History
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Atlas Obscura has another interesting story this week about a small park near St. Louis filled with four pecan trees that survived the 1993 floods. When the area was rebuilt after the flood, the community protected the 100-year-old trees with a new levee and a park to protect them. You can read more about it…
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The Tampa Bay Times has an interesting story this week about how rising sea levels are threatening many historic sites along the Florida coast, including many historic forts, Native American sites, and other heritage sites. This is also true of other Southeastern states, where many historic sites are located near the coasts because of their…
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Atlas Obscura has interesting stories about many obscure topics, and this is no exception. The answer is—they were all used to test hot air balloons before humans went up in them. You can read more about their exploits here.
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Here is an interesting story about how farmers in the Plains are returning to tilling after years of no-till. The concept of no-till was driven in large part by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when tilled fields literally blew away in the strong winds that accompanied the major drought then. The article’s title is…
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Happy Halloween! Or if you are a Calvinist like me, Happy Reformation Day! Here is an interesting story from Paris Review on the eruption of Mount Tambora 201 years ago and the “Year without a Summer” that brought freezing conditions and atmospheric gloom to much of the Northern Hemisphere. The conditions led Mary Shelley and…
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I’ve seen an interesting story this week in a couple of news outlets describing a recent study which linked volcanic eruptions at high latitudes to the flood climatology of the Nile and also to uprisings in Egypt during the reign of Cleopatra. Using ice corp data and climate modeling, scientists were able to link low…
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If you’re in the Southeast, your attention has probably been fixed on Hurricane (and now Tropical Depression) Nate moving through the region. But if you are traveling somewhere else this week like I am, you may have noticed that the first big winter storm of the year is set to hit Denver and the Rockies…