January GEOLOGY media highlights( Boulder CO USA - GEOLOGY topics i...)

Boulder, CO, USA - GEOLOGY topics include "the best submarine record of displacement," geophysical data from the Black Sea, hazardous volcanic ice-slurry flows, the controversy over riverbank erosion rates, surface cracks in the Atacama Desert, CO₂ sequestration, ultradeep Australian diamonds, Earth's magnetic field and the cosmic-ray-climate theory, fresh-water megafloods into the Pacific, early marine fossils preserved in French amber, tiny fossil fish teeth recovered by the Ocean Drilling Program, and alkaline groundwater at the dawn of land plant radiation.

Highlights are provided below. Representatives of the media may obtain complementary copies of articles by contacting Christa Stratton at cstratton@geosociety.org. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GEOLOGY in articles published. Contact Christa Stratton for additional information or assistance.

Non-media requests for articles may be directed to GSA Sales and Service, gsaservice@geosociety.org.

Philip M. Barnes, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Private Bag 14 901, Kilbirnie, Wellington, New Zealand. Pages 3-6.

Barnes presents what is arguably the best submarine record of displacement rate yet documented on a major submarine plate boundary strike-slip fault. It will be of wide interest to a multidisciplinary global community of workers undertaking research on active plate boundaries, continental margins, and also zones of intracontinental deformation in which strike-slip faulting is significant. It is particularly relevant to current tectonic studies of western North America, where a substantial part of the Pacific-North America
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