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Something about one of the floor tiles in his parents’ newly renovated European home seemed extremely strange. That’s because the man who made the discovery, a dentist, recognized the bizarre, out-of-place object he had just found. The unusual discovery was made when Reddit user Kidipadeli75 noticed a floor tile located in a portion of the home leading out onto a patio area that seemed to have something very strange embedded in it. Naturally, he did what anyone would do in our modern era of internet sleuthing: he posted an image of the oddity online. The curious object in the photo...

A multi-national team of researchers from Bournemouth University and Guangzhou University has found five handprints and five footprints in Quesang, on the Tibetan Plateau, dating from 169,000-226,000 years ago, in the middle of an Ice Age.The prints were preserved in freshwater limestone deposited around a hot spring – known as travertine. Judging by the size and height of the prints, the analysis suggests that they were carefully placed by children around the age of seven to twelve years of age.Dating of the prints was conducted using a radiometric method based on the decay of uranium found in the travertine, providing...

A hunter-gatherer who trekked through a desert oasis a hundred centuries ago left the continent’s most lasting impression: the oldest known human footprints in North America. There are only two of them — one left and one right — but the ancient traveler’s path through mineral-rich sediment in the Chihuahuan Desert allowed them to become enshrined in stone, and now dated, some 10,500 years later... The tracks were first discovered during highway construction in northeastern Mexico, about 300 kilometers from the Texas border, in 1961. They were excavated and taken to a local museum for study, but their precise location...

This is one that I've actually seen in person; it's just off Highway 4 north of Jemez Springs (near Los Alamos). There's a small hot spring, certainly from the remnant heat of the Valles Caldera just up the road, that created the "soda" (limestone) that makes the dam that is cut through by the Jemez River.

When I was discovering the "Earth from Above" pictures, I was bedeviled by the image below. I thought it was Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone NP, and it wasn't labeled. It took a bit of searching to find out where it was -- and I was surprised to also find out I'd never heard of it before. The image is of Pamukkale, a famous site in Turkey that features active, large travertine terraces. Apparently they aren't as hot as Mammoth, because people can clearly wade and immerse in them. Below are some additional images and links about Pamukkale. Pamukkale, a...

Link Post: Geology Picture of the Week, December 8-14, 2002

Mooney Falls and travertine cascades on Havasu Creek, Arizona.