Earth Science

Climategate originated when the architects of the campaign that drew the world’s attention to global  warming were attacked and accused of doctoring their data. As a result, the incident was also dubbed “mediagate” in relation to certain media outlets that were too…
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Snowflakes are an amazing thing. You can stare at these light, delicate crystals for hours, marvelling at their delicate beauty. No machine-produced snow even comes close. Every snowflake has six sides, but there’s many ways for six points to come…
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Although the concept is now a foreign one; anyone who grew up reading Robert Heinlein wonders why we have not already colonized Mars, and why we are not bickering with these colonies over independence on their 30th anniversary. The truth…
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Europe stretches west-east from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains in central Russia, and north-south from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Although one of the smaller continents of the world, it contains a large number of countries,…
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This same question was asked about the Apollo missions and while there were setbacks, none of the lunar missions experienced any fatalities. Of course space travel is dangerous, and we have learned much since the Apollo days (1969-1972). For instance,…
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Before the terms “eco-friendly” and “Green Revolution” swept through the United States, U.S. Senator Al Gore was working hard to bring attention to what he believed was an imminent environmental crisis that would impact civilizations worldwide. In 1992, just before…
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It is the year 2012 and many people are discussing the potential doom of the planet earth and the extinction of human race due to an unprecedented catastrophe. Although not as extreme as some of the layman-talk, super powers of…
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I can tell you how to make quicksand, but don’t be too quick about it. After you make it I’ll show you some experiments ya can do to understand quicksand better. First, what IS quicksand? Sand which is ‘merely wet’,…
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Everybody’s heard about the volcano, Eyjafjallajokul, in Iceland, erupting and causing a huge cloud of volcanic ash to rise above Britain and Europe.  It stopped hundreds of flights, infuriated thousands of people who were planning to travel, and cost Britain’s…
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Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, western civilization regarded hazards as ‘acts of God’ in the strict biblical sense, as punishment for people sins. As noted by Bryant (2005), ‘natural hazards afflict all corners of the Earth; often…
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