earth science
gregladen | April 14, 2008
On April 9, 2008, numerous dust plumes blew off the Libyan coast and over the Mediterranean Sea. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image the same day. Although contrasting strongly with the underlying ocean water, the tan plumes are thin enough to allow a view of the land and water surfaces underneath the dust. The plumes blow toward the east-northeast, turning more northward as they move farther off the coast.
This dust storm continued a pattern of intermittent storms blowing off the African coast and over the Mediterranean in…
gregladen | April 13, 2008Is the earth falling apart? Have they started using the Hadron Colider early and not mentioned it to anyone? Are we experiencing a Global Coincidence? Have science reporters suddenly gotten interested in earthquakes? There must be some explanation for the nearly simutaneious occurrence of a powerful 7.1 earthquake in the southern ocean, Hawaii's Kilauea volcano Exploding, an earthquake hitting near Rome, and unusual earthquakes off the coast Oregon all within one blogging cycle....
Details:
Powerful 7.1 Quake in Southern Ocean from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- A strong earthquake hit near the…
gregladen | April 10, 2008A noted hurricane researcher predicted Wednesday that rising water temperatures in the Atlantic will bring a "well above average" storm season this year, including four major storms.
The updated forecast by William Gray's team at Colorado State University calls for 15 named storms in the Atlantic in 2008 and says there's a better than average chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the United States.
An average of 5.9 hurricanes form in the Atlantic each year.
"The Atlantic is a bit warmer than in the past couple of years," said Phil Klotzbach, a member of the forecast team. "That…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question "Why did our furry elephant go extinct?"
What caused the woolly mammoth's (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting that the more-plausible cause was human expansion.
The woolly mammoth went extinct less than four thousand years ago. The bones of miniaturized woolly mammoths have been found in Siberia dating to about 3,600 years ago. Indeed,…
gregladen | April 6, 2008
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr....
Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard ... the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff.
"The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It's held every two weeks (the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month), traveling around to a different blog for each installment, connecting some of the best blogging on ancient life."
The previous edition of The Boneyard is here, at Dragon's Tales. The next edition of The Boneyard will be Here at Archaeozoology. If you would like to submit an entry to the next…
gregladen | March 31, 2008Fall, a very sunny, very breezy day on the lake, Amanda and I sitting in the cabin minding our own business.
Suddenly, ...thwack...
... well, it was a sort of tiny miniature thwack, but a thwack nonetheless. Peering outside through the window, we could see the the last death throws of a tiny greenish bird that had run into the window. The lighting conditions must have been just right for this bird to think that it could fly through the cabin, because this was an odd and unusual event. (We later made further adjustments to the window to see to it that this did not happen again, of…
gregladen | March 27, 2008Old books can be wonderful sources of information, ideas, and even inspiration. I collect them and sometimes even read them. Reading a 100 year old book in your field of interest is a challenge and can be a rewarding experience.
It is a challenge because it is dangerous. I worry that I might accidentally learn something that is no longer true. What if I remember it at some later time, like at a cocktail party or while giving a lecture, but don't remember the source: "... As is well known, flies spontaneously generate from certain forms of mud ..."
Repost from gregladen.com ... apropos…
gregladen | March 26, 2008Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical.
The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is here.
Let us begin right away with the Artichokes. Seeds Aside has a piece on the relationship between the artichoke and the cardoon, both known in ADL (ancient dead language) as Cynara cardunculus. The phyloge relatinship between the two, and the story of domestication for each, is very…
gregladen | March 6, 2008I want to refer you two two items, one older piece by me and another very new, fresh out of the box piece by Carl Zimmer. Not that I'm trying to compare Zimmer and me. But the two posts are somewhat complementary, yet very much on the same page.
How to Date the Grand Canyon: Go With the Flow
Abducted by Aliens ... and dropped off at the Grand Canyon
Well, you've got to admit they are both pretty attractive titles....
gregladen | March 3, 2008My colleague Christian Reinboth (Frischer Wind) sent me this amazing video. Christian says it has been circulating on the European YouTube circuit (which, from our American perspective could be known as "TheirTube"). It has been very windy in Europe lately, as you know from the amazing Wind Turbine Catastrophic Failure videos (Wind Turbines Gone Wild).
This is an Airbus 320 trying to land in a very strong cross wind:
This reminds me of the old Sesame Street skit "Can you see wind?" ... maybe not, but if you are aerodynamic, the wind can certainly see you. That is some amazing flying. (…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Almost half of the world's oceans have been ruined to some degree ... often very severely ... by human activity. You've heard a lot on the news and in the blogosphere about this lately. This increased interest is in part because of the recent production (Feb 15th Science) of a map of the ocean showing these impact.
Here is the map:
Click Here to View Larger Image
The work, published in the Feb. 15 issue of Science and presented at a press conference Thursday, February 14 at 1 pm EST at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston, MA, was conducted at…
gregladen | February 22, 2008In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
In the vicinity of Rio Tercero...
Hearing ... of the remains of one of the old giants, which a man told me he had seen on the banks of the Parana, I procured a canoe, and proceeded to the place. Two groups of immense bones projected in bold relief from the perpendicular…
gregladen | February 18, 2008Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle's voyage), this meant that Darwin would become the world's expert on South American geology. Much of The Voyage is about his expeditions and observations. Part of this, of course, was figuring out the paleontology of the region.
Bahia Blanca is a port at the northern end of Patagonia. Chapter V of The Voyage begins:
THE Beagle…
gregladen | February 13, 2008Bats; Signaling in the Rain Forest; Sumatran Tiger Body Parts; Humans in the New World 20,000 years ago.
Bats are funny. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. There are two kinds of bats, microchiroptera and megachiroptera. The micros are smaller, the megas larger, by and large. and the micros have bat-sonar, while the mega's don't The micros tend to eat insects, the megas tend to eat fruit. Micros are more global in their dsitribution, mega's are more tropical.
It is not the case that all of the evidence regarding bat evolution clearly indicates that the common ancestor of both kinds of…
gregladen | January 31, 2008
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that we adopt that term instead.
The pithy title of the paper making this proposal is "Are we now living in the Anthropocene" (sic: no question mark is included in this title, enigmatically).
It is not an entirely stupid idea. The paper argues that there are major changes of the type often used to distinguish between major…
gregladen | January 24, 2008The amount of ice lost to the sea from Antarctica has increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years. This is the result of an increase in glacial flow. It had previously been thought, and perhas was the case, that Greenland ice loss outpaced the Antarctica. This is no longer the case.
An article coming out in the next issue of Nature Geoscience, by Rignot et al ("Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling") is the most detailed study of this phenomenon to date.
There are two factors that affect the flow of ice into the sea at the edge of the…
gregladen | January 17, 2008Things are just not like what they used to be. You know this. You know that the Age of Dinosaurs, for instance, was full of dinosaurs and stuff, and before transitional fossil forms crawled out of the sea to colonize the land, all animals were aquatic, etc. But did you know that from a purely modern perspective, the Miocene was the most important geological period?
First, lets get one thing straight. We are not in the so-called "Holocene." The so-called "Holocene" is a totally bogus geological period. Saying "Hey, we're in the Holocene, not the Pleistocene ... the Pleistocene is over…
gregladen | January 12, 2008Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that's not enough, he's also planning to mine lunar ice by 2015.