I’m not at the totality today, and it’s been gnawing at me. Between 1 and 7 million people are estimated to witness this swath of darkness across the middle of North America from coast to coast. I live about an eight-hour drive away, and I’ve heard totality is a mystical experience, once in a lifetime. […]
Earth
You may have heard that there’s a total solar eclipse happening on Monday. I have known about this event for at least five or six years, which is how long my dad has been planning for it. Dad already had me pretty excited for the eclipse, but after reading David Baron’s delightful book, American Eclipse, […]
I have a mild case of fatal familial obsessive-compulsive disorder. (At least, if that were real I’d have it.) Today’s obsession is the Fall Line. It’s the line that runs through the big east coast cities — New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, all the way down to Columbia SC and […]
My friend Taya and I were out at her parents’ country place, about twelve acres in the western foothills of the Cascades. I was maybe eight, visiting for the first time. Taya was taking me on a tour. We were struggling along, as short-legged people do through dense, early successional Northwest forest. She stopped and […]
When marine biologist Julia Lowndes started graduate school in California in 2006, she expected to spend the next several years learning about the behavior of the Humboldt squid, which had recently—and dramatically—expanded its range north along the California coast. But before she learned anything about the squid, she discovered, she had to learn to code.
This post first ran on January 26, 2012. We now have three years in a row that have set records for the hottest year on record, and it comes after a string of previous records. Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote: At what point does a […]
This post first appeared on April 24, 2013. Unfortunately, the problem of dust on snow has not gone away. Since I wrote this post, NASA has gotten involved in studying snow on the Grand Mesa. I wrote about the NASA project for FiveThirtyEight. Spring is a nervous time for skiers and farmers. I’m both of these, […]
David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own new book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. Grinspoon’s book uses insight from the study of the other planets in our solar system […]