About 56 million years ago, the Earth experienced something called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The Earth’s atmosphere warmed by about 6.5° C, and sea surface temperatures by about 5° C. There was serious ocean acidification, which is associated with very high CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It’s too long after the Dinosaur Killer’s cataclysmic…
In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, there was a mighty struggle in the nascent science of geology. Biblical literalism had insisted on a young earth, created less than 10,000 year earlier, and a literal, world-spanning Noachian flood. As the evidence for a much older earth accumulated, and the evidence against a global flood…
A reader asked why some of the gulls currently being featured in recent Return of Bird of the Week series have a red spot on their bill. More recently, Mrs. WC reminded WC of a classic avian behavioral study closely related to the reader’s question. So, what’s up with the red spot? It’s not blood,…
Naomi Orestes is a professor at Harvard, and writes a monthly column for Scientific American. In a recent column, she noted that climatologists have consistently under-predicted the rate of climate change in the Arctic. In fact, it seems to be warming about four times as fast as most models have predicted. Some reports have it…
Since he was just a pup, about 30-45 minutes after wolfing down a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, WC would be asleep on the couch. In the late 1970′s, a physiologist who was WC’s Thanksgiving guest explained it as a reaction to all of the tryptophan in turkey meat. Just before he dropped off to sleep. As…
Motmots, the fourteen species of the family Momotidae, are colorful, long-tailed birds of Central and South America. Like Kingfishers, they nest in long tunnel-like burrows in dirt banks, but they are not closely related to Kingfishers. For such a colorful, charismatic bird, they are remarkably poorly studied. As just one example of the challenges presented…
The oldest complete written sentence has been identified. It’s written in the Canaanite language, about 1,700 years ago. There are earlier writings, but they are simply names or sometimes the owner of the object. This artifact was found at Tel Lachish in Israel, once a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE. The artifact…
WARNING: Still more geeky geology ahead. And, WC acknowledges, some pretty serious oversimplifications of complex stuff. WC has written about seismic topography before, the evolving technology that uses the seismic waves from earthquakes to analyze subsurface geologic features. The technology has even been used on Mars to study xenogeology, albeit in a more simplified form.…
WARNING! Seriously geeky geology ahead. Most folks who were exposed to even a little bit of geology in school understand vaguely the idea of plate tectonics. They get the basic idea that big chunks of the surface of the earth are somehow moving around. But there are lots of non-obvious parts of the science of…
When New England fisherman grossly overfished cod to the edge of extinction, they finally did the sensible thing and completely closed down the cod fishery in the North Atlantic. The complete closure was very hard on the New England fishing industry; fisherman went bankrupt, communities were economically injured and the bitterness lasted a long time.…
The Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) appears to have been an unqualified success. Based on preliminary analysis of the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid that was the target of NASA’s satellite, Dimorphos’ orbit was significantly altered. Before DART, Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos took 11 hours and 55 minutes; post-impact, it’s down to 11 hours and…
This post is for Ron Dudley, retired biology teacher,, astonishingly good bird photographer and, WC is pleased to to report, a good friend of WC’s. Ron is recovering from surgery at present, and this blog post is WC’s way of wishing him a speedy recovery. Most parasites are SLiPs. That is, they are Simple Lifecycle…
In the last month, Typhoon Merton has made an unprecedented, devastating run into the Bering Sea. Hurricane Iona did severe damage to Canada’s Maritime provinces. And Hurricane Ian has battered Florida as one of the worst storms in that state’s long history with hurricanes. It’s the consensus among meteorologists that the remarkable severity of these…
On the long list of things you need to worry about is the problem of PFAS. “PFAS” is an acronym for perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl substances. It’s a class of chemicals composed of long chains of carbon molecules very strongly bonded with fluorine atoms, and they are damned near indestructible. Other chemicals break down by bacterial…
