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POPSStudying volcanoes with flying balloons :) "The balloons are piloted remotely by satellite link," Durant explained, "with flight visualization using Google Earth. We were looking at tropospheric volcanic emissions of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and water, which can be hazardous to human and animal health and degrade ecosystems."
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POPSBizarre but true facts about the Earth The oldest living tree is a California bristlecone pine name 'Methuselah'. It is about 4600 years old. The largest tree in the world is a giant sequoia growing in California. It is 84 meters tall and measures 29 meters round the trunk. The fastest growing tree is the eucalyptus. It can grow 10 meters a year. The Antartic notothenia fish has a protein in its blood that acts like antifreeze and stops the fish freezing in icy sea. The USA uses 29% of the world's petrol and 33% of the world's electricity.
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POPSIce Volcanoes of Titan May Habor Life For almost thirty years, scientists have known that complex carbon compounds called tholins exist on comets and in the atmospheres of the outer planets. Theoretically, tholins might interact with water in a process called hydrolysis to produce complex molecules similar to those found on the early Earth. Could tholins formed in Titan's atmosphere react with liquid water temporarily exposed by meteor impacts or ice volcanoes to produce potentially prebiotic complex organic molecules — before the water freezes? Laboratory research by Catherine Neish, a graduate student working on her doctorate in planetary science at the University of Arizona, suggests, not without controversy, however, that, over a period of days, compounds similar to tholins can be react with water at near-freezing temperatures.
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POPSStrange Rites From an outside perspective, this truly is a bizarre ritual that is reminiscent of old B-movies of virgins being thrown into volcanoes to appease the gods. I would bet that most believers don't share this viewpoint.
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POPSSan Andreas fault longer than previously thought "The extension of the San Andreas does not appear to be active. It is probably a very old part of the fault, and helps to explain the larger, more complex transition area between the Imperial fault and San Andreas Fault, called the Brawley Seismic Zone," he said. Weird co-incidence this article appears the same day that a 5.8 quake occurs.
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POPSHistorian: Genocidal Napoleon was as barbaric as Hitler The Haitians fought to the death for independence, which they finally declared in 1804. Prisoners on both sides were regularly tortured and killed, and their heads were mounted on the walls of stockades or on spikes beside the roads. Non-combatants, too, were raped and slaughtered. According to contemporary accounts, the French used dogs to rip black prisoners to pieces before a crowd at an amphitheatre. Allegdly on Napoleon's orders, sulphur was extracted from Haitian volcanoes and burned to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide, which was then used to gas black Haitians in the holds of ships - more than 100,000 of them, according to records. The use of these primitive gas chambers was confirmed by contemporaries. Antoine Metral, who in 1825 published his history of the French expedition to Haiti, writes of piles of dead bodies everywhere, stacked in charnel-houses.
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POPSon my wish list if this is anything like planet earth series which is magnificent, it will be fabulous and well worth the money as was Planet Earth.
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POPSEarth as Art Gallery I have only one thing to say about this site: AWESOME! Not in the surfer use either. Truly, an experience leaving you catching your breath.
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POPSBio-Earth: Are Planets Living Super-Organisms? He believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life. To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.
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POPSMass extinctions? Blame it on the ocean In the course of hundreds of millions of years the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas such as the shark and mosasaur infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs. As those epicontinental seas drained, animals like mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.
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POPSThe Legacy of Charles Fort Many people over the space of 5000 yrs of human civilization have claimed to be prophets, messiahs, holy men or the Illuminated as compared to the rest of us "mere" normals. Some have claimed to be masters of the Black Arts (Aleister Crowley, et al) and some have claimed to be immortal or possessing long lives (Comte de Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, John Dee) or incredible psychic awareness (Edgar Cayce, Uri Gellar, Madame Blavatsky) but as far as I know only one man made his life out of collecting facts that were witnessed by many and researched diligently by him that still astound us. You have seen the kinds of things I am talking about on the X-Files or read of it in the Tabloids, but this man never took it as more than a wonderful reach that man's scientific knowledge was far from complete. Charles Fort only collected curiosities as I do. He was my inspiration. This is his legacy.
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POPSSea's Ebb And Flow Drive World's Big Extinction Events Arnold I. Miller, a paleobiologist and professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, says the new study is striking because it establishes a clear relationship between the tempo of mass extinction events and changes in sea level and sediment: "Over the years, researchers have become fairly dismissive of the idea that marine mass extinctions like the great extinction of the Late Permian might be linked to sea-level declines, even though these declines are known to have occurred many times throughout the history of life. The clear relationship this study documents will motivate many to rethink their previous views."
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POPSIn Indonesia, life plays out in the shadow of fiery peaks "Death by volcano takes many forms: searing lava, suffocating mud, or the tsunamis that often follow an eruption. In 1883, Mount Krakatau (often misspelled as Krakatoa), located off Java's coast, triggered a tsunami that claimed more than 36,000 lives. The name became a metaphor for a catastrophic natural disaster."
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