Katabatic Winds What is wind? The question seems simple, but I cannot recall learning about this topic in science classes in school. In simplest terms, wind is the movement of air. But why does air move? What causes wind? The simple concept bleeds into complexity rather quickly, as new questions emerge. Wind occurs because of […]
The Coriolis Effect Perhaps you’ve heard that your toilet water spins clockwise or counterclockwise depending on whether you live in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. This phenomenon is supposedly the result of the Coriolis effect. My next sentence might be the oddest I’ve ever typed: Unfortunately, your hemispherical location does not influence your toilet, but the
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Mount Elbrus – Russia and Europe’s High Point When it comes to mountains, Europe is nearly synonymous with the Alps. Those majestic, stark crags might be the world’s most beautiful and they include the planet’s most recognizable peak, the Matterhorn. Despite its robustness, Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps, is not the highest point in Europe.
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Lava-Fired Pizza Objectively, a top-five human creation is the pizza. It helps when one of the constituent parts is also an all-timer, the wheel of the culinary world, a miraculous building block: bread. Whoever figured out, accidental or not, how to create bread is one of the greatest humans to have ever lived. Paired with
Mistletoe “the Yule clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe, with its white berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids.” — Washington Irving, Christmas Eve One of the strangest Christmas traditions I recall learning as I grew up was both ubiquitous and absent. The notion of kissing under
I Ran a 50k A few weeks ago, I traveled to New River Gorge National Park to run in a 50-kilometer race. I had never run anywhere near this length, but the challenge seemed fun. Who wants to run a repetitive marathon on random roads when you can do it through a gorgeous forested gorge? Did I
Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards Nature photography is an incredibly rich medium. From the original masters, such as Ansel Adams, whose black and white images of the National Parks helped define the milieu of landscapes, to modern experimentalists, such as Reuben Wu, whose unnatural lighting put a new spin on framing the outdoors, Mother Nature has provided us with
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Artificial Intelligence – Part III [Editor’s Note: This article is the third in a series chronicling the potential for artificial intelligence to craft this project. Each year, we ask ChatGPT to write an issue on mountains and provide the imagery with Midjourney. Everything that follows is unedited and not crafted by humans (other than
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Four Different Mountains Are the Tallest on Earth What’s the highest point on our planet? This bit of trivia is likely known by many humans, not just fans of mountains. If you went into Final Jeopardy! with the lead, you would confidently scrawl “What is Mount Everest?” on your lectern and toast yourself to becoming a
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