SciNews

04/28/2016

Our latest issue is on the recent earthquake in Ecuador:
http://sites.psu.edu/scinews/archives/1025

The Pacific Coasts of South America, North America, and Asia are on the infamous Ring of Fire of volcanoes. The Ring of Fire is also associated with large earthquakes, which like the volcanoes, result from the interactions between tectonic plates. On April 16, 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked…

04/06/2016

Gale Crater on Mars hosts Mount Sharp, a 3 mile high mountain. Exactly how is formed has long been a mystery, so much so that NASA sent the Curiosity rover to Mount Sharp. A paper by graduate student, McKenzie Day, at UT Austin provides evidence from the Curiosity mission and laboratory experiments that the mountain may have been sculpted by wind over many billions of years.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/wind-and-ancient-water-built-three-mile-high-mound-mars

In the 1970s, NASA's Viking program observed enormously high mounds in Martian craters. It has taken until now for us to understand how wind can form these giants.

03/31/2016

Easter Sunday Eruption on Pavlof in Alaska. The ash column reached 20,000 ft.

Pavlof Volcano in eruption, March 28, 2016. The annotations show several of the processes that were occurring during the eruption including the formation of hot granular flows of rock material, the formation of lahar deposits, white steam plumes associated with the interaction of hot eruptive material and snow and ice, and the vertical ash column and drifting ash cloud. Pavlof sits just outside of Emmons Lake caldera, one of the largest caldera structures in the Aleutian arc. Also shown are several of the young post-caldera volcanoes inside the caldera. View is toward the north east.
http://avo.alaska.edu/images/image.php?id=94011

03/29/2016

NASA recently released this fun and simple modeling activity about the discovery of gravitational waves (more hands on exercise than in Issue 23). Check it out!

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/dropping-in-with-gravitational-waves/

Students develop a model to represent gravitational waves and their propagation through spacetime.

03/21/2016

A large asteroid (~100 ft long) recently passed Earth, causing quite a stir. This SciNews issue examines how to hunt for much smaller, more common meteorites in one activity. In another, we investigate the structure of impact craters from much larger, rarer asteroids. Enjoy!

http://sites.psu.edu/scinews/archives/557

On March 7, 2016, a 100 foot wide asteroid called 2013 TX68 made its closest approach to Earth in its orbit. It remained about 3 million miles away, but some models predicted it could pass at only 15,000 miles from Earth. NASA identifies and tracks Near-Earth Objects (NEO). To date thousands of NEOs…

02/25/2016

It's been a wacky winter with this year's El Niño. One of the mostly beneficial consequences has been more snowfall in the drought-stricken western US. The flip side is more deadly avalanches.

Check out the latest SciNews issue on Avalanches!
https://sites.psu.edu/scinews/archives/508

Winter means lots of opportunities for outdoor activities like skiing and snowboarding. Often the best places for these winter sports are in high, steep mountains. Yet the terrain that makes these locations ideal also puts these places at risk for avalanches, making the slope dangerous for mountain…

02/22/2016

A new study suggest that sea level will rise by 3-4 feet by 2100:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/sea-level-rise-global-warming-climate-change.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Check out our related SciNews Issue from last month on sea level rise: http://sites.psu.edu/scinews/archives/445

Scientists reported Monday that flooding in coastal communities was largely a result of greenhouse gas emissions, and likely to grow worse.

02/15/2016

As you have probably heard, gravitational waves were just discovered and confirmed! They were predicted by Albert Einstein as part of his Theory of Relativity just over 100 years ago.

Check out this activity about the simple science behind the instrument responsible for the discovery:
https://sites.psu.edu/scinews/archives/496

02/08/2016

New issue on the Anthropocene!
Love it? Hate it? Have your students debate!

http://sites.psu.edu/scinews/archives/476

Geologic time is broken down into Ages (the smallest subdivision), Epochs, Periods, Eras, and Eons (the largest division). Today we are officially in the Phanerozoic Eon, the Cenozoic Era, the Quaternary Period, and the Epoch of the Holocene. Some scientists suggests we have entered the Anthropocene…