Unfortunately stone has an undeserved reputation for being uncommunicative. The expressions ‘stone deaf’, ‘stone cold;, ‘stony silence’ and, simply, ‘stoned’ reveal much about the relationship most people have to the rocks beneath their feet. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated texts, telling gothic tales of scorching heat, violent tempests, endurance, cataclysm, and reincarnation. Over more than 4 billion years, in beach sand, volcanic ash, granites and garnet schists, the planet has unintentionally kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past.
Fuente: roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com
Earthquakes - Shock Waves (by USGS)
Source: http://gallery.usgs.gov/videos/438. This short excerpt is from a USGS/Bay Area Earthquake Alliance produced television program “Shock Waves: 100 Years After the 1906 Earthquake”. This specific segment describes some of the history behind our modern understanding of the earthquake process. The program received numerous industry awards and was nominated for a regional Emmy Award in the Bay area. It aired twice on KPIX CBS5 and its affiliate station around the time of the April 18, 2006, 100 year anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. The full program is streamed at the link:http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/1906/shockwaves/
Fuente: youtube.com
QuakeCaster Trailer (por volkansevilgen)
QuakeCaster is an interactive, hands-on teaching model that simulates earthquakes and their interactions along a plate-boundary fault. QuakeCaster contains the minimum number of physical processes needed to demonstrate most observable earthquake features. This tool, which is designed so that students or audience members can operate it and record its output, enables people to test and explore hypotheses for earthquake occurrence.
Fuente: youtube.com
Great example how science becomes life saving environmental policy. This fantastically produced piece shows the history of how the Antarctic Ozone Hole was discovered by a graduate student, then reported in a few newspapers. Chemicals dumped into the environment were the cause.
The public picked up the story of the Ozone Hole and got really, really worried that corporations were putting too much pollution into the air. They formed partnerships with environmental groups, universities, and certain governments, and lobbied other world leaders to help fill in the Ozone Hole.
Eventually, leaders agreed on the Montreal Protocol - a system of cap and trade that limited the amounts of pollution companies could dump into the environment. A must watch for budding environmentalists, policies wonks, and science-types.
Today, the Montreal Protocol loosely serves as the model for cap-and-trade system of the Kyoto Protocol, European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, California’s AB 32, and many other systems around the world.
Today is the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. Take a deep breath.
Have a look at the UNDEP’s ozone website for more information.
Coal vs. Banana: A two-minute explanation of the carbon cycle (by NASAEarthObservatory)
What do a banana and a piece of coal have in common? Both are made of carbon and both provide us with energy. Coal stores carbon that was in the atmosphere millions of years ago. A banana, on the other hand, stores carbon that was in the atmosphere just a few months ago. As NASA scientist Peter Griffith explains in this video, when we burn coal, we release old carbon back into the atmosphere far faster than things like bananas can store it. As a result, carbon gases build up in the atmosphere and warm the Earth. Read more about the carbon cycle on the Earth Observatory. Credit: Genna Duberstein, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Fuente: youtube.com
