Modeling December 2010 Geology and GSA Today HighlightsGEOLOGY presents evidence that today’s C4 plants grew 14 million years earlier than previously thought; a 3-D view of ocean floor “rivers”; swarm seismicity and a Yellowstone tree-ring core; mysterious rock layers containing the petrified remains of bizarre early life-forms, complete with eyes, guts, and muscles; cohabiting bacteria in a 3.4 billion-year-old beach-like environment; and deep-cave stromatolites in Spain. GSA Today calls for and details the use of geoinformatics to transform science data to knowledge.KEY WORDS: Chemical kinetic modeling, submarine channels, granite genesis, retrograde metamorphism, tree ring, seismicity, CO2, Yellowstone, rainforest, reptiles, dinosaurs, tetrapod, diamonds, biosignatures, C4 grasses, C3 plants, T-J boundary, Vishnu Schist, Soom Shale, South Africa, anoxic conditions, Cretaceous, organic-rich sediments, sulfur, bacteria, sandstone, pyrite, El Soplao Cave, Spain, vorticity, kinematics, platinum, Nile, Space Shuttle Radar Topography, Kilauea, pseudotachylyte, geoinformatics***************Testing competing hypotheses for soil magnetic susceptibility using a new chemical kinetic modelJohn F. Boyle et al., Univ. of Liverpool, Geography, Chatham Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L69 7ZT, UK. Pages 1059-1062.Soil magnetic properties are widely studied by earth and environmental scientists. For example, magnetic susceptibility measurements have been used to generate Quaternary climate records from loess-paleosol sequences; to fingerprint fluvial sediment sources; to…