Some humans ain’t human, some people ain’t kind You open up their hearts, and here’s what you’ll find A few frozen pizzas, some ice cubes with hair A broken popsicle, you don’t wanna go there — John Prine, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” Fair and Square, 2005 WC admits to an occasional fascination with some appallingly…
While WC recently answered readers’ questions, in that effort WC held one question out to address is a separate blog post. You’ll see why. Why do you write about geology so often?When WC was in undergraduate school, in the late Pleistocene, he took a minor (sorry) in Geology. One of the classes was on plate…
Warning: Serious biological technogeekery ahead. For much of earth’s history, the only form of life was single-cell, primitive bacteria. Those early primitive cells are called prokaryotes. Basically, they were small sacks of fluid with the contents mixed together, higgedly-piggedly. Sometime about 1.5 billion years ago, a few lucky prokaryotes ingested or otherwise acquired another cell…
In principle, at least, the use of seismic – earthquake – waves to understand the interior of a planet is less complicated than it first seems. You’re probably familiar with bats’ use of echolocation to navigate the night skies: they emit high-pitched squeaks, and then use the reflections, the echoes, to navigate and find prey.…
WC will celebrate this Friday the 13th, a day founded on superstition, by following up on a series of seriously geeky science subjects. Black holes, even galaxy-sized black holes, have magnetic fields. You can give yourself a headache thinking too long about that. Black holes, which are as real as an earthquake, have always felt…
There have been two recent images from the Mars Rover Perseverance and its amazing little helicopter companion, Ingenuity, that reminded WC that for all the faults and challenges of these modern times, we really do live in an age of miracles and wonders. The first was the images of one of Mars’ two tiny moonlets,…
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a…
Readers already know that in 2021 the Republican Party had enthusiastically opposed every governmental effort to limit the casualties from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s just part of what WC believes to be the Republicans’ tendency over the last few years to embrace policies and positions that are contrary to survival. WC will offer a few…
In engineering, a “single point failure” is a term for any step in a multi-step process which, if it fails, craters the whole project. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), from launch to deployment at Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2) involved hundreds of single point failure risks. Hundreds of motors, cables, moving…
It isn’t very often WC writes an obituary for a star, especially a red supergiant star. In fact, this is the very first time. Because it is the first time astronomers have watched the final days of a red supergiant star and observed as it exploded into a Type II Supernova. The star in question…
Okay, WC admits that in the giant scheme of things to be depressed about, the pending lumping together of bird species hardly makes it on the radar of even dedicated birders. But WC laments the discovery of the genetic basis for variation among the three Redpoll species, and the news that the genetic variation among…
Before we get to today’s blog post, here’s a reminder to vote for the Wickersham’s Conscience 2021 Hypocrite of the Year. In 1969, Dr. Ray Sheldon, in the course of circumnavigating North and South America, sampled the water columns across a vast stretch of the Earth’s oceans. What he discovered was that across all of…
The IRIS Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program has some very spiffy visualization of earthquake activity that captures the movement of the surface of the earth in the course of an earthquake. Check out this display of ground movement from the Honshu earthquake: Here’s the more recent deep earthquake in Peru: WC understands many readers…
Since he was just a pup, about 30-45 minutes after wolfing down a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, WC would be asleep on the couch. In the late 1970′s, a physiologist who was WC’s Thanksgiving guest explained it as a reaction to all of the tryptophan in turkey meat. Just before he dropped off to sleep. As…
Beringia is a term used for the area where the vanished Ice Age land bridge existed, connecting Asia and North America, now drowned under the Bering Sea. It’s also applied to the region’s shores and islands today. The four (possibly five) subspecies of Rock Sandpiper all breed in Beringia. One such subspecies, ptilocnemis, breeds on…
There is increasing evidence that solar superflares are more common and much more severe than we thought. Superflares are events triggered when our sun produces an immense flare of particles and radiation, orders of magnitude greater than normal. Superflares matter because when that energy strikes the Earth’s magnetosphere, it can wreak pure havoc on our…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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