— About —
Kathelijne Bonne is the inspirer of GondwanaTalks and writes and edits most articles. One reason for starting this blog:
"Nothing amazes me more than the connectedness of all spheres of our complex planetary system now and in the past: from the depths of the ocean to the stratosphere, and from microscopic life to forests and the ancient rocks beneath our feet. All these environments feed into each other at disparate timescales, from milliseconds to vast aeons, giving rise to outbursts of chemical energy at black smokers, the monumental drifting of tectonic plates, invisible soil forming processes, the wandering of species, that of our own forebears, and finally the rise and fall of civilizations and communities. What we are could not have been without lifetimes of continual change, evolution, inventions, adaptations, extinctions and new opportunities, all interspersed with some droplets of luck. Endowed with an unusual mind, humanity can finally look back and connect all the dots. I take pleasure in connecting some of the dots and this is probably one of the reasons why I started GondwanaTalks."
Some background: I'm Flemish with roots in the City of Ghent (Belgium) where I enrolled in Geology and Soil Science. After some wanderings across Europe and Africa – for work, pleasure and discovering – absorbing languages, landscapes, friendships and new ideas, I landed in a village at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama in Spain. Here my GondwanaTalks writing activities took off, but the passion for all earthly things has been with me since I was a child.
Silvia from Mar del Plata is a writer of contemporary fiction. After studying Economics in Buenos Aires she moved to Madrid in 2005. She worked in the world of culture and then took a leap of faith and started writing and studying Philosophy. She publishes articles on filosophy, economy, big data, femenism and publishing on www.silviazuletaromano.com and regularly contributes to literary magazines.
Other authors too have contributed to GondwanaTalks, like Marc Verhaegen who provided valuable information for the article on the Waterside Hypothesis of human evolution, Dorothea Eue on the worlds of Narnia and climate change, Roseanne Chambers on the geology of Machu Picchu, Sam Poppe and colleagues on restless Etna early 2021.
Many other people, especially family members and friends, have read and commented early versions, provided ideas, picked out errors, that all contributed to the best possible final versions of my articles. Despite all the combined efforts, the articles may still contain unintentional errors, more about them in the disclaimer and copyright statements.