Tag: earth
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PBS Eons: Did Asteroids Spark Life?
PBS Eons has a new video. This one is about the very early history of the Earth, a period called the Hadean. How did the building blocks of life form? Harold Miller did some experiments in the 1950s attempting to recreate the conditions. The impacts of a large asteroid might have provided the perfect condition…
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Here’s How Earthquakes Are Measured
The New York Times has an interesting article that explains the moment magnitude scale used to calibrate the strength of an earthquake. The logarithmic was proposed by Thomas C. Hanks and Hiroo Kanamori in 1979. The method measures an earthquake’s magnitude based on its seismic moment. It replaced the older Richter scale because it saturates…
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PBS Eons: When Earth “Ate” a Planet
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the origin of our moon. Where did our unique moon come from? It turns out that lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts are a clue, pointing to the origin of our closest cosmic companion, an origin even stranger than you might imagine…
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Earth Had a Ring 466 Million Years Ago, Study Says
The New York Times has a nice review of a study published in the journal Science Direct that postulates the Earth had a ring during the Ordovician Period, some 466 million years ago. There are numerous (21!) impact craters that date to the period. At the time, Earth was an island world, with life being…
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PBS Eons: Why Only Earth Has Fire
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of our planet’s atmosphere and how life makes fire possible. To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever…
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PBS Eons: Where Did Water Come From?
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about early Earth and where did we get our liquid water. Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from…
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Throwback Thursday #120: What is “Earth Science”?
This is Throwback Thursday #120. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! This Throwback Thursday is a look back at a column published in April 1952 called “What is “Earth…
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PBS Eons: When the Earth Suddenly Stopped Warming
PBS Eons has a new episode about the end of the most recent ice age. It’s called the Younger Dryas period. And, it was a time when the global climate cooled after a period of warming. While we understand what happened, the cause of it has been a mystery. From ice lakes, to volcanoes,…
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Discovery of ancient super-eruptions indicates the Yellowstone hotspot may be waning
From the “Maybe Some Good News Department”, phys.org has an article about the hot spot under Yellowstone National Park. This paper, from the journal Geology, looked at past Yellowstone eruptions of the super volcano to assess trends and found that the interval and the intensity of eruptions have been decreasing. Throughout Earth’s long history, volcanic…
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NYT: The ‘Profoundly Radical’ Message of Earth Day’s First Organizer
The New York Times has an article about the founder of Earth Day. The first event was held on April 22nd, 1970 and was very popular. New York City shut down parts of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street. It was created to get attention for environmentalism. I vaguely remember the event and was a member…
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800,000 Years Ago, a Meteor Slammed Into Earth. Scientists Just Found the Crater
LiveScience has a story about a century long search to find a meteor crater. About 790,000 years ago, a meteor hit the Earth and spread tektites, shiny black lumps of rock, over about 10% of the surface of the planet. The tektites were found from Indonesia to eastern Antarctica and from the Indian Ocean to…
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Geophysicists propose new theory to explain origin of water
Cosmos Magazine has an article about the origin of Earth’s water. A paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets challenges the widely-accepted ideas – maybe it didn’t come from an asteroid impact. Earth’s water may not have originated solely from material carried by asteroids, according to new US research. A study in the Journal…
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20 Things You Didn’t Know About “Inner Earth”
GeologyPage has a story about 20 things you didn’t know about the inner Earth. 1. In 1692 Edmond Halley (of comet fame) proposed that the Earth is hollow. Below the outer crust where we live, he pictured two concentric shells and a core about the size of Mercury, all floating in a luminous gas. 2.…
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Earth has an 8th continent
LiveScience has a story about a 8th hidden continent on our planet. It’s called Zealandia and only a small part of it, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and a few other specks of land, are above sea level. The eighth, a lost continent called Zealandia, isn’t a huge landmass that geographers have somehow missed. Rather, only…
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PBS NOVA: Treasures of the Earth: Gems
Last weeks NOVA was entitled “Treasures of the Earth: Gems”. Check it out. Their beauty has captivated us for millennia. Their cost can be extraordinary–some are even considered priceless. Precious gems like diamonds, rubies, emeralds, opal, and jade are the ultimate treasures of the earth, and each one is made from a specific–and often torturous–recipe of…
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How Deep Is The Ocean
BuzzFeed has a cool video on YouTube that shows the depth of the ocean in nice relative steps. Check it out… very interesting!
