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The Discovery Channel brings us a story on how the exact (well, semi-exact if you read the article) date for the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius has been nailed down by dating, well, fish sauce. The findings? The records of antiquity were right, it was probably around August 24, 79 A.D. and if you ...
Satellite navigation (SatNav) is a lot older than previously thought. In fact, it’s even decades older than man-made satellites themselves. This fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage ...
It's often been observed that atheism, or at least outspoken atheism, seems rarer among America's black community than among American society in general. Although I don't know why that's true, I suspect that it may stem from the tendency of a minority group, especially one that's often ...
It has been awhile since we've talked of Chaiten, so I thought I'd touch upon "the eruption of 2008" (really, no one else is close). Spring time has arrived in southern Chile, and the Patagonia area has cleaned up a lot of the ash from the eruption (but not the town of Chaiten). National Tourism ...
Shiveluch in Kamchatka experience a small eruption today. Russian authorities reported a ~4,500 meter ash column with associated local earthquakes, likely related to the eruption. In the same article, both Karymsky and Klyuchevskaya Sopka (also known as Kliuchevskoi) are erupting or showing ...
The growth of atheism is coming at the expense of religion. As freethought makes gains in society, it will inevitably start by appealing to those who are religious only by default - the people who go to church because they've never known an alternative, those who are receptive to our message and ...
Thanks to everyone who has responded to my Eruptions poll so far. Looks like we have a couple clear favorites, based on the results right now: Profiles of historic eruptions - 35% Profiles of active volcanoes - 33% Discussion of monitoring techniques - 18% Discussion of volcanic ...
If anyone has been watching the earthquakes worldwide today, you might have noticed that there have been three >M2.5 earthquakes in the Yellowstone Caldera today at depths <10 km. Not to say that it is anything, but just something to note.
This might not be directly related to a volcanic eruption, but it has been picked up by a lot of news sources, so I thought I'd give it a mention. A report from researchers at University of Texas hypothesize that some very large coral boulders (up to 10 meters tall) that can be found on the ...
Of all the major faiths in the world today, few surpass the bizarreness of Mormonism. The church was founded in the 1830s by Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed to have been guided by an angel to a set of buried golden plates which he miraculously gained the ability to translate. These plates ...
As you could probably figure out, sometimes there isn't much new volcano-related news out there in the get interwebs. I've been trying to think of ways to fill in some of that time, but I thought I'd ask you, the readers, what you'd like to see. Please respond to the poll (below) and leave me ...
The metropolitan area surrounding San Francisco Bay, better known as the Bay Area, includes over 100 cities (San Francisco, Oakland and San José being among the most populous) and counts about 7 million people. It is the 4th-largest metropolitan area in the US and the 47th-largest in the world ...
China is the world’s most populous nation (1). That much anybody knows. But even if we know a bit more (that the number of Chinese is around 1.32 billion, which is just under 20% of all humans alive today), that figure is still too big to mean much beyond that China is ‘number one’ (2). This map ...
Now that Russia has recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the improbable phantom nation of Transnistria (1) might be gearing up for its own fifteen minutes of geopolitical fame. Like the aforementioned breakaway regions of Georgia (itself a former Soviet republic ...
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are a pair of young Brazilian artists, working in their home country and in France. Some of their work explores fonts and maps. Typography meets cartography in this little work, entitled ‘The World, Justified’. It shows the world we live in as only one of ...