Poles of Inaccessibility The place on Earth that’s farthest from an ocean is in what nation? A: Canada B: China C: Central African Republic If you answered with China, give yourself a round of applause. The Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility is in China, near the border with Kazakhstan, and that pole happens to be the continental […]
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Grandma Gatewood In 1955, 67-year-old Emma Rowena Gatewood decreed to her adult children she was going for a walk. She didn’t offer details and, facing a stubborn and resilient woman, her children didn’t demand any. She grabbed an army blanket, a raincoat, and a plastic shower curtain, stuffed them into a handmade denim bag, doffed a pair
The Vernal Equinox Open the windows, cue In Bloom, and rejoice at the end of winter! Spring is here again! Today is the first day of the new season! The 2023 vernal equinox transpires (transpired) at 5:24 PM EDT. From the Latin word aequinoctium, equinox means “equal night.” Occurring twice every year, equinoxes mark a change in astronomical season and happen when
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The Tilting of Uranus When I stumbled across the article with the title, “A New Approach to Tilting Uranus,” I knew immediately I had to include the topic in the newsletter. Uranus is one of those puns that everyone continues to love, despite “growing up.” I know some people who publicly claim to disdain this line
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Snapping Shrimp As submarines became a staple of battle in the World War era and sonar matured into a necessary tool, humans began to notice something odd in the depths. Something very weird was messing with our ability to hear sufficiently underwater. It wasn’t a Kraken; it wasn’t dolphins; it wasn’t whales. It was a
The woman behind the math behind the space program.
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Denali – The High Point of Alaska, the United States, and North America Eventually, as we continue to explore this fantastic orb of ours and, especially, its craggy splendors, we’ll investigate the high points of the continents and all 50 states in America. Since one spot scratches both itches, today we will gaze upon Denali. Situated
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Lituya Bay & The World’s Largest Recorded Wave The tsunamis that killed over 200,000 people in Indonesia in 2004 and caused a nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011 were disasters nearly unfathomable in scale. Tsunamis, from Japanese for “harbor wave,” are caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, usually in oceans and usually caused by
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Ice Balls & Ice Volcanoes Here in the northern hemisphere, we are in the last weeks of Meteorological Winter (Astronomical Winter still has exactly one full month until the Vernal Equinox pulls us into spring). When big cold and big lakes combine sometimes unusual phenomena arise. The Great Lakes of the United States and Canada are
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Ansel Adams “Adams had a superior alertness to the gestures of the natural world, in their simplicity and their subtlety. And that was half the story. The other half was a rare sensitivity to his medium that allowed him to devise pictorial solutions that could stand as a surrogate for the experience. The experience,