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Seismic measurements recorded on August 23rd during the earthquake centered in Virginia show how the shock wave traveled across the USA. If you didn’t feel it, it was because the movements measured are very small.
What you’re seeing here are vertical displacement measurements from an array of detectors that are part of the USArray/EarthScope facility (you can read more about the array and the animation on the IRIS website). These are very sensitive instruments; note the scale on the lower graph showing the motion is only about 40 microns top-to-bottom! That’s less than the thickness of a human hair.
Read more at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link -via Metafilter
Our earth is a dynamic place that moves and changes with no regard to humans or anyone else. Every once in a while, those changes occur rapidly and powerfully. Cracked looks at five events that left behind some serious scars, like the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa.
The blast was the equivalent of 200 megatons of TNT. For perspective, the largest explosion ever made by humans was the detonation of a Russian hydrogen bomb, which was 50 megatons. That blast broke windows in buildings 560 miles away. Krakatoa was four times that; the cloud it generated wiped entire villages off the map 25 miles away and created a tsunami that traveled all the way to South Africa. That wasn’t all Krakatoa’s neighbors got for their birthday that year; giant pieces of rock and coral reef fell from the sky as well.
Now get this: Krakatoa is only number five on the list. Link
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I don’t know about you guys, but I am fascinated by the etymology of both words and nursery rhymes. But whenever I hear a new story about the origin of a nursery rhyme or tongue twister, I rush to find out more information because while they’re so interesting, many of these stories simply aren’t true.
That’s why I was so excited to share these two cool true stories of tongue twister origins with you, along with a quick explanation of why a few common etymology stories you’ve probably heard already aren’t actually true.
We all know that Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, but who the heck is Peter and why should we care if he’s got pickled or fresh peppers? As it turns out, this story is far more interesting than the simple tongue twister we’re all familiar with.
First off, it’s important to know a little history about the spice trade. You see, a long, long time ago, all spices were referred to by the generic name of “peppers.” They were also incredibly expensive and the companies who ran the spice trade would go out of their way to keep the supply low by rubbing the seeds with lime before selling them so they couldn’t germinate if planted. The practice was called “pickling.”
As for Peter Piper, he was actually a French pirate and horticulturalist named “Pierre Poivre” (which has become Anglicized into Peter Piper). Pierre was known for raiding spice stores so he could grow them in his garden in Seychelles and hopefully make spices more affordable and accessible for the average European. The rhyme comes from the fact that there were at least a few occasions where Peter Piper picked pickled peppers that wouldn’t grow in his garden.
Personally, I never thought much about the girl who sold seashells by the seashore. But as it turns out, the woman who was made famous in this terribly difficult tongue twister is actually quite the scientist.
Mary Anning enjoyed collecting seashells and fossils ever since her dad taught her how to dig up fossils when she was a little girl. The duo then sold their specimens to beach tourists and she became so famous in this role that Terry Sullivan eventually even wrote the famous tongue twister about her.
Then, in 1811, Anning’s brother noticed a skull sticking out of a cliff near her home. Mary was fascinated by the skull and started digging it out the ground, soon finding a massive skeleton of what she believed was a crocodile. As it turned out though, the giant croc was actually a dinosaur that later was named Ichthyosaurus. As this occurred at a time when most people still didn’t believe in dinosaurs, it was kind of a big deal.
Mary was proud of her discovery and went on discovering more and more dino skeletons, including fossils for a Plesiosaurus, a Pterodactyl and a Squaloraja. These days, many people credit Mary Anning with founding modern day paleontology –and you thought she was just a seashell dealer.
Of course, not all nursery rhyme origins stories are to be believed. Here are a few very untrue, but widely-believed stories about nursery rhyme origins:
more …
The official name for the geological epoch we are in now is the Holocene. But there is a movement among those who study such things to refer to the current stage of geologic time as the Anthropocene epoch, a term coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, which means “age of man.” This would seem obvious to historians, but in the context of global geology, does the presence of man make that much difference?
Way back in the 1870s, an Italian geologist named Antonio Stoppani proposed that people had introduced a new era, which he labeled the anthropozoic. Stoppani’s proposal was ignored; other scientists found it unscientific. The Anthropocene, by contrast, struck a chord. Human impacts on the world have become a lot more obvious since Stoppani’s day, in part because the size of the population has roughly quadrupled, to nearly seven billion. “The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate,” biologist E. O. Wilson has written. Wilson calculates that human biomass is already a hundred times larger than that of any other large animal species that has ever walked the Earth.
