Pangaea or Pangea was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It formed approximately 300 million years ago and then began to break apart after about 100 million years. Unlike the present Earth, much...

Thera, or the modern island of Santorini, located sixty-nine miles north of the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, was devastated by a volcanic eruption sometime in the 15th century BC. The eruption was one the the most powerful in the past...

James Hutton was a Scottish physician, geologist, naturalist, chemical manufacturer and experimental agriculturalist. He is considered the father of modern geology. His theories of geology and geologic time, also called deep time, came to b...

Sir Charles Lyell was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by sl...

John Henry "Professor" Pepper was a British scientist and inventor who toured the English-speaking world with his scientific demonstrations. He entertained the public, royalty, and fellow scientists with a wide range of technological innova...

Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was an American geologist noted for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century. He was also a physician who served with the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1871...

Eduard Suess was a geologist who was an expert on the geography of the Alps. He is responsible for discovering two of the Earth's major now-lost geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana (proposed 1861) and the Tethys Ocean. Sue...

Yellowstone National Park is a national park located primarily in the U.S. state of Wyoming, although it also extends into Montana and Idaho. It was established by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March...

Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German polar researcher, geophysicist and meteorologist. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered as th...

Krakatoa is a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It has erupted repeatedly, massively and with disastrous consequences throughout recorded history. The best known eruption culminated in a series of ma...

Prof Arthur Holmes was a British geologist who made two major contributions to the understanding of geology. He pioneered the use of radiometric dating of minerals and was the first earth scientist to grasp the mechanical and thermal implic...

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco and the coast of northern California at 5:12am on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the earthquake is a mo...

Clair Patterson was a geochemist born in Mitchellville, Iowa, United States. He graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and spent his entire professional career at the California...