Geology
12 articles-
The Last Drop of Water in Broken Hill
In the Australian outback, the future of drought has come early. -
How Water, Paradoxically, Creates the Land We Walk On
It’s no secret that water shapes the world around us. Rivers etch great canyons into the Earth’s surface, while glaciers reorganize the topography of entire mountain ranges. But water’s influence on the landscape runs much deeper than this: Water explains why we have land in the first place.You might think of land as the bits […] -
The Sinkhole Hunters
In sprawling Florida, one group of geologists is never short on business. -
The Genetics of the Earth and Moon
Imagine that two very similar-looking neighbors undergo a genetic test. The exam shows that the pair’s genetic fingerprints are virtually identical. They feel a flash of shock and excitement. What does this mean? Could they be long-lost twins, separated in a hospital mixup?The Earth and Moon share a similar issue, one that poses a major […] -
Los Angeles Should Be Buried
A day in the war between the city and its mountains.
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Sparkly Mints May Help Explain Puzzling “Earthquake Lights”
Agriculture inspector Jim Conacher photographed these earthquake lights over Tagish Lake, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, in 1972Jim Conacher For centuries, people have been reporting mysterious lights along the ground and in the sky soon before an earthquake hits. But it wasn’t until 1966 that there was some solid evidence of the lights, when one man […]
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The Lightning Beneath Our Feet
The strange lights that occur before earthquakes may originate underground.
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Reading Lines in the Earth Like Lines in a Book
Light snow on Mt. Jumbo highlights the different shorelines of prehistoric Lake Missoula.Photo by Don Hyndman, courtesy of the University of Montana You may not realize it, but all around you lie coded messages about the past. The curve of a hill, the shape of a lake, or the almost dinosaurian spine of that ridge […]
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The Unlikely Rocks Found in Mosques, Siberia & Outer Space
A Penrose tiling, a 2D pattern that shows a similar lack of repetition as a 3D quasicrystal.Wikipedia Back in June, researchers at Ames laboratory in Iowa announced the discovery a new group of rare-earth quasicrystals—an unusual class of crystalline materials where the atomic structure boasts regular patterns that never repeat themselves. They resemble the intricate […]
