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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Rainbow Ghost Planes After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the human viewpoint of Earth radically shifted. No longer were we mere stargazers, now we could watch what happened at home from a lofty viewpoint. Since the first satellite hit space, we have enhanced our abilities to gaze downward to astonishing levels. Governments and militaries
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Fighter Planes Shooting Themselves Down Son, I’m sorry, they got us. — Henry Jones, Sr. If Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade can serve as a real-world guide, the perils of a dogfighter circa World War II stretched beyond incoming fire from the enemy. Gunners had to make sure they didn’t imperil their own craft, too. More modern (and
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The Old-Growth Forest Network This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring oceanSpeaks, and in accents
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Kelimutu One of the best aspects of Google’s Chromecast is the outstanding array of images in its ambient mode, which serves as a wallpaper slideshow. The photographs primarily feature outdoor locations or wildlife, allowing the wanderlusting individual stuck indoors to sample virtually the planet’s riches. Google has no monopoly on this sort of collection. Microsoft has
The Bone Wars Many progenitors of scientific fields garner reverent reputations as time passes, perhaps titans of inquiry, research, and genius who placed pure scholarship above all else. We tend to view Newton and Einstein as ascetic paragons, infallibly probing the fabric of the universe for nothing more than the good of humanity. Of course,
Apatosaurus vs. Brontosaurus Scientists have definitively identified more than 300 genera and more than 700 species of dinosaurs. These numbers seem surprisingly low; the real total is likely much higher, as we have to dig through hundreds of millions of years of rock for a shot at finding fossilized dino bones. Ask many toddlers, however,
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