Category: Earth Science Education
Use a VERY long sampling straw? Nope. Use a spectrometer? Yup. (Explore how this works in our “Is there life outside of Earth?” investigation.) Scientists at NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency collaborated to send the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn to get closer looks at the planet, its rings, and its […]
Scientists have used indirect measurements of movement to infer the presence of waves for a very long time. For example, how can you tell when it’s windy without going outside? You look to see the movements of the trees or flags or other flexible structures. Now, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are using lasers […]
Where has all the groundwater gone, long time passing? (My apologies to Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson.) It’s gone into the sea. Scientists in the Netherlands have made the shocking discovery that much of the water pumped out of the ground evaporates and ends up in the oceans. Amazingly, this raises the sea level by […]
Scientists may soon find out. Orbiting objects exert a gravitational pull on each other. This gravitational pull is what gives objects their weights; it’s the reason that you weigh 83% less on Earth’s moon than on Earth, without losing any of your mass. Scientists are currently using measurements of objects’ gravitational pulls to find new […]
Burning plant material in the Amazon rain forest can be good for the planet? Yes–provided it’s done in the right way. A scientist at Cornell University has discovered that the ancient practice of burning biomass underground, starved of oxygen. The process produces “terra preta” (also known as “black gold” and biochar)–a carbon-rich soil that helps […]
From xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/164/ Science is about facts and evidence. There is a lot of evidence that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. You can explore with our models how carbon dioxide impacts the global temperature. Politics is about what to do about those facts. But politics too often turns into a blame game, in which […]
From xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/402/ The permafrost line is shifting. It may be slow by tornado-chasing standards, but it’s shifting. A study earlier this year from Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada showed that the permafrost line has moved northward by 130 kilometers in the last 50 years. While climate change is the most probable explanation for the […]
Yes–if you’re a coral. Biologist Brent Constantz has formed a company to sequester carbon dioxide just as corals in the ocean do. The strategy is simple–combine carbon dioxide, water, and calcium. The carbon dioxide comes from the smokestacks of electrical power plants, and the water and calcium come from seawater. The material produced is used […]
In the fairy tale, Goldilocks was a little girl who walked into a house in the forest. She ate porridge, sat in chairs, and slept in beds. The first choices she tried were too hot, too big, and too hard. Her second choices were too cold, too big, and too soft. Her third choices were […]
From xkcd: http://xkcd.com/263/ Question: How can we trust ourselves (or scientists) to know the truth about anything? Answer: We look at the evidence. Scientists back up their claims with evidence. If the evidence doesn’t fit the claim, then the claim is rejected and revised. New evidence can result in changes to long-held understandings about how the […]