June 19, 2018
Energy Notes: November 2010-2011
U.S. Oil & Petroleum Imports (millions of barrels per day) Oil and petroleum imports data are preliminary numbers taken from the American …
The EARTH archive
March 2012
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16 articles · Page 1 of 1
June 13, 2018
Mineral Resource of the Month: Cadmium
Amy C. Tolcin, a mineral commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey, compiled the following information on cadmium, a minor metal that …
June 4, 2018
Travels in Geology: Going to extremes in Death Valley
A desert called Death Valley sounds like a place to avoid. Don’t let the ominous name scare you away. Most of the year, this vast and rugged …
June 4, 2018
Getting There and Getting Around California
One of the easiest ways to visit Death Valley is to fly into Las Vegas, rent a car with four-wheel drive and head due west 250 kilometers to the …
July 6, 2016
Benchmarks: March 1961: Project Mohole undertakes the first deep-ocean drilling
Since its inception in the 1960s, the ocean drilling program — an international research program that explores the world’s ocean basins — has …
January 13, 2015
Down to Earth With: Glaciologist Richard Alley
If you don’t know who Richard Alley is, stop reading for a minute and search for him on YouTube. Go on, this can wait. Back? What you likely saw …
March 29, 2012
Tree-climbing hominin with opposable toes co-existed with Lucy
When Lucy and other Australopithecines were walking around Ethiopia 3.4 million years ago, they may have encountered another hominin species that …
March 23, 2012
Blogging on EARTH: Panelists weigh in on tsunami preparedness policy
“It is not a question of whether it will happen, but when it will happen,” said John Schelling, addressing the room at a Congressional Hazards …
March 23, 2012
La Niña could set the stage for flu pandemics
In 1918, the Spanish flu spread around the world, claiming between 50 million and 100 million lives — more than 3 percent of the world’s …
March 16, 2012
Danger in paradise: The hidden hazards of volcano geotourism
In November 2000, rangers at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park made a gruesome discovery. The bodies of a man and a woman, in an advanced state of …
March 8, 2012
Quoth the feathered, iridescent Microraptor, Nevermore
Our knowledge of the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs is sketchy, at best, but new research on fossilized feathers is painting a remarkably …
March 5, 2012
Voices: From Haiti to Japan: A tale of two disaster recoveries
A year ago this month, a devastating earthquake and tsunami struck northern Japan. Two years and two months earlier, on Jan. 12, 2010, a much …
March 5, 2012
Undressing Vesta
Researchers find surprising characteristics of the asteroid Since last July, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting the asteroid Vesta and …
March 1, 2012
Blogging On Earth: Humans acidifying ocean at unprecedented rate
Human emissions of carbon dioxide are currently acidifying the oceans at a rate unprecedented in the last 300 million years — since well before …
February 23, 2012
Listening for gas bubbles
Passive acoustic technology detects natural gas leaks and seeps In recent decades, active acoustic surveys have been used to detect methane seeps …
February 15, 2012
Gold, lead and death in Nigeria
Geology, economics and culture culminate in a perfect storm with deadly results In March 2010, a team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or …