Geoblogosphere week in review (June 7-13, 2010)

Here are several posts from the geoscience blogosphere last week highlighting some interesting writing*:

• Michael Welland, author of the book Sand: The Neverending Story and the blog Through the Sandglass, continues his great writing about plans to construct sand berms in the Gulf coast to help mitigate the ongoing oil well blowout disaster. Michael takes a closer look at what we might learn from Dauphin barrier island, offshore Alabama.
• David Bressan from the blog cryology and co. started another blog a couple months ago called History of Geology. David revisits some of the ideas of 19th Century geologists about how the Alps mountain range came to be. David includes some great line-drawing diagrams from some of these old publications in addition to photographs from his own visits.
• Silver Fox from the blog Looking For Detachment writes about her thoughts while traveling throughout the basins and ranges of Nevada some years ago looking for geologically appropriate areas for future research.
• Matt Wedel, who contributes to the blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, writes this excellent review of the brouhaha that ensued last week when the University of California system threatened to boycott Nature Publishing Group over their business practices (i.e., 7% annual increase in cost to academic libraries.) If you want to get the big picture on this story, complete with links to all the gory details, then this is the post.
• Finally, this post by Callan Bentley at his blog Mountain Beltway is notable for the discussion that is ongoing in the comment thread about oversimplified (and sometimes just plain wrong) concepts in geology and how, or if, to teach them to novices.

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* this is the first post in this series so please bear with me while I experiment with the title, format, etc. over the coming weeks; as always, feel free to provide feedback in the comment thread