Soufrière Saint Vincent On 27 December 2020, the highest point on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent – named La Soufrière – started to rumble. La Soufrière is a stratovolcano that rises 4,049 feet above sea level. Since 1718, it has erupted violently just five times, the last coming in 1979. St. Vincent is one island
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Mt. Greylock – Massachusetts’ High Point This edition of the High Points series takes us to the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Mt. Greylock rises 3,489 feet above sea level. Though the peak is often associated with the Berkshire Mountains, it is technically part of the Taconic Mountains. The whole region is filled with craggy goodness. The Green
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The Coastline Paradox What country has the longest coastline in the world? If you answered Canada, peel off a gold star and stick it to your shirt. Great work! OK, now what country has the second-longest coastline? Russia? The United States? Australia? Maybe you figure the question is a trick and answered something along the
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Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator The Large Hadron Collider, operated by CERN, the famed European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s biggest particle accelerator. Also known as “atom smashers” or “supercolliders,” accelerators are massive machines that use electromagnetic fields to launch particles at extraordinarily high speeds, usually near the speed of light. Particle
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In Which Talking Birds Parrot New Content [Editor’s Note: This article is an unusual addition to the project. It was the result of a promise to produce new content on a deadline, while being away from a computer. The videos are well worth your time, so we’re happy to feature this piece in the
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There Is No Blue “And jealous now of me, you gods, because I befriend a man, one I saved as he straddled the keel alone, when Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt, out on the wine-dark sea.” — Homer, The Odyssey, Book V In 1858, then-future British Prime Minister William
Croagh Patrick In 441 AD, a man named Patricius ascended a peak called Cruachán Aigle or Cruach Aigle. The exact etymology of this name is partially lost to the ages, but it comes out meaning something along the lines of “Stack of Eagles” or “Eagle’s Stack.” On the summit, he fasted for 40 days. We know this man
South America A snapshot of Earth today in its tectonic evolution shows seven landmasses known as continents. Though there are no strict criteria for exactly what constitutes a continent, broadly we define them as large bodies of crust that sit on top of plates. Our planet’s upper reaches are comprised of tectonic plates that move
The Unaccountable Freak & the Comet I think it’s fair to say no comet is as popular in the collective consciousness as Halley’s Comet. Every once in a while another will pop up, such as Hale-Bopp, which garnered a lot of attention in 1997 due to the cult called Heaven’s Gate, or last year’s spectacular NEOWISE.
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Eqalussuaq If you watched Jeopardy! last week you may recall one particular clue that stood out to the nature-lovers among us: “A very old vertebrate the Greenland shark takes nearly 150 years to reach this; for humans it’s around age 10 or 11” The Greenland shark – image by NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program The correct response: What