The Snowy Desert Between 14,800 and 10,500 years ago, the oldest petroglyphs in North America appeared in limestone at Winnemucca Lake. Today, the lake is a dry bed, but this spot was likely an oasis to some of the continent’s earliest inhabitants. They inscribed the rock with figures that might be trees, flowers, leaves, clouds, or […]
The Great North American Eclipse On 21 August 2017, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I sat in a baking parking lot at The Ohio State University. It was a Monday, and my wife had emerged from the Mathematics Tower to join me during a break between teaching classes. Wispy clouds hung in the sky but did
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Adam’s Bridge One of the gorgeous macro-elements of the globe is the island of Sri Lanka, which seems to fall like a teardrop from the southern tip of India. About the size of West Virginia and home to 22 million people, Sri Lanka features interesting tectonics and geography. Madagascar, for the sake of comparison, sits somewhat
ManhattAnts In the 21st century, most entomologists would head to a rainforest if they hoped to discover a new species of insect. So, when biologist Rob Dunn taught at Columbia University, he did not expect to be greeted on the concrete jungles of New York City by an unknown critter. Still, Dunn scooped a few
Þrídrangaviti Lighthouse Once they got near the top there was no way to get any grip on the rock so one of them got down on his knees, the second stood on his back, and then the third climbed on top of the other two and was able to reach the nib of the cliff above.
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A Rocky Remembrance written by Brianna S. The mountains were NOT calling. At least not to me. Each summer, I would see the shimmer in my brother’s eyes as we began preparations for our yearly trip to Maine. Even my father’s countenance, normally grumpy and stoic, would give off a gleeful hum –
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A23a & Taylor Columns In 1986, a gargantuan ice chunk calved from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The size of this iceberg – creatively dubbed A23a – is hard to comprehend. It was so big that, after it separated, it did not move. Estimated to be more than 1,100 feet tall and weighing nearly a trillion
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The Biscuit Basin Explosion The world’s first national park – Yellowstone – contains over half of Earth’s geysers. Powering this incredible fact is the Yellowstone Caldera, an underground supervolcano. Though currently dormant in terms of overground eruption, the system isn’t extinct and still heats the region, creating Old Faithful and the other gushers inside the park. Worrywarts across
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Uranus Is Cold Really cold. You should probably get that checked out. The amount of light a body receives plummets exponentially as the distance to a star increases (the formula is 1/distance squared). Uranus is just over 19 astronomical units away from the Sun, meaning it gets 0.27% of the sunlight we receive on Earth
Red Adair, the Munroe Effect, & the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter On 20 February 1962, John Glenn became the third American to visit space, as Friendship 7 left Earth. When the craft successfully orbited our planet, Glenn was the first American to circle Earth above the atmosphere. He orbited three times during the nearly five-hour mission, giving Glenn
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