History
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Back in 2000, an enormous iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It was the size of Connecticut and was called B-15. All these years later, the iceberg is still around, although it has been losing pieces ever since it broke off. Now, a big crack along the length of the remaining ice…
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On January 31, 1971, Apollo 14 lifted off for the third trip to the lunar surface. Included in the cargo on the space ship were some small canisters packed with tree seeds of five species: Loblolly Pine, Sycamore, Sweetgum, Redwood, and Douglas Fir. After the mission concluded, the seeds were planted and grown to seedlings,…
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Weather Underground had an interesting story a week ago about a terrible weather-related disaster that killed between 100,000 and 230,000 people in China in August 1975. Most of you have probably never heard about it since news reports in the US were quite thin. It’s especially timely this year because high rain amounts and a…
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The earth has been around for about four and a half billion years, according to the best estimates of climate scientists. But in its early life, the planet was much different than is it now. This week an article in Nature discussed how it has changed and estimated when conditions were first right for snow…
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The latest issue of NOAA’s “Beyond the Data” blog has an interesting story about the history of the cooperative observer network, the backbone of long-term climate observations across the US. Did you ever wonder how the US has a climate record going back at least 125 years? How do we know what happened before that?…
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Here is a story that links events in World War 2 to impacts on tree rings in Norway. According to the story, a German dendrochronologist noted that many trees along the Norwegian coast near Kåfjord. In 1945, the Germans were hiding their battleship the Tirpitz there using chlorosulphuric acid as a sort of “chemical fog” to try…
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Live Science has an interesting story this week about how scientists are using artwork from past years to study the atmospheric content of particles put out by erupting volcanoes. According to the story, by looking at the color of the sky in the paintings, they can determine the scattering properties of the aerosols, such as…