June 12, 1870, birthday of German paleontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach. Famous for the discovery of the holotype of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.
History_of_Geology
June 11, 1993, the movie Jurassic Park (even if most #dinosaurs are from the Cretaceous) is released in the #USA. Praised at the time for the story & special effects using animatronics and early computer graphics 🦖🎥
"The man and his fossils can be imprisoned, but not his idea."
June 11, 1819, William Smith, a pioneering geological sections & map maker, is arrested & imprisoned as defaulting debtor. Work on his map & poor financial decisions bankrupted him.
June 11, 1991, Mount Pinatubo on the Philippines erupts. It is the second-largest eruption in the 20th century 🌋
Reporter Ted Aljibe takes an impressive sequence of pictures showing a pyroclastic flow caused by the collapse of the eruption column.
P.S. The men in the car managed to escape 🚗🌋
June 11, 1770, James Cook's ship collides with the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, the largest biostructure on Earth.
Reef & carbonate platforms fascinated geologists as they origin remained a mystery for a very long time 🏝️
June 10, 1962, died on this day American botanist Robert Fiske Griggs.
In 1916, he discovered the "Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes" in Alaska - the still steaming-hot deposits of Novarupta-Katmai - the largest volcanic eruption in the 20th century
June 10, 2003, the Spirit Rover is launched, beginning #NASA's #Mars Exploration Rover mission - The first color image by Spirit send to Earth shows the Martian desert - at the time the highest quality photo taken on another planet.
🌚
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_(rover)?fbclid=IwY2xjawK09R9leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETBqbTA3WHNaYWZQWEVFU3ZRAR5i5tvlgq8RRhI2GmnQXi5YSEEiNmKt0dOk8Mh8LAyHHP-YqpHeQQ1AkL-p2Q_aem_EFlkgGJcCSqjmvB5qxjBzA
June 10, 1786, a landslide lake along the Dadu River, formed by an earthquake ten days earlier, collapses, the resulting outburst flood kills 100.000 people in the Sichuan province of China.
June 10, 1880, the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius (and first mass transit system on an active volcano) opens to the public, making the volcano even more accessible to tourists visiting Naples. It covered the last 400 meters to the rim of the central crater and was destroyed during the 1944 eruption.
June 9, 1989 "#StarTrek V: The Final Frontier" premieres in the US giving us an out of this world story and dialogue like
"You must be one with the rock" 🖖 ⚒️
http://www.bressan-geoconsult.eu/geological-star-trek-review-where-no-man-has-gone-before/
The props used for the scenes in the movie were actually "Herkimer Diamonds" borrowed from the Herkimer Diamond Mines of Middleville, New York. They are doubly-terminated (two-ended) quartz crystals found in cavities of dolostone. They were the only gem-like crystals that would look enough like diamonds and be that large.
As a kind of tribute, Tim Curry's character's first name is "Herkermer" (his character does not appear in the Michael Crichton novel upon which the movie was based).
June 9, 1995, "Congo" premieres in the U.S. featuring sesame cake, an erupting volcano, Ernie Hudson and Tim Curry hunting for mineralogical impossible "diamonds" while battling killer gorillas💎🦍
June 9, 1891, French painter Paul Gauguin arrives at Papeete, Tahiti -"landscape of Tahiti" showing the eroded remains of a volcano on the island of Hiva Oa 🌋
June 8, 1783, the “Laki-eruptions” start - a series of fissures erupting lava fountains - the strongest eruption in #Iceland's history and largest effusive eruption on land in the last 1.000 years.
Ash and toxic gases caused widespread devastation and a famine in Iceland and the eruption maybe even changed weather patterns in Europe 🇮🇸🌋
June 6, 1912, the Novarupta-Katmai eruption in Alaska was the largest in the 20th century - 30 times more powerful than St. Helens in 1980 🌋
The Glossopteris leaves will later prove that Antarctica once was ice-free and part with other continents - where similar fossils were found - of the supercontinent of Gondwana.
In 1914, British paleontologist Albert Charles Seward described the fossil plants collected by Scott’s party as Glossopteris and Vertebraria.
"The moraine was obviously so interesting that when we had advanced some miles and got out of the wind, I decided to camp and spend the rest of the day geologizing....Altogether we had a most interesting afternoon, but the sun has just reached us, a little obscured by night haze."
Their samples were discovered later that year - along with the frozen bodies of the entire expedition.
June 6, 1868, birthday of British explorer Robert F. Scott, he will perish during the race for the south pole.
In 1912 Scott's expedition was beaten by Amundsen and his Norwegian team.
The demoralized Scott, hoping to still achieve his scientific goals, decides during his return to stop at a moraine and collect rock samples, costing precious time:
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