History
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If you love history, you will be fascinated by this story about a stubborn meteorologist who made the crucial forecast for the launch of the first US satellite in January 1958 following the flight of the USSR’s Sputnik in late 1957 . They could not afford to get the launch wrong and depended on him…
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As you probably know, this past week has been frigid for the upper Midwest as a piece of the Arctic air associated with the polar vortex has moved through the area. I think everyone there is glad that temperatures are already starting to warm up and they are likely to be above normal within a…
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Today is Veterans Day, and a friend of mine shared a photojournal story from The Atlantic from last May on the fading remains of battlefields from World War 1, which ended 100 years ago this year. You can see it here. My dad’s father fought in WW1 on the side of the Germans. He was a…
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What links together the invention of bicycles and the writing of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein? If you guess a historical climate event, you are exactly right! This year marks the 200th anniversary of the famous novel and next year will be the 200th anniversary of the development of the modern bicycle. Both of these events…
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I recently ran across this story from January 2018 which describes an invited talk that Edward Geller, famous physicist and part of the Manhattan Project, gave to a gala celebration noting the 100th anniversary of the petroleum industry. According to a transcript of the speech, given in 1959, Geller warned petroleum executives that the increase…
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I’ll end my posts today with this scary story, just for Halloween. Be sure to read it all the way to the end for a surprise weather ending. Check it out at Atlas Obscura at https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-skeleton-lake-of-roopkund-india-f-3-p-2-india.
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Since Albany, Georgia is far inland, you don’t think of it as a place that suffers from terrible weather events like recent hurricanes. But in this story from the Washington Post, it points out that Albany has suffered from three natural disasters in the past two years–a tornado and Hurricane Irma in 2017 and this…