History
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On today’s date 113 years ago, the largest asteroid impact in recorded history struck on a warm summer morning in Siberia, Russia. We observe Asteroid Day each year on June 30, on the anniversary of what’s now known as the Tunguska explosion. This explosion flattened roughly 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles in a remote part…
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The extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest is setting all kinds of records for high temperatures, including some all-time highs for individual cities and potentially even for the entire country of Canada. It has also caused huge infrastructure problems with buckling highways and other effects of the high heat. I have heard of at least…
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I ran across this video a week ago and have just found it in my overloaded list of windows. It’s a little late for D-Day, which was earlier this month, but still a fascinating look at the weather planning required to plan the D-Day invasion, which required a lot of coordination and care in timing.…
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On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It was the 2nd largest eruption of the 20th century and the most recent eruption big enough to affect the global climate. To remember that eruption, NASA provided a very interesting interview with John Murray, their disasters program associate director. He was there watching the…
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Time magazine had an interesting story on the history of the invention of the thermometer that you might enjoy. It includes information on how the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales were developed and how Galileo invented a precursor of the thermometer called the thermoscope. You can read it here.
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If you are reading the digest version of this blog, you will probably see it on Sunday, June 6. That date is the anniversary of D-Day, the invasion at Normandy Beach. I had the privilege of visiting there in 1980 and camped near the beach as part of a tour of Europe after college. It…
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The Dust Bowl era caused tremendous losses to farmers in the central US in the 1930s. The reasons for the occurrence of the Dust Bowl are complex, but one of the factors that caused the loss of soil and farms was the method that producers used to farm at the time, which broke up the…