March 2012 on EARTH Magazine

Energy Notes: November 2010-2011

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 15:53:18 -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: Cadmium

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:10:17 -0400

Amy C. Tolcin, a mineral commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey, compiled the following information on cadmium, a minor metal that is important for its use in rechargeable batteries.

Eighty percent of cadmium produced goes into nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries. Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Bartlomiej Jaworski

The element cadmium was discovered in 1817 by Friedrich Stromeyer, a professor of chemistry at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Stromeyer noticed that a yellowish glow would occur when heat was applied to certain samples of calamine, a zinc-carbonate. This was unusual as the reaction was expected to be colorless. After further testing, Stromeyer deduced that an unknown metallic impurity in the carbonate caused the color change. He called the new metal “cadmium” after “kadmeia,” the Greek word for calamine.

Travels in Geology: Going to extremes in Death Valley

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 17:08:13 -0400

The Dante's View overlook on the crest of the Black Mountains is the best bird's-eye view of Death Valley, short of climbing the 3,367-meter-tall Telescope Peak across the valley. Credit: Mary Caperton Morton

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 expanse of eastern California is brutally hot, but visit in winter or early spring and you’ll find a surprisingly beautiful and vibrant place.

Getting There and Getting Around California

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:50:35 -0400

Due west from Death Valley are California's Sierra Nevada mountains, including Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states, seen here on the left. Credit: Mary Caperton Morton

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 east entrance of the park. Before exploring, stop at the Furnace Creek Visitors Center for park maps and information on weather and road conditions. Before heading out on a hike or a dirt-track drive, talk to a ranger about where you’re going and when you’ll be back.

Benchmarks: March 1961: Project Mohole undertakes the first deep-ocean drilling

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 13:15:34 -0400

Early near-shore trials of the CUSS I drillship occurred off La Jolla, Calif., where the writer John Steinbeck noted that the barge, with its drilling derrick rising amidship, had the "sleek race lines of an outhouse standing on a garbage scow." Credit: Willard Bascom, National Academy of Sciences.

Since its inception in the 1960s, the ocean drilling program — an international research program that explores the world’s ocean basins — has logged hundreds of thousands of hours of ship time traveling the world’s oceans, drilling boreholes and retrieving cores of sediment and rock that have revealed Earth’s deep history and structure.

Down to Earth With: Glaciologist Richard Alley

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 13:05:38 -0500

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 was Alley singing his rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” in which he explains subduction zones, or another similar song. In addition to being something of an Internet sensation for his energetic lectures and songs about geologic processes, Alley is a glaciologist who studies the effects of climate change. Alley’s work has taken him to glaciers around the world, from Greenland to the Antarctic ice sheet. He is also trying to understand how best to communicate scientific ideas to the public. So far those efforts have included singing to his undergraduate classes and filming a television series for PBS called “Earth: The Operators’ Manual.” (There’s a public-friendly book and website of the same title as well.)

Tree-climbing hominin with opposable toes co-existed with Lucy

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:20:50 -0400

The Burtele partial foot superimposed on an outline of a gorilla foot. © The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Photo courtesy: Yohannes Haile-Selassie

When Lucy and other Australopithecines were walking around Ethiopia 3.4 million years ago, they may have encountered another hominin species that still climbed trees and also walked, but with a gait more like an ape than their bipedal neighbors. The tantalizing new discovery of a few fossil foot bones shows that at least one species retained an opposable big toe, one million years after the grasping feature was thought to have disappeared. The discovery means that two different types of locomotion co-existed during early human evolution, which sheds new light on the evolution of bipedalism and may warrant the naming of a new hominin species.

Blogging on EARTH: Panelists weigh in on tsunami preparedness policy

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:54:40 -0400

Many low-lying coastal communities in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Puerto Rico have tsunami warning signs and evacuation plans in place. NOAA

DART buoy locations around the world. DART buoys help track tsunamis in real time. NOAA National Data Buoy Center

Abby Seadler is the member society services manager for the American Geosciences Institute and writes about about the government and policy developments for EARTH. Abby Seadler

“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 Caucus briefing last week. The briefing, entitled Tsunami Preparedness: Understanding our Nation’s Risk and Response, brought together Schelling, who is the Earthquake and Tsunami Program Director for the Washington State Emergency Management Division, Eddie Bernard, scientist emeritus at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, and John Orcutt, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to put forward one question: Is the U.S. tsunami-ready?

