June 20, 2018
Energy Notes: May 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
September 2011
Explore the archive by subject.
16 articles · Page 1 of 1
June 14, 2018
Mineral Resource of the Month: Rare Earth Elements
Daniel J. Cordier, rare earth commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey, has prepared the following information on the rare earths, …
June 7, 2018
Travels in Geology: Nova Scotia: A driving tour of Pangaea
What’s the quickest way to see the Scottish Highlands and Africa? Take a trip to Nova Scotia. The southeastern Canadian province is a mash-up of …
June 7, 2018
Getting There and Getting Around Nova Scotia
Getting to Nova Scotia is easy by plane, car or ferry. Most flights arrive in Halifax, roughly in the middle of the province. If you’re driving …
January 5, 2012
When the dust settles: Investigating lingering health questions 10 years after 9/11
Five days after the Twin Towers collapsed, two geoscientists boarded a plane from Denver to New York City. They were part of a team that would …
January 5, 2012
Voices: Climate change and civil conflict: New clues from El Nino
In 2007, 11 retired admirals and generals from the U.S. armed forces published a report arguing that global climate changes represented a major …
January 5, 2012
Travels in Geology: Glacial pools to sea caves: A tour of New Zealand's South Island
New Zealand has a reputation for extreme adventure — sky diving, jet boating, bungee jumping and even “zorbing,” which sends you rolling down a …
January 5, 2012
Thinking outside the rocks in the search for ancient earthquakes
The eyewitness accounts, written in columns from right to left, top to bottom, testify that there was no warning of the tsunami, no shaking to …
January 5, 2012
Move over Homo habilis: Early human evolution remapped
Mapping out how one species of early hominin branches to another has always been complicated by the rarity of complete specimens and lack of …
January 5, 2012
Down to Earth With: Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess
Astronomer Adam Riess and his team made a huge splash in 1998 when they announced they had discovered something called dark energy, the major …
January 5, 2012
CryoScoop: Woolly rhino traveled with an ice scraper
The discovery of a woolly rhino fossil in Tibet that predates the last glacial maximum shows how these and possibly other creatures were already …
January 5, 2012
CryoScoop: Sea ice synopsis and a whale tale
The extent of Arctic sea ice shrinks each year during the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer, trading a white frozen surface for dark open …
January 5, 2012
Charting a course correction: A review of Earth: The Operators' Manual
Rare are the scientists like Richard Alley. An exceptional researcher known for his work on the great polar ice sheets, he is also a central …
January 5, 2012
Benchmarks: September 30, 1861: Archaeopteryx is discovered and described
The Solnhofen limestone of southern Germany has a storied history. First quarried nearly 2,000 years ago by the Romans, the dense, fine-grained …
January 5, 2012
All that glitters... Acid mine drainage: The toxic legacy of gold mining in South Africa
In 1947, in a dolomite cave 50 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, anthropologist Robert Broom discovered a 2.05-millionyear- old …
January 5, 2012
A day without Glory
On a warm afternoon in early March, the Taurus XL rocket that was prepped for launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California looked …