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Solar System

Keeping Saturn Old
October 7, 2010
Keeping a planet like Saturn going for billions of years has been a problem lately, especially when evidences show that what we see today of its rings and moons could not have lasted that long. Ringside gambling:  The rings of Saturn are majestic, colorful, and young-looking.  Their ices are too clean, and the forces acting […]
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Early Man

Animals Can Skew Archaeological Dates
October 6, 2010
Archaeologists date stone age artifacts by the depth of the layer.  They may not have paid sufficient attention to one factor that could have shoved them deeper down: animals trampling over them.  “Animals push human tools into ground�and back in time, study says,” was a subtitle of a report in National Geographic News.  This factor […]
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Birds

Super Penguin: Seeing Is Believing, But Is It Understanding?
October 1, 2010
Another fossil of a giant penguin in Peru has been found (cf. 06/26/2007).  It apparently had reddish-brown underwings and stood as tall as a man.  It must have been a strong swimmer.  Nicknamed “water king,” the mammoth penguin was placed at the 36 million mark on the evolutionary timeline.  One remarkable feature of this fossil, […]
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Solar System

Lunar Complexity Challenges Simple Theories
September 17, 2010
Tomorrow is “International Observe the Moon Night” according to Space.com, stimulating laypeople and astronomy neophytes to get outdoors to look at the moon with telescopes, binoculars, and the naked eye while the last-quarter moon is in convenient position for evening viewing.  Humans have contemplated the moon for millennia on such evenings and imagined all sorts […]
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Bible and Theology

Did a Global Flood Move Rocks Across Continents?  No, uh…
September 14, 2010
Paper View Sept 14, 2010 — Geologists were baffled.  Something moved rocks up to 3,000 miles across whole continents.  They found evidence in Asia and also in America.  How on earth could that happen?  Their list of explanations omitted one possibility: the transporting power of water.  Maybe it’s because it would have implied a global […]
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Physics

What’s Flipping the Earth’s Magnetic Field?
September 8, 2010
Why has the earth’s magnetic field changed orientation in the past?  How often does it happen?  How long does it take?  Such questions arise from a story reported by New Scientist that claims, “Second super-fast flip of Earth’s poles found.”  This implies there was a first case – and that “super-fast” reversals are strange.   […]
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Physics

Asteroid Pi
September 5, 2010
Asteroids are much more diverse than previously imagined.  The Spitzer Space Telescope (now in its “warm” mission after the liquid coolant has dissipated) is targeting about 700 asteroids in a program called ExploreNEOs (Near-Earth Objects).  NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope website reported results from the first hundred studied.  The scientists found that near-Earth asteroids… …are a […]
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Solar System

Moon May Be Active Today
August 23, 2010
The old story of our moon was that it was geologically dead.  Except for the occasional meteor impact, not much happens there; the interior had cooled down long ago, leaving it an inert, battered sphere.  That was before the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showed scientists evidence that it has continued to shrink and form new surface […]
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Geology

Ancient Earth Smackdown at Santa Fe Tells Global Story
August 10, 2010
Secular geologists tell a “a compelling story about the distant past” that emerges from a look at rocks near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Cosmology

Things in Space that Shouldn’t Be
July 29, 2010
A history of astronomy and a history of surprise discoveries in space would track pretty well.  Recent stories show that the trend continues even today. Wet moon:  The moon was thought to be depleted of volatiles – until now.  According to PhysOrg, “Researchers discover water on the moon is widespread, similar to Earth’s.”  Shouldn’t all […]
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Solar System

Dating of Impacts and Impacts of Dating
July 25, 2010
Earth and Neptune were both on stage this week with stories of impacts.  How do scientists know when they occurred? Neptune:  A comet struck Neptune 200 years ago.  That’s what planetary scientists are claiming, according to National Geographic.  The data only “suggests” this explanation, according to Space.com.  Since nobody witnessed the impact in 1810 (Neptune […]
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Fossils

Scratching Heads With Imaginary Stars
July 21, 2010
It was lurking out there, astronomers said.  Our sun’s evil companion, invisible, dark, like a stealthy general of an enemy force, wandered silently in hiding, waiting for the next opportunity to order its agents of death into combat.  Its name was Nemesis.  Every 27 million years, using its gravity, it sent comets from the Oort […]
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Early Man

Tricks to Preserve Deep Time
July 15, 2010
It’s not always easy to prove that things are very, very old.  After all, no one has ever experienced deep time (millions and billions of years).  The key is to maintain a public “feeling” in the oldness of things.  Once that feeling is in place, some pretty major tweaks can be made by the experts […]
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Physics

Breaking Up an Ice Age Is Hard to Do
July 1, 2010
“Ice Age 3” the movie is out, and the subject of ice ages deserves some attention.  Atmospheric scientists and geologists seem very confident sometimes about things they know about only indirectly, like ice ages.  At other times, though, the rhetoric turns diffident (opposite of confident).  Take this opening paragraph from PhysOrg: Scientists still puzzle over […]
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Uncategorized

Colorado Plateau Stumps Geologists
June 27, 2010
Many of the West’s greatest parks and scenic areas lie on the Colorado Plateau, a large basin covering parts of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado.  Within its rugged acres are the Grand Canyon, Grand Staircase, Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Natural Bridges, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, Glen Canyon and Lake Powell, […]
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