 million years ago. In some cases, when the magmas that carried these diamonds to Earth’s surface encountered water-saturated rock at shallow depths, violent steam explosions called phreatomagmatic eruptions resulted. Such explosions can form volcanic craters known as maars, which often fill with water and accumulate lake sediment, along with soil and vegetation that collapse into them from their margins. In the case of the Panda kimberlite pipe at the Ekati Mine in the Lac de Gras area, maar sediments accumulated far below the surrounding terrain, such that they were later buried under glacial deposits rather than being eroded away by ice sheets during the past million years. Wood and other organic materials were entombed and preserved in their natural state, thereby preserving shreds of the Paleo-Bell River Basin.

25 Jul 2018

Saglek Basin sediments suggest a Grand Canyon connection

Pollen makes an ideal fossil. Pollen grains — each only a few tens of microns in diameter — are produced in astronomical quantities by plants and record information about the ecosystem from which they came, thus providing a way to reconstruct past environments. Additionally, pollen is composed of a highly stable organic substance, sporopollenin, which resists decay as well as the high heat and pressure associated with deep burial, lithification and tectonism. It is so resistant, in fact, that it can be eroded from rock and recycled into younger sediments, a process recognized in the 1980s by V. Eileen Williams of the University of British Columbia in her studies of Paleo-Bell River sediments deposited in the Labrador Sea.

25 Jul 2018

The Paleo-Bell River: North America's vanished Amazon

With similar geologic and tectonic histories, including a continuous mountain cordillera along their western margins, why does South America have a massive river draining a continentwide basin but North America does not? Before the Pleistocene, it did.
25 Jul 2018

Getting There And Getting Around Vancouver

Most visitors to Vancouver and the surrounding area arrive via Vancouver International Airport (YVR) or by road, approaching the city from the east along the Trans-Canada Highway or from a U.S. border post to the south. Although flights into YVR are often good value, especially as a stopover for trans-Pacific flights, it’s often cheaper for U.S. travelers to fly into Seattle, as we did, and then drive across the border. 

16 Jul 2018

Travels in Geology: From sea to sky in British Columbia

About 200 million years ago, myriad exotic terranes began accreting to form what is now British Columbia in southwest Canada. Today, the region’s tremendous topography, which rises from sea to sky over just a few kilometers, allows outdoor pursuits year-round.
16 Jul 2018

Hazards in paradise: Indonesia prepares for natural disasters

Indonesia is a lushly beautiful and tectonically active country that is prone to natural disasters, including eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, floods, tornadoes and landslides. What is the country doing to monitor and prepare for such hazards and are those efforts working?

06 Jul 2018

Toxic treatments: Lead lingers in folk remedies

Despite drastic reductions in lead poisoning since the 1970s, some children are still being exposed to lead from atypical sources, including cosmetics and folk remedies with often-unknown origins. Medical geologists are on the case.

25 Jun 2018

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