Older Than Dirt
“How old is the earth?” has been a recurring question for centuries, and the dates and procedures used to estimate its age have surely evolved with time. Enter “age of the earth” into your...
Category: Hydrosphere
What’s in a Name?
This one will of necessity be short — duty calls. I recently published a post regarding the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The subject continues to prompt countless articles that run the full gamut:...
Flash Floods, Slot Canyons, and Kinetic Energy
The recent episodes of flooding in Nepal and the Grand Canyon are horrific, to say the least. My heart goes out to those affected at both locations. Each of the floods were the result...
El Niño Southern Oscillation
I’m probably going to get most of this wrong, but since even the guys driving the Cray supercomputers don’t really understand the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and what makes it tick, I guess...
Deep Sea Mining: Part 2
Before we jump into the deep water, a couple possibly irrelevant tangents: I love the earth, am fascinated by its processes, and wish it a long and happy life. Anybody who has opened their...
Thermosteric Sea Level Rise
The SciTechDaily website had an interesting article (28 May 2026) that summarized an international study about how climate change is affecting global sea level rise. The team included researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric...
Desalination (and political suicide?)
Another short one. I tried to abandon poli-sci over fifty years ago, but here I am… old and staring down toward the end of the tunnel, and sucked back into the swamp. I saw...
It’s Still All About the Water
This one will be short, but really, what is there to say at this point when absolutely none of us know what is actually happening? A recent article in the New York Times titled...
Oops, Our Bad…
Real science — by definition — is open to continuing reinterpretations as more data become available, often leading to adjustments of accepted models. An excellent example of this unavoidable truism was the basis of...
White Sand Beaches
I got a question from Jane who, while reading Marker Bed, became intrigued by the reference to quartz sand on page 29 of the print versions. (By the way, if you have not yet...
