Mauna Loa For approximately 28 million years, the Hawaiian hotspot has belched out islands and atolls. The hotspot sits in the same position, spewing upward from the mantle, while the Pacific Plate moves above it. This combination created the string we know as the Hawaiian Islands. Eight major isles comprise the archipelago. Each was once […]
The Night the Stars Fell When I was a young man in Illinois I boarded for a time with a Deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, & I heard the Deacon’s voice exclaiming ‘Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come!’ I
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Opt Outside Since 2005, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day in the United States. Sometime in the 20th century, the day after Thanksgiving became the de facto beginning of the Christmas gift-buying season. Though many consumers proclaim to love the frenzy of Black Friday and the deals that appear then, we need to
Maize Many myths surround the first Thanksgiving celebration in the United States. The gathering most commonly cited as the inaugural festival happened in October 1621. For three days, 53 Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony dined with 90 Wampanoags to revel in gratitude for a bountiful harvest. For many people, today’s traditional Thanksgiving meal centers around items
X-37B Overshadowed in the past week by the launch of Artemis, NASA’s renewed moon mission, was another incredible space achievement, one cloaked in secrecy. In 1999, NASA commissioned Boeing to develop an “orbital vehicle.” Boeing designed the X-37 to be a scaled model of the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The orbiter is the part of the
Code Girls written by Alan R. In the years leading up to and during World War II, increasing usage of radio and telegraphic transmissions to send secret communications necessitated the need for ciphers to disseminate sensitive information, such as military planning and operations. As the ability of one force to crack the enemy’s codes
Do Fish Drink Water? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? –The Bridgekeeper Life, as we currently understand it, depends on water. Perhaps, somewhere in the universe, a form exists that does not require the liquid; but, on our pale, blue orb, anything alive needs dihydrogen monoxide to survive. You and I
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The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes “The sight that flashed into view…was one of the most amazing visions ever beheld by mortal eye. The whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands–literally tens of thousands–of smokes curling up from its fissured floor…It was as though all the
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Mount Edgecumbe Just over 100 miles south of Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park resides a stratovolcano known to the Tlingit as L’ux. The name means “to flash” or “blinking,” a fascinating moniker for a volcano, ostensibly because the Tlingit first encountered the mountain while it produced smoke or erupted. In an interesting etymological confluence, lux is
Life Finds a Way // Chapel Rock Nearly a year ago to the day, we published the 250th The Mountains Are Calling article. The topic that day was Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a largely unknown, underrated wonder of the United States. I’ve had the fortune to visit the unit twice, both times touring the spectacular cliffs from a
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