Who Shot the Sheriff?

Mass extinctions are among the most intriguing events in earth history and their cause a matter of heated and passionate debate. An article in EOS by Keller et al. reports on a recent workshop at the Natural History Museum in London.

Since the seminal paper by Alvarez et al. on the nature of the K-T boundary it had always been the argument mainly between the proponents of the impact hypothesis vs. the flood volcanism hypothesis. And both sides had good arguments to support their cause. At this recent workshop 150 scientists from different disciplines got together to discuss the cause of Phaenerozoic mass-extinctions in a multi-disciplinary approach.

It will be interesting to read the proceedings from this workshop. In preparation, Keller et al. have published an extensive summary of their view on the subject in Geoscientist.

We are still looking for the smoking gun.

The Mysteries of Deep Time

Originally published by by Randall Munroe on XKCD. http://xkcd.com/1194/

Introducing Lithologs

After some initial experiments with Psicat and SVG we can now offer a new, cool Snet tool: Lithologs. 

Lithologs is a tool which allows to create and plot lithological logs online. It is very inspired by Psicat and internally uses the Psicats XML to store litholog data. But unlike Psicat it plots lithological columns using SVG, which you can also embed in your blog, website etc. like this one (which you cannot see if your browser doesn't support SVG):

It further offers the possibility to store some basic metadata on these geological features.
The project is now in a very early alpha release phase.
More features are planned such as Psicat import and export, and the support of more standards such as OAI-PMH, Geo DC and in the future also GeoSciML..