Taxonomy term

april 2016

Getting there and getting around Gotland

Useful websites for planning your trip to Gotland include the island’s own commercial sites: Gotland.com and Destination Gotland. Start there for everything from travel to entertainment events, and for ideas on what to see.

21 Mar 2016

The ups and downs of an island

In 1835, Captain Robert FitzRoy and the crew of the HMS Beagle — who were exploring and studying the Chilean coast with Charles Darwin in tow — arrived at Isla Santa Mariá near the city of Concepción six weeks after a magnitude-8.5 earthquake jolted the region. Along with scenes of dried seaweed and dead mussels lining the island’s shores well above the high-tide line, comparison of a bathymetric survey of a shallow bay adjacent to Santa Mariá to one conducted the previous year suggested to FitzRoy that the earthquake had thrust the island 2.4 to 3 meters out of the water.

18 Mar 2016

Protracted drought threatens California levees

Levee failures are most often associated with the onslaught of water from large storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, whose landfall in 2005 caused more than 50 floodwalls and levees around New Orleans to fail.

But the lack of water can also weaken these critical earthen structures, according to recent research presented last December at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. 

15 Mar 2016

Rainbows reclassified

Rainbows — those arches of color that streak across wet skies — are recognizable to almost everyone. Our understanding of rainbows, though, particularly how they form and the diversity of shapes they can take, is still fuzzy.

21 Dec 2015

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