You are browsing the archive for movies Archives - Magma Cum Laude.
13 February 2015
Movies in your geology
No, that’s not a typo – it’s the topic of a discussion I prompted on Twitter a few weeks ago and then immediately forgot to post about. Fortunately, through the wonder of Storify, I can recap it for everyone. The backstory is that I had a request from a reader for movies he could show that featured geologically interesting places, but weren’t necessarily about geology or disasters. He also requested that they be fairly popular (things that had done well at the box office and might be expected to have been seen by a wide audience) and that they be things that intro students would recognize, either because they were recent or widely re-watched.
1 March 2014
“Is the volcano erupting yet?” (A quick Pompeii review)
So, you may have seen me mention on Twitter that I was planning on seeing Pompeii this week – and I did, properly fortified with some nice cider at a nearby pub beforehand. I’m not going to give you the full rundown of the science and history of the eruption, because David Bressan is already working on a series of excellent posts about that. Instead, I’m going to treat this as a quick-and-snarky guide to whether you want the movie to feature at your next “bad geology movie night”.
10 March 2012
Learning moments in geology movies
Between digging into fluid dynamics papers, figuring out stability fields for alteration minerals and generally dealing with being a grad student, I haven’t had a lot of time to post lately. (Plus I had to do my taxes this weekend…) But I did get great comments on the “Survival Geology” post, especially about using movies and TV to teach science, and I thought I’d run with some thoughts on those. …
30 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: The Monolith Monsters
Lee Allison at Arizona Geology deserves credit for inspiring the last movie in the Frightfest series – in his post from June about the Piranha 3D movie, he also mentioned The Monolith Monsters. Again, it’s another 1950s movie I haven’t had the chance to see, but I’ll definitely have to remedy that if I can…guess what’s next on the Netflix queue? With a title like that, though, I couldn’t resist …
29 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: El monstruo de los volcanes
Tonight’s post will be a short one, because it’s Friday and I just spent the last hour carving a pumpkin. This Frightfest offering comes via the suggestion of a devoted reader (thanks, Mom!), and I had to post it, even though I can’t find out a lot about the movie. This is the best I could dig up for El Monstruo de los Volcanes: A yeti-like creature with the power …
28 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: Fantasia
All right, so Fantasia probably isn’t the first thing you think of when the topics of horror movies or geology come up (and I’m not talking about the whole movie, so I’m cheating a bit with this one). But I am talking about the excellent Night on Bald Mountain sequence, where the animators set Modest Mussorgsky’s composition of the same name. I loved Fantasia as a child, and still do …
27 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: The Mole People
I thought I’d go with a classic film for today’s edition of Geological Frightfest, because the premise of The Mole People is just so interesting. It’s not actually one I’ve seen, and I know a lot of younger readers probably won’t have ventured into the realm of 1950s horror, so here’s a bit of summary from Wikipedia: “The film begins with a narration by Dr. Frank Baxter, an English professor …
26 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: Jurassic Park
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Jurassic_Park_poster.jpg Okay, given the super-gory, blood-soaked grossness that today’s monster movies seem to be embracing, Jurassic Park is pretty tame. Tasteful, even, when people get eaten by dinosaurs. But let me tell you, when it came out in 1993, that was a pretty darn scary movie. (I remember seeing it as an eight-year-old, and I can’t remember a movie since that’s actually frightened me out of my seat and two …
25 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: Tremors
Halloween is pretty much my favorite holiday – when else can I show up at school in costume? – and I’ve decided to resurrect the theme of geology in the movies for a Halloween series this week. To start us off, I’ll turn to that classic geologic monster movie: Tremors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tremorsposter.jpg Tremors often comes up when lists of geology-themed movies are mentioned. Not only does it feature hungry subterranean critters, …
5 May 2009
If I were a geologist on Star Trek…
…I could apply for a joint medical degree, because sometimes rocks need doctoring. …Sometimes a rock hammer wouldn’t be enough to deal with those really stubborn minerals. …I could give up hand lenses, thin sections, petrographic microscopes, microprobes, XRD, and point counting for this… (although a good geologist would never give up their hand lens) …It wouldn’t take me until the end of the episode to figure out that I …
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.