La Niña could set the stage for flu pandemics

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:49:41 -0400

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 population. The previous fall and winter, La Niña had brought cooler-than-normal sea-surface temperatures to the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. More recently in 2009, swine flu swept across the planet. Again, the widespread outbreak was preceded by La Niña conditions. This link might be more than coincidental, according to new research, and could lead to improved predictions of future pandemics.

Danger in paradise: The hidden hazards of volcano geotourism

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:41:52 -0400

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano often flows into the ocean, creating a beautiful but dangerous site. USGS HVO

Warning sign outside the visitor's center at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Megan Sever

Sandboarding is a popular tourist activity on Cerro Negro in Nicaragua. NicaPlease

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 decomposition, were found near the site where lava from the Kilauea eruption flows into the sea, sending up plumes of scalding white steam. The area, aptly named the Eruption Site, is littered with chunks of tephra, a glassy volcanic rock, which are formed and ejected violently into the air when the 2,000-degree-Celsius lava is quenched by seawater.

Quoth the feathered, iridescent Microraptor, Nevermore

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:23:55 -0500

Artist's conception of a _Microraptor_, which has been discovered to have sported iridescent plumage. Courtesy of Jason Brougham, University of Texas

Our knowledge of the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs is sketchy, at best, but new research on fossilized feathers is painting a remarkably clear picture of what one species, known as Microraptor, may have looked like — a raven with black iridescent feathers. The findings may have implications for the importance of sexual display in the early origins of feathers.

Voices: From Haiti to Japan: A tale of two disaster recoveries

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:22:23 -0500

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 smaller earthquake devastated Haiti. Both earthquakes occurred on a weekday and in the afternoon, but there is very little else that is similar about these two events or how the countries have recovered. Both offer reminders about the uncertainties of the effects of disasters.

Undressing Vesta

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:42:50 -0500

Researchers find surprising characteristics of the asteroid

Since last July, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting the asteroid Vesta and sending back images and other data to the delight and amazement of researchers, who presented their latest results at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, Calif., last December.

Blogging On Earth: Humans acidifying ocean at unprecedented rate

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:08:23 -0500

Human emissions of carbon dioxide are currently acidifying the oceans at a rate unprecedented in the last 300 million years — since well before the dinosaurs evolved — according to a study published today in Science. More acidic water can dissolve the shells of many marine organisms, including reef- and shell-building species, such as clams, oysters and corals, as well tiny organisms that form the base of the food chain.

Listening for gas bubbles

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:39:21 -0500

Methane hydrate recovered during a U.S. Geological Survey gas hydrate research cruise in the Gulf of Mexico in 2002. Passive acoustic techniques may be used to find gas hydrate deposits. William Winters, USGS

Passive acoustic technology detects natural gas leaks and seeps

In recent decades, active acoustic surveys have been used to detect methane seeps and gas hydrates — deposits of crystalline solids consisting of gas molecules, usually methane, surrounded by a cage of water molecules — buried under the seafloor.

Gold, lead and death in Nigeria

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:38:00 -0500

An unprecedented lead poisoning epidemic in Zamfara, Nigeria, is the result of artisanal gold mining operations, where families participate in the gold processing. Courtesy of TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering, Inc.

Nigerian families process gold ore in flour mills. James Durant, ATSDR environmental health scientist

Researchers used portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer technology to characterize the heavy metal concentrations in the soil in Nigeria. Courtesy of TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering, Inc.

Trained local laborers systematically remove the top layer of contaminated soil using locally available tools under the supervision of local and state government supervisors and managers. Courtesy of TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering, Inc.

Geology, economics and culture culminate in a perfect storm with deadly results

In March 2010, a team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), monitoring for endemic diseases such as meningitis and malaria, visited villages in northwestern Nigeria after being informed by the local community of high mortality in children under five years old. The doctors were not immediately prepared for what they would find. In two villages they discovered children’s fresh graves and a mortality rate of more than 40 percent. Children among the living showed intractable seizures and decreased levels of consciousness. The clues pointed toward a situation massively out of the ordinary, compelling MSF to immediately launch an investigation alongside Nigeria’s state and federal government, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).