Posts treating: "decades"
Sunday, 05 June 2016
Ranger Development has begun production of helium from the old Navajo Springs field near Holbrook in eastern Arizona. [Photo credit, Ranger Development]
Arizona helium fields are among the richest anywhere in terms of concentration of helium but production stopped decades ago when the US government helium reserves supplied most needs at an artificially low set price. That reserve was
Recently I’ve been to the beach. I went down to visit an old friend, the USS Lexington. I had stayed aboard her back when I was in 9th grade, about a couple of decades ago, and hadn’t seen her since. … Continue reading
Shall we start with a stereotypical Hawaiian beach?
One can certainly be forgiven for thinking that Hawai'i is a group of high-rise hotels next to a wide sandy beach. It isn't as if a string of television shows (Magnum, P.I. and Hawaii 5-0 for example) have spent decades putting that stereotype into our heads. And the majority of tourists never venture beyond the hotel row at Waikiki
Spring snowpack, relied on by ski resorts and water managers throughout the Western United States, may be more vulnerable to a warming climate in coming decades, according to a new
Wooster, Ohio — The College of Wooster community will soon say goodbye to Mateer Hall (above), which has housed the Biology Department for decades. It will be demolished next month to make way for the new Ruth Williams Hall of Life Science. I haven’t heard anyone yet say they will miss the creaky and undersized
This is based on modeling of speciation and extinction rates.
Manabu Sakamotoa, Michael J. Benton,and Chris Vendittia
Whether dinosaurs were in a long-term decline or whether they were reigning strong right up to their final disappearance at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 Mya has been debated for decades with no clear resolution. The dispute has continued
Author shares lessons learned from geoscience education reform with math educators embarking on a similar endeavor. Suggestions
Two decades after arsenic was found to be contaminating drinking water across Bangladesh, tens of millions of people are still exposed to the deadly chemical. Now a new report from the group Human Rights Watch charges that the Bangladesh government “is failing to adequately respond” to the issue, and that political favoritism and neglect have corrupted the government’s
I spent the weekend reading the new paper in Nature last week that made a lot of news. (Justin Gillis at The NY Times has an excellent summary of the paper here). If you missed it, the short version is that for the first time, researchers used a series of coupled models to produce a more realistic look at what will happen to Antarctica in the coming decades and centuries. There
The American Geophysical Union invited Colgan and six team members, including CIRES director Waleed Abdalati, to compile and synthesize decades worth of research on glacier crevasses to highlight overarching key concepts and new research directions. Their review paper has been published online in Reviews of Geophysics, a journal of the American Geophysical
Twenty thousand years ago, low concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allowed the earth to fall into the grip of an ice age. But despite decades of research, the reasons why levels of the greenhouse gas were so low then have been difficult to piece together. New research, published today in the leading journal Nature, shows that a big part of the answer lies at the bottom of the
Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs [2016-01-25 22:39:00]
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(144 visits) Mesozoic
Mostly thanks to pesky time constraints, I won't go in to too much detail about the BBC's latest dino-docu, Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur. Examining the discovery of what might just be the largest titanosaur (and therefore dinosaur, and therefore land animal) yet, it briskly chronicles the discovery, excavation, analysis, and reconstruction in a way that's made all the more compelling by the lack of sensationalism and CGI bullshit. (OK, there's a little CGI, including a brief clip [...]
Scientists and policymakers have discussed for decades how to slow the rate of global warming and melting Arctic ice—most recently at the Paris talks—but few have discussed how to restore the ice after it is lost. That task will likely fall to future generations who not only grew up without a white Arctic but may have conflicting interests in keeping it blue, according to an analysis presented on Monday by scientists at the 2015 American Geophysical Union Fall
Will coral reefs and atolls (coral islands) be able to keep pace with the current and projected sea level rise and remain geologically stable in the coming decades and centuries? Will atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans remain habitable?
Regarding the first question, I came across a couple of recent studies that suggest that reef growth in the Pacific, Indian and Caribbean seas
smithsonianmag.com The world’s worst mass extinction has been a great whodunit for decades. Some 252 million years ago, 75 percent of land species and 90 percent of those in the oceans disappeared. But what caused trilobites, Eurypterid “sea scorpions” and all those other species to go extinct? READ
nationalgeographic.com Over eight decades ago, while pondering the heavily-armored dinosaur Scolosaurus, the eccentric paleontologist Franz Nopcsa proposed what is probably one of the oddest ideas in the annals of paleobiological speculation. Scolosaurus was a low-slung quadruped that shuffled around what were then thought to be parched sand dunes. Even though its close ankylosaurian relatives had
Over eight decades ago, while pondering the heavily-armored dinosaur Scolosaurus, the eccentric paleontologist Franz Nopcsa proposed what is
Sea level rise from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland threaten catastrophe for coastal cities within decades unless strong measures are taken to reduce CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels, argues climate scientist James Hansen. Hansen’s warnings about the dangers of climate change are not new, but a new paper written by... read
As many as one in five deaths in Bangladesh may be tied to naturally occurring arsenic in the drinking water; it is the epicenter of a worldwide problem that is affecting tens of millions of people. For two decades, health specialists and earth scientists from Columbia University have been trying to understand the problem, and how to solve
It is only recently that scientists learned of the existence of glacial earthquakes–seismic rumblings produced as massive ice chunks fall off the fronts of advancing glaciers into the ocean. In Greenland, where they have been extensively measured, such quakes have grown sevenfold over the last two decades and they are advancing northward. This suggests that ice loss is increasing