Archive for the 'Earth Science' Category

Venture to Light Africa with Dirt Power

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

“For all the Pan-Africanism of the last four decades,” said Hugo Van Vuuren, “it is quite rare to have young students from South, East, and West Africa, in the same room without a soccer ball somehow involved.”x1 Van Vuuren was talking about himself and three other Africans, who along with two Americans formed Lebônê [...]

White Hurricane of 1913 was Deadliest Great Lakes Storm

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

31 cargo ships and barges stranded, twelve ships sunk with crew, 253 sailors drowned—that was the the toll of the most disastrous storm ever to hit the Great Lakes. The first November gale of 1913 started on western Lake Superior when warm southwest winds sped up on Thursday the 6th. On Friday morning [...]

The Great Black Swamp

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

“Water! Water! Water!” wrote an early surveyor of northwestern Ohio, “tall timber! deep water! Not a blade of grass growing or a bird to be seen50.” The surveyor was traveling in the Great Black Swamp, a forty mile (64 km) swath stretching from the western end of Lake Erie nearly to Fort [...]

The Ogallala Aquifer

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Wind sweeps the North American High Plains, drying up the scant rain water30×31. But there is water enough for short grasses to flourish, and over the ages they have fed the hardy buffalo, whose massive herds “darkened the plains32”. ”[The High Plains is] almost wholly unfit for cultivation,” wrote Major Stephen H. Long [...]

Hugh Hammond Bennett Stopped Further Dust Bowls

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Clayton Hall, 14, was bringing the baseball bat for a game in Minneola, Kansas, on “Black Sunday”, April 14, 1935, when the dust storm hit61: “I just got in the middle of the road, ... and all of a sudden, I couldn’t see. I thought, well I just got some dust in my eyes. I [...]