Things are still unsettled in Illinois. Earthquake tremors were reported every day last week, Sunday through Friday. Most of it was small stuff, but there was a 4.0 and a 3.7. Here’s the latest. Still lots of activity near Bone Gap. The gap must be growing.

My earthquake monitor indicates another earthquake near Bone Gap, Ill., early this morning. This one measured 4.0 and was at a depth of 6.2 miles, a mile shallower than last weeks.

Usually placid Illinois had a 5.2 magnitude earthquake this morning. It was six miles east of Bone Gap, at a depth of about 7.2 miles. Follow the action here. Click on the Summary tab and learn about earthquakes in Illinois.

Here’s a good news account about it.

Effective Saturday, the price for titanium dioxide will jump by $120 a metric ton.

That’s how a post by Andrew Leonard starts off at How the World Works. I’m a sucker for writings about geology and Leonard weaves that along with memories from his childhood and environmental concerns about the Okefenokee Swamp.

Underneath it all is an everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know article about titanium dioxide (where it comes from, how it’s used, etc.) Excellent work, Andrew.

The earthquake map today shows something unusual: quakes in New York state. That’s the closest to this area that I’ve seen since starting to glance at the map.

There was a 2.7 magnitude quake northeast of Buffalo today and a 2.9 southeast of Ottawa, Ontario, on Friday.

As always, there’s a whole lot of shakin’ going on, including a strong one in Peru.

I’ve mention the Earthquake Watch widget on my iGoogle page. Great entertainment to follow the daily spread of tremors. A fairly common pattern that emerges. There’s always plenty of activity in the Indonesia area, always something in Greece/Turkey and Alaska. Generally something in California and somewhere in the Caribbean.

Today there’s a different pattern. There were small tremors all across Europe. There was a quake in the usually placid South America and the Sandwich Islands (the closest I’ve noticed to Antarctica), plus a couple in Japan.

The leader of the day? South Sandwich Islands. 6.5 magnitude about 6 miles down into the Earth.

There was a light earthquake this morning in Tennessee. According to the U.S.G.S., about two quakes a year are felt in the region:

The New Madrid seismic zone of southeast Missouri and adjacent States is the most seismically active in North America east of the Rockies. During the winter of 1811-1812 three very large earthquakes devastated the area and were felt throughout most of the Nation.

Some British geologists are suggesting that the Holocene era has ended. We’ve entered a new geological age governed by human activity. The Holocene is a post-glacial era spanning the past 11,000-some years - all of recorded human history:

But now, a distinguished group of British geologists has provocatively proposed that the Holocene is over and that we have entered a new geological era — the Anthropocene — in which humans have left such a distinctive footprint on the Earth’s surface through carbon pollution, nuclear fallout, urbanization and other traces of our immense technological power that it should be officially recognized by international scientific bodies as “a formal epoch.”

I have the Earthquake Watch widget on my iGoogle page and I noticed an oddity today: a quake in Missouri. There’s always lots of activity in Alaska and the west coast, but something in the interior seems to be rarer. I went to the USGS earthquake site for the map of the US and discovered there was more than just Missouri in the past week. There were also tremors in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.

In the past seven days, there were 764 quakes reported in the U.S.

I’m always amazed by the number of earthquakes recorded every day. It’s not so often that we hear about one, but they’re happening quite frequently in varying degrees. And varying depths.

The Earthquakes Hazards website (from the U.S. Geological Service) shows quakes in December as near to the surface as about six tenths of a mile (in Manitoba, Canada) to 414 miles down (near the Fiji Islands).

Dec. 30: eight quakes reported worldwide
Dec. 29: five
Dec. 28: 13
Dec. 27: 17
Dec. 26: 14

Details are here.

Ben Keene, editor of Oxford Atlas of the World, has decided to make Warming Island (Uunartoq Qeqertotoq) his place of the year. He names a place of the week in his geographical blog at Oxford University Press. Warming Island is especially interesting because it’s now known to be an island.

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — “lonely mountains” in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.

“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”

Read more about Warming here.

Greenland is rising. As the ice melts, land is moving upward about a inch and a half every year:

Greenland appears to be floating upwards – its landmass is rising up to 4 centimetres each year, scientists reveal.

And the large country’s new-found buoyancy is a symptom of Greenland’s shrinking ice cap, they add.

“The Earth is elastic and if you put a load on top of it, then the surface will move down; if you remove the load, then the surface will start rising again,” explains Shfaqat Khan of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

In the case of Greenland, the “load” is its ice cap, he says.

I know you’re going to file this under “Who cares?” but you should at least take a passing interest in what’s going on out there in earth science research:

Geologists from the University of Alberta have found that portions of Canada collided a minimum of 500 million years earlier than previously thought. Their research, published in the American journal Geology, is offering new insight into how the different continental fragments of North America assembled billions of years ago.

As the Canadian Arctic starts to gain attention nationally and globally, Michael Schultz believes the time is right to push for more geological exploration in the region. “All this newly discovered geological information means that large portions of Northern Canada are still very poorly understood, and in fact may contain rocks that nobody knows about. This has many implications, both academically and for mineral resources,” said Schultz.

Schultz is right. The Arctic is gaining attention. There will be fights over ownership and minerals.

OK, now let it pass.

I’m always digging up excellent old New Yorker articles. I seldom get them finished the week they arrive and they end up in a stack that I slowly work through. A few minutes every night before sleep.

Last night I started “The Path of Stones” from last October. It tells about “discovery” of gems on the African island of Madagascar. The gems have been there for eons; the gem-hungry Westerners didn’t really catch on to their presence until the 1990s.

A couple hundred million years ago, Madagascar was part of the former continent known as Gondwanaland, lodged between East Africa and India. When the supercontinent was torn apart, Madagascar drifted off into the Indian Ocean and now resides about 300 miles off the coast of southern Africa. It was never populated by humans until about 2,000 years ago.

In the 18th century, there was a king known as Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka, meaning the beloved prince of Imerina who surpasses the reigning prince.

From New Scientist:

Some 20 million years ago, the Arctic Ocean was best described as a very large lake, whose fresh water leaked southwards through a narrow strait into the Atlantic.

Then, 18.2 million years ago, something happened. Drawn by shifting tectonic plates, the strait began to widen. Slowly, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, salt water from the Atlantic began flowing into the Arctic turning it into the ocean we know today.