Posts Tagged ‘earth’
“There is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental”*…
Still, we can try…
Via Jason Kottke, who is reminded…
of Ben Terrett’s calculation of how many helveticas from here to the Moon and my subsequent calculations about the point size of the Earth and the Moon (50.2 billion and 13.7 billion, respectively).
* Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
As we size up scale, we might recall that it was on this date (the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene) in 1342, that Central Europe’s worst flood ever occurred. Following the passage of a Genoa low, the rivers Rhine, Moselle, Main, Danube, Weser, Werra, Unstrut, Elbe, Vltava, and their tributaries inundated large areas. Many towns such as Cologne, Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Würzburg, Regensburg, Passau, and Vienna were seriously damaged, with water levels exceeding those of the 2002 European floods. Even the river Eider north of Hamburg flooded the surrounding land; indeed, the affected area extended to Carinthia and northern Italy.
“The earth is what we all have in common”*…
Explore a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet: “Visible Earth,” from @NASAEarth.
* Wendell Berry
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As we peruse our planet, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that NASA turned on planetary science mode on the Mariner IV spacecraft (which had been launched on November 28, 1964 from Cape Canaveral) as it flew by Mars. Over the next two days, Mariner IV captured the first “close up” pictures (21 in all) of the planets surface. The images taken during the flyby were stored in the on-board tape recorder; each individual photograph took approximately six hours to be transmitted back to Earth.
While waiting for the image data to be computer processed, the team used a pastel set from an art supply store to hand-color (paint-by-numbers style) a numerical printout of the raw pixels. The resulting image provided early verification that the camera was functioning. The hand drawn image compared favorably with the processed image when it became available.
“Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable”*…
Still, as Katarina Zimmer explains, an emerging science can help us improve our forecasts…
… contemporary simulations suggest the Great Colonial Hurricane was a Category 3.5 storm, probably the strongest in recorded eastern New England history. (For reference, Sandy, which killed nearly 150 people and caused some $65 billion in damage in the United States, was technically no longer even a hurricane when it made landfall in the New York metro area in 2012.)
Scientists know about the Great Colonial Hurricane’s impact not only from written reports but curiously, also from hidden, physical impressions the long-ago storm left on the landscape.
At the bottom of a pond, Jeffrey Donnelly, a hurricane scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his colleagues found subtle, buried evidence of the storm that almost felled the Mather line. The researchers were collecting sediment cores from a lakebed on Cape Cod. The spot, known as Salt Pond, lies about a third of a mile from the ocean and has long been a place of mud. But in their core samples, they found a pinky finger-thick layer of pure ocean sand in layers that dated back to roughly 1635. The only thing that could have pulled that much beach material over the sand barrier and that far inland was a truly massive storm.
The cores revealed other clues, too. Although written accounts suggest the 1635 tempest was the strongest of its time, the exhumed samples showed it wasn’t the only intense storm in the area. Donnelly found evidence for 10 major storms in the area between 1400 and 1675—a surprising toll, given that major hurricanes are virtually unheard of this far north today. The fact that hurricanes were much more frequent in the past begs the question of why, and whether these levels of storm activity could someday return.
Which is why researchers like Donnelly are traipsing along coastlines and digging in the muck. They hope their relatively new branch of science, paleotempestology (the study of old storms), can use these buried traces of long-gone winds to augur ancient patterns. Patterns that might also help us predict the weather that lies ahead…
Paleotempestology promises to uncover patterns of historical hurricanes—to better predict destructive weather of the future. More at: “The Secret Messages in Ancient Storms,” (or here) from @katarinazimmer in @NautilusMag.
* Diane Ackerman
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As we muse on the meteorological, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to Bernard Brunhes; he was born on this date in 1867. A geophysicist, he is known for his pioneering work in paleomagnetism, in particular, his 1906 discovery of geomagnetic reversal [see here]. The current period of normal polarity, Brunhes Chron, and the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal are named for him.
Brunes made his discovery in a way that presaged the work of paleotempestologists: he found volcanic lava and clay samples that recorded the Earth’s inversion of its magnetic field.
“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise”*…
Take a ride from the earth’s surface to the Kármán line (the conventionally-acknowledged boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space) on Neal Agarwal‘s (@nealagarwal) Space Elevator.
* Henry David Thoreau
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As we get high, we might recall that this date in 1970 was the first Earth Day. First suggested by John McConnell for March 21 (the Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, a day of natural equipoise), Secretary General U Thant signed a UN Proclamation to that effect. But Earth Day as we know it was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (who was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award for his work) as an environmental teach-in to be held on on this date. The first Earth Day had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. Later that year, President Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into being. Earth Day is now observed in 192 countries, coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, chaired by the first Earth Day 1970 organizer Denis Hayes– according to whom Earth Day is now “the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year.”
Earth Day Flag created by John McConnell
“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower”*…
Where, exactly is Heaven? Stephen Reid Case explains how a very concrete, physical answer to that question became much less concrete…
The Christian concept of heaven, so familiar today from popular depictions of clouds and haloed angels, was an invention – one that came about as early Christians interpreted their religious writings in the context of the Greek culture in which their movement grew up. Christian writers combined Plato’s ideas about the soul’s ascent to the sky at death with Aristotle’s understanding of the structure of the universe, a combination that allowed them to apply a cosmological framework to terms like ‘heaven of heavens’, as well as the ascents, described in the New Testament, of both Jesus and Paul. By the Middle Ages, anyone who uttered the words ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’ had a clear spatial understanding of where heaven was: God dwelt in the third heaven, above the heaven of the air and the heaven of the stars. This third heaven, the empyrean, became an article of Christian faith – until the new cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo placed the Sun rather than Earth in the centre of the universe. This transformation from an Earth-centred to a Sun-centred universe did not simply displace Earth; it destroyed heaven as a place within the cosmos.
If I asked my astronomy students where heaven was located, I would no doubt receive a classroom full of bewildered stares, despite the fact that I teach at a Christian university – where the majority of students believe in both heaven and the afterlife. When pressed, they might offer thoughts about heaven being a different plane of reality or perhaps another dimension. They believe, but they don’t conceptualise heaven as a location; it is not a part of their spatial understanding of the universe. For most of the history of Christianity, though, the opposite was true…
For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists: “Where God dwelt.”
* William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” l. 1 (ca. 1803)
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As we muse on metaphor and morphology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the Apollo 17 mission launched; on their way to the moon, about 18,000 miles from the Earth, astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Ron Evans took the photo now known as “The Blue Marble”– one of the most reproduced images in history.
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