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Kit Hamley holds a large male sea lion skull from a bone pile at New Island. Dozens of individual sea lions were present throughout the bone pile assemblages excavated at New Island.Credit: Kit Hamley

Dec 2, 2009 — Field geologists have revisited a site Darwin visited on the voyage of the Beagle, and found that he incorrectly interpreted what he found.  A large field of erratic boulders in Tierra del Fuego that have become known as “Darwin’s Boulders” were deposited by a completely different process than he thought.  The modern team, publishing in the Geological Society of America’s December issue of the GSA Today,1 noted that “Darwin’s thinking was profoundly influenced by Lyell’s obsession with large-scale, slow, vertical movements of the crust, especially as manifested in his theory of submergence and ice rafting to...

TIERRA DEL FUEGO, Argentina (Reuters) - The Great Beaver Plague, as some furious locals call it, began in 1946 with the same good but misguided intentions that have presaged countless other ecological disasters. That year, Argentina's former military government imported 25 pairs of beavers from Canada, hoping they would multiply and create a fur industry among the chilly, lush forests on this large island at the very tip of South America. Multiply they did. But the fur trade never quite caught on, and there were no natural predators. So today there are tens of thousands of beavers wreaking havoc across...

Link post: Geology Picture of the Week, March 30-April 5, 2003: Tierra del Fuego

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