Geology

14 Million Years And Counting: The Frozen East Antarctic Ice Sheet

Antarctica was once downright balmy, lush with plants and lakes, but not any time recently. Despite all of the climate change and global warming of the last few million years, the continent has been a barren, cold desert of ice. What might we expect there ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 15 2015 - 4:30pm

Tiefer See: Traces Of Islandic Volcanoes In A German Lake

Traces of volcanic ash originating from islandic volcanoes have been found in the sediments of Laker Tiefer See in the Nossentiner-Schwinzer Heide natural park in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. An international team of geoscientists identified traces of in total ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 4 2016 - 11:00am

Methane Can Be In Water, Does That Mean Fracking Caused It?

Dramatic videos created by environmental activists shows tap water being set on fire. In some cases, they were clear hoaxes, in others it turned out to be methane unrelated to drilling. Yet regardless, the belief is that natural gas fracturing (fracking), ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 14 2016 - 12:37pm

Want To Lower Your Risk Of Being Involved In An Avalanche? Do This

Avalanches are the primary hazard for winter back country recreational trekkers and cause numerous deaths and injuries annually.  These snowy adventures have grown in popularity, leading people to forget that just because you paid a professional guide doe ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 8 2016 - 2:48pm

No Evidence Drilling Caused Earthquake In Texas, Finds New Study

The most comprehensive analysis to date of a series of earthquakes that included a 4.8 magnitude event in East Texas in 2012 didn't find evidence that the earthquakes were caused by wastewater injection- and they the difficulty of trying to claim ear ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 13 2016 - 11:23am

Peak Radiation: Scientists Hope To Calculate Nuclear Fuel Left Inside Earth By 2025

By 1992, environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin claimed, we would achieve Peak Oil. Fossil fuels would begin to decline. Rifkin was just going by an environmental press release but Peak Oil had a long history; almost as long as oil itself. In 1919, the chie ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 9 2016 - 9:25am

Soil Moisture Could Help Predict 'Flash Droughts'

New research suggests that "flash droughts", like the one that unexpectedly gripped the Southern Rockies and Midwest in the summer of 2012, could be predicted months in advance using soil moisture and snowpack data. Scientists at the National Cen ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2016 - 9:47am

The Alps Are Growing

The Alps are steadily "growing" by about one to two millimeters per year. Likewise, the formerly glaciated subcontinents of North America and Scandinavia are also undergoing constant upward movement. This is due to the fact that at the end of th ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 10 2016 - 12:08pm

Consumption Vortex And The Terrifying Mathematics Of The Anthropocene

Here are some surprising facts about humans’ effect on planet Earth. We have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. We are creating “ technofossils ”, a new term for ...

Article - The Conversation - Mar 2 2017 - 6:30am

Moon Water May Be More Common Than We Think

Satellite data have detected widespread water within ancient explosive volcanic deposits on the Moon. That means its interior may contain more indigenous water than previously believed. The ancient deposits are believed to consist of glass beads formed by ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 25 2017 - 2:40pm