In 2002, when Crutzen wrote up the Anthropocene idea in the journal Nature, the concept was immediately picked up by researchers working in a wide range of disciplines. Soon it began to appear regularly in the scientific press. “Global Analysis of River Systems: From Earth System Controls to Anthropocene Syndromes” ran the title of one 2003 paper. “Soils and Sediments in the Anthropocene” was the headline of another, published in 2004.
More and more, geologists are coming around to the idea that humankind has such an effect on the earth that we are, indeed, living in the Anthropocene epoch. Read the entire story at National Geographic in a feature article that is part of the year-long 7 Billion project. Link
(Image credit: Mitch Epstein)
You’ll be forgiven if you first read that as “The Eye of Sauron.” Astronauts were the first to notice this 50-kilometer wide geological formation in Mauritania, in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Read about it and other wonders of nature in the post 13 Most Incredible Geological Wonders on Earth at Environmental Graffiti. Link
Inspired by a t-shirt design, Flickr user Kohl? made a cake that looks like a column of rock layers. There appears to be a deposit of chocolate within easy drilling range.
Ischigualasto, meaning “the place where you put the moon” is a remote valley in Argentina. It is studded with geological formations left by wind erosion, amazing standing stones and boulders that are so rounded they look like enormous marbles. The valley’s once-fertile ground is now arid and contains so many plant and animal fossils that paleontologists come from all over the world to study them. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Aylwin Lo)
The Gamburtsev Mountains in Antarctica, named after Soviet geophysicist Grigoriy Gamburtsev, lie beneath a mile of solid ice. Scientists have known about their general location for a while, but only recently were able to take pictures of them:
The images are the result of radar technology, and reveal a dramatic landscape of rocky summits, deep river valleys, and liquid, not frozen, lakes, all hidden beneath the ice. The range itself rivals the Alps in size and cover an area that is roughly the size of New York State.
“What we’d shown before was an estimate based on gravity data — a little bit of a coarse resolution tool,” said Robin Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. “What we showed at this meeting was the radar data. It’s like going from using a big, fat sharpie to using a fine-tipped pencil.”
Link via TigerHawk | Image: NewsDesk
The 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile apparently had some profound effects on this giant spinning rock we live on. NASA calculated that the figure axis, along which Earth’s mass is balanced, shifted by about eight centimeters.
Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).
It also disrupted the Earth’s rotation, shortening each day by 1.26 microseconds. No worries, though, because at that rate we shouldn’t notice any real effects for a while, but in 500 (edit by Alex 3/3/10 – more like 25 million) years or so, sunrise will be around 10:30 PM. Link
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Scientists have always thought that colorful mineral deposits in caves are the work of geology, not biology – but they were wrong: unusual deposits may actually be microbial poop!
"We’re finding that you need to look at things you might write off as not being biological—they might be biological," said Penelope Boston, a cave scientist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.
The microbes were found on the walls of lava tubes in Hawaii, New Mexico, and the Portuguese Azores islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean (see map).
The finds include "a lovely blue-green ooze dripping out of the [cave] ceiling in Hawaii; a vein of what looks like a gold, crunchy mineral in New Mexico; and, in the Azores, amazing pink hexagons," said Diana Northup, a geomicrobiologist at the University of New Mexico.
"That’s the waste—the bug poop, if you will."
Link (Photo: Kenneth Ingham)
Seven rock formations called Man-Pupu-Nyor (little mountain of the gods) stand in the Komi Republic, a part of the Ural Mountain area of Russia. They range from 30 to 42 meters tall! The pillars formed when erosion washed away the mountain that once surrounded them over a period of 200 million years. Legend says they are evil giants who had a spell cast upon them. Link -via the Presurfer
Archaeology is a religion for illuminated individuals, however if you cross the Gods you will suffer the consequences. Many men have risked their lives in pursuit of historical relics, many have never returned.
The Valley of the Kings in Egypt is located on the West bank of the Nile River within “the heart of the Theban Necropolis”. This illuminated place is said to hold the wealth of Egypt where Kings and Queens were laid to rest and their treasure was buried with them. Many men have died risking their lives to discover the mysteries of this sacred place, some have never returned.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
Lava explodes and flows in different forms. How many of these are you familiar with?
The explosive nature of these fascinating geological mountains provide us with a time line of earth’s past, they create chains of living and breathing islands, and they cause deathly destruction to everything they touch.
The violence of a volcanic eruption is based upon many factors including the viscosity of the given magma. (the more viscous, the more violent) Viscosity is a measure of a materials resistance to flow, and the thicker it is, the slower is will flow. This works the same way in our bodies when we are dehydrated.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
