Last month I was invited to give a lecture on earth science to a group of 8th graders at a nearby middle school. I leaped at the chance. Although my day job is teaching university students, it’s not often I get to share science stories with kids at that
I’m enchanted by waterfalls, and not just for the obvious reasons. To a geologist, a waterfall is a slow-motion wave in solid rock. Occasionally you find waterfalls that are stationary, pinned in place by some hard piece of geology: an ancient dike of frozen lava, say, or a vertical
On a hot afternoon this past July I paid a visit to Crawford Lake, a tiny dot of water 30 miles southwest of Toronto. Only 300 m long and about half as wide, the lake fills an ancient sinkhole that formed when the roof of an underlying cave collapsed. In
This month marks the 80th anniversary of a report that transformed American science and technology. In July 1945, Vannevar Bush delivered a report to President Harry Truman titled “Science: The Endless Frontier,” outlining a bold set of recommendations for future US science policy. The story of Bush’s vision and
June 15, 2025, marks the 34th anniversary of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. In 1991, an unassuming peak fifty-four miles north of the Philippine capital of Manila blew its top, blasting more than a cubic mile of debris into the sky. Searing clouds of hot ash poured down its flanks,
Planet earth must be one of the best kept secrets on … well, on planet earth. We all live here, so you’d think most of us would know a bit about the place. But it turns out there’s an awful lot to know about our planet’s life and
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