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Solar System

Titan May Have Erupted Ice Recently
April 8, 2005
Large features on Titan resemble volcanic calderas.  The fact that no impact craters appear on the flows indicate that they are young.  But these are no ordinary volcanoes.  If the findings are confirmed, they erupted ice.     Richard Kerr reported the scuttlebutt from last week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.  Titan may […]
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Solar System

How Well Do We Know Our Moon?
March 31, 2005
Leonard David wrote in Space.Com that Earth’s moon is “still a puzzle” – “luna incognita,” he calls it, hoping for a new corps of discovery to go back.  Surprisingly, the treasure trove of Apollo data has “been sitting around and never properly studied,”  especially since the development of more highly sophisticated analytical techniques.  Carl Pieters […]
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Fossils

Oldest Fossils Aren’t
March 11, 2005
A new analysis of the world’s oldest claimed fossil rock, a banded deposit off the coast of Greenland said to be 3.8 billion years old, probably contains no signature of life, reports Stephen Moorbath (Oxford) in Nature.1  He has visited the Akilia site twice where rocks were purported to contain graphite of biological origin.  He […]
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Uncategorized

Mars Life in Embalming Fluid?
March 1, 2005
A researcher with the Mars Express project claims to have found formaldehyde along with methane in exceptional amounts, reports News@Nature.  Since methane is destroyed by radiation in hundreds of days, and formaldehyde in several days, there is either a geological source for it, or it comes from living organisms in the soil, Vittorio Formisano claims. […]
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Uncategorized

Pot Shots at Hot Spots
February 18, 2005
Say that title five times, and you’ll be as flummoxed as geologists reporting in Science1 last week that long-believed assumptions are wrong.  They looked at three seamount chains in the Pacific, long thought to provide evidence of tectonic plates moving across stationary hot spots, and found that current theory cannot account for them: Our findings […]
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Uncategorized

Age Estimate for Oldest Glacier Revised Way Down
February 2, 2005
Deposits from Antarctic glacial ice thought to be 8.1 million years old have been re-dated at not more than 310,000 years old, and maybe as little as 43,000, reports a team writing in the Feb. issue of Geology.1  Ng (MIT), Hallet, Sletten and Stone (U. of Washington) analyzed cosmogenic helium-3 and calculated the rate of […]
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Uncategorized

Theologians Wrestle with God’s Role in Disasters
January 3, 2005
As international rescue efforts accelerate in the aftermath of last week’s tsunamis in Asia (see Caltech for the geological story, and Nature News for the earthquake’s affect on Earth’s rotation), commentators and theologians are beginning to ask the “why?” questions.  The liberal Archbishop of Canterbury is doubting the existence of God, according to the UK […]
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Dinosaurs

Cretaceous Temperature Estimates Point Out Flaws in Climate Models
December 15, 2004
Nature1 this week described evidence for high temperatures in the Arctic during the Cretaceous that it termed “astounding.”  Based on work by Jenkins et al. that Arctic waters were 15°C, as warm as modern coastal waters off France and Maryland. For a region blanketed in darkness for half of the year, the Arctic Ocean was […]
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Politics and Ethics

Grand Canyon Creation Book Stays on Shelves
October 14, 2004
The ruckus over a creation-oriented geology book on Grand Canyon at the Visitor Center (see 01/18/2004 headline) is back in the news.  The Environmental Media Services reports that plans for a review have been shelved by the park: Despite telling members of Congress and the public that the legality and appropriateness of the National Park […]
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Cell Biology

News Nuggets
October 12, 2004
Here’s a collection of news items that deserve quick notice: Mars Rumbles:  Mars still has minor earthquakes, says Space.com, That’s without plate tectonics, “But scientists don’t know exactly how Mars is constructed.”  The Mars Exploration Rovers, meanwhile, awaking from a winter’s nap, are still gathering science data long past their expected lifetime.  Evidence for past […]
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Physical Science

How Are Radioactive Dates Determined?
October 6, 2004
To most of us, the practice of radioactive dating seems like a highly-technical, incomprehensible skill that nevertheless (we are told) yields absolute ages of things.  We don’t know exactly how they arrive at the results, but are led to trust them because very smart people get their answers using hard science with extremely accurate equipment.  […]
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Uncategorized

North Pole Enjoyed Balmy Climate
September 8, 2004
In ages past, the North Pole region enjoyed a Mediterranean climate, according to Nature Science Update and the BBC News.  EurekAlert reminds us that ice cores demonstrate that Greenland, too, had one or more periods of warm weather suitable for lush plant growth (see 08/16/2004 headline).  Climate swings were abrupt enough to occur within a […]
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Fossils

Extinctions Too Complex for Simple Stories
August 26, 2004
Impact theories of extinction are fighting for their own survival.  A commentary in PNAS1 warns that extinction theories are more complex than can be handled by a single event, like a meteor impact.  At best, they might be invoked as the coup-de-grace in a series of situations.  Hermann Pfefferkorn reveals the complexities in the Permian […]
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Uncategorized

Antarctica Hit by Catastrophic Meteors, Researchers Claim
August 23, 2004
A story in BBC News claims that multiple impact sites have been found under Antarctic ice covering an area 1300 by 2400 miles, with one impact making a hole in the ice 200 miles across.  The estimated date of these impacts (around 780,000 years ago) creates a problem, however: The research suggests that an asteroid […]
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Uncategorized

Mars Science Results Fleshed Out, but the Spirit Is Weak
August 6, 2004
The first detailed science results from the Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit” have been published in eleven papers in the Aug. 6 issue of Science.1  Highlights include: the Gusev Crater shows no sign of lake sedimentary deposits, but rather is composed of volcanic ash with some windblown dust.  Lacustrine (lakebed) deposits, if any, must be buried […]
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