January 2012 on EARTH Magazine

Energy Notes: September 2010-2011

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 15:38:39 -0400

Credit: The American Geosciences Institute

U.S. Oil & Petroleum Imports (millions of barrels per day) ' Oil and petroleum imports data are preliminary numbers taken from the American Petroleum Institute’s Monthly Statistical Report. For more information visit www.api.org.

Mineral Resource of the Month: Rhenium

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 13:51:06 -0400

Désirée E. Polyak, a mineral commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey, compiled the following information on rhenium, the last naturally occurring element to be discovered. Rhenium is used primarily in producing high-octane, lead-free gasoline and high-temperature superalloys.

Travels in Geology: Utah: Exploring the scenic byways and slot canyons of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 17:06:25 -0400

Above: The elevated Kaiparowits Plateau extends more than 80 kilometers from the town of Escalante, Utah, to the Arizona border. Below: A self-guided trail leads upstream on the Escalante River to Escalante Natural Bridge. Credit: ©Laurie J. Schmidt

It’s no secret that the American Southwest harbors some of the most dramatic geology in the world. Although many visitors stick to the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, geology-savvy travelers will also want to head to an often-overlooked region with relatively easy access to unique rock formations, fossils and cultural artifacts: the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Getting There and Getting Around southern Utah

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 16:52:34 -0400

To get to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, fly into either Salt Lake City, Utah, or Las Vegas, Nev. By vehicle, the monument can be accessed from three directions: south from Torrey, Utah, or east from Bryce Canyon, both via Scenic Byway 12, or north from Arizona via the unpaved Cottonwood Canyon Road. Southern Utah is home to half a dozen other national parks and monuments, so you’ll probably want to combine your trip with visits to some of these. Allow at least three to four days to take in all of the features mentioned in this article.

Benchmarks: January 3–5, 1982: 18,000 landslides wreak havoc on the San Francisco Bay area

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 10:16:25 -0400

A debris flow blocked a creek in Santa Cruz County. As the water and mud were diverted, a creek bank collapsed, dropping a house into the creek. Credit: California Geological Survey.

The debris flows in some regions were so fast and massive that they transported homes dozens of meters. Credit: California Geological Survey.

When a storm battered California’s San Francisco Bay Area in early January 1982, the rain was intense, but not without precedent. The region had historically endured heavy rains during the winter months, with individual storms sometimes bringing more than half the annual average rainfall in a single 36-hour span. But a collection of unique factors in 1982 created a recipe for a landslide disaster. First, two weather fronts merged, bringing copious amounts of rain to an already saturated region. Second, the rising population had resulted in a construction boom in the iconic hills of the Bay Area. During three days of relentless rain from Jan. 3–5, 1982, a record 18,000 individual landslides occurred, killing at least 25 people.

Down to Earth With: Lee Allison

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 09:15:38 -0500

Lee Allison is director of the Arizona Geological Survey. Credit: Courtesy of Lee Allison.

_Editor’s Note: Lee Allison was head of the Arizona Geological Survey until his unexpected death on Aug. 16, 2016. EARTH interviewed him in 2012 and spoke with him about the latest issues in Arizona geology, especially the complicated politics of potash and uranium mining. Allison was a great friend to the geosciences and to EARTH. More info can be found here: _http://www.azgs.az.gov/news_releases2016.shtml#aug17.

Astronomy under the ice: Scientists use Antarctic ice to study some of the tiniest particles in the cosmos

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 15:51:07 -0500

Deep below the glacial surface at the South Pole, where the Antarctic ice is crystal clear yet pitch black, a 3-D array of more than 5,000 custom-built and precisely positioned sensors, each about the size of a basketball, lies frozen in place. The sensors keep watch for thousands of momentary flashes of blue light that zip by every second, some the result of collisions between neutrinos — nearly massless subatomic particles with no electrical charge — and the relatively large atomic nuclei in the frozen water. Fittingly dubbed IceCube, the array is the world’s newest and largest operational neutrino observatory, and its aim, despite its subterranean setting, is to illuminate interstellar phenomena that are millions, and even billions, of light-years away.

Dangerous dust: Erionite - an asbestos-like mineral causing a cancer epidemic in Turkey - is found in at least 13 states

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:52:52 -0500

A gravel road north of North Killdeer Mountain, one of the sites where erionite was found in road gravel in 2006. Ed Murphy, North Dakota State Geologist

An epidemic of mesothelioma is responsible for half the deaths in some villages in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, where villagers have built homes of, and in, the erionite-bearing stone. Michele Carbone, University of Hawaii Cancer Center

As North Dakota’s state geologist, Ed Murphy has spent a fair amount of time mapping the geology of the Killdeer Mountains in the western part of the state, hiking up and down buttes of the White River Group and the Arikaree Formation. In the 1980s, he and colleagues mapped large deposits of rocks bearing erionite — a zeolite mineral formed when volcanic ash is altered by water — that may have had some commercial use. No use was ever found for the mineral itself, but for roughly 30 years, several gravel-mining operations have been excavating the chalky, grey-brown rock from these erionite-bearing formations. It was then crushed and spread on nearly 500 kilometers of roads in Dunn County, as well as on playgrounds, baseball fields, parking lots and even flower beds.

Tracking plastic in the oceans

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:34:25 -0500

Researchers found this net and other debris floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. ©Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The garbage patches floating in the oceans are not solid, giant floating islands of trash. In fact, most of the plasticsx are tiny fragments called microplastics. ©Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Plastic can affect everything from tiny invertebrates to fish to large marine mammals. ©Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Despite worldwide efforts to curtail plastic use — to ban plastic grocery bags, to switch to reusable water bottles instead of disposable plastic bottles, and to get rid of the microplastics in cosmetics, for example — we still produce more than 260 million tons of plastic each year. Almost a third of that plastic goes into disposable, one-time-use items. Only about 1 percent of it is recycled globally, so much ends up in landfills. Worse still, some of the plastic winds up in the world’s oceans.

Setting off a supervolcano

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:03:55 -0500

Bolivia's Uturuncu volcano is the fastest-growing volcano on Earth. Shanaka de Silva

Supervolcanoes are one of nature’s most destructive forces, but given that there are no recorded observations of super-eruptions — the last occurred 74,000 years ago in Indonesia — scientists don’t fully understand how they work. Now a team studying the world’s fastest-inflating volcano, Bolivia’s Uturuncu, is shedding some light on how supervolcanoes become so powerful.

Source code: the methane race

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:59:21 -0500

Estimated contributions of methane emissions in the U.S. Such emissions ratios are hard to tease out. NASA GISS

Doug Rumble of the Carnegie Institution of Washington stands behind a mass spectrometer. Doug Rumble

UCLA geochemist Ed Young in his lab, where he's working on sourcing methane using isotopologues. Ed Young

Ten years ago, John Eiler couldn’t convince anyone to build him his dream machine. He wanted a mass spectrometer that could measure the mass of common gases with extreme precision and sensitivity, but such a device would cost more than a million dollars and might not find a market: The companies that could make it didn’t think they would be able to sell more than just the one to Eiler, which didn’t make it worth their while. Even Eiler didn’t know exactly what problems he could solve with the device, though he had a hunch it would be useful. “At that time it felt so outlandish,” says Eiler, a geochemist at Caltech. “There were no examples of someone solving a scientific problem this way. So they basically all said ’no.'”