Home

On:

A recent study has unveiled a new perspective on the ancient eruptions that formed the region now known as the Snake River Valley in Idaho and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. The study, conducted out of the University of Leicester, found that there were far fewer individual eruptions over the 8-to-12 million-year span that formed the region’s geography, but those individual eruptions were much more violent than originally estimated.
read more

On:

Some of our smallest astronomical neighbors just keep getting odder and odder: recent observations of the bright spots found on dwarf planet Ceres have shown them to be brightening and dimming over the course of it’s 9-hour day.

The spots, made of a briny mixture containing magnesium sulfate hexahydrite, appears to be upwelling in certain spots from below the former asteroid’s surface. The spots have been found to emit a haze, indicating that the water in the material is evaporating into space, leaving the pale minerals deposited on Ceres’ dark surface.
read more

On:

Bolivia has officially declared that their second-largest lake, Lake Poopó, has disappeared. While long-term water diversion for mining and agricultural use has been cited as a partial culprit, an El Niño-driven drought, along with the disappearance of the Andean glaciers that fed the lake, are being blamed for the lake’s disappearance.

While Lake Poopó’s size historically sees large fluctuations due to it’s relative shallowness, this is the first time it has essentially disappeared, now being at only 2% of it’s former maximum water level of 5 meters (16.4 feet). A recent study showed that the water the lake received in 2013 wasn’t enough to maintain it’s equilibrium, short by 161 billion liters (42.5 billion gallons).
read more

On:

The formation of the Earth-Moon system has long been theorized to have been heavily influenced by the impact of a Mars-sized celestial body, commonly called "Theia" by scientists. The Moon’s formation is theorized to have occurred when this object struck the primordial Earth, spinning off a portion of it’s mass, that formed into the Moon as we know it today. However, a common question has dogged the issue since it’s conception: did Theia just strike a glancing blow to the primordial Earth, or did it strike it head-on?